Recent news suggested that the number of young people in the UK out of work and not in education or training has risen to one in five. This is a shocking statistic, and needs serious thinking about. But at the same time the government scrapped the one scheme, the Future Job Fund, that was available as a stepping stone to the younger generation. Perhaps we need to find some solution to the problem which doesn’t include the word "benefits".

The number of young people who are out of work has sky rocketed and in typical fashion everyone is playing the blame game and everyone is trying to avoid being hit by the blame. But the question why cannot be answered simply by throwing accusations at single people or even political parties, it’s more complicated than that. You can’t even turn around and say that the young people are just lazy who have no inclination to get work, or you can but you’d be wrong. Some are, but the largest majority are desperately trying to find a job, university graduates with high hopes suddenly finding that reality isn’t quite what they’d imagined.

I know, I’ve been there. I spent twelve months unemployed after walking out of the University of Birmingham with a decent degree in English. For twelve months I religiously applied for every job I could find, starting with high hopes of a 20k salary but quickly moving down the ladder. I got lucky. I was unemployed at the time when the government were still offering the Future Job fund, the most fantastic opportunity the government have ever offered. Yes, the pay was terrible. Yes, it wasn’t what I was hoping for when I walked out of university bright eyed and far too naïve for my own good. But it was a job, and I learned valuable life lessons and thoroughly enjoyed myself while doing so.

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But these opportunities have dried up, the Future Job fund is no more and the government wonders why the youth unemployment figures are so high. And the answer can probably be boiled down to the fact that in a period of economic insecurity, with redundancies and jobs being lost throughout the country, employers would much prefer someone with a proven track record. Someone who has the skills and the experiences is much more appealing than a youngster waving a piece of paper in their faces. And it’s not as if there aren’t enough people applying for each job.

If it were the older generation being shafted in favour of the youth then there would be a national outcry because it would be seen as direct discrimination and therefore ageism. But because it’s positive discrimination, an oxymoron if I ever heard one, in favour of those who could be seen as past it then there is no backlash, no outcry. Just a generation slowly losing hope and despairing of ever being a useful part of society. A generation that is gradually growing used to living off the state. The lost generation. We wonder why our young generation sometimes seems to be separated from the rest of society, and the answer may well simply be that we force them to be.