THE crisis of Britain’s “lost generation” of young people — alongside the unending wars of imperialism to which Starmer Labour has tied our country — is the clearest sign that that Britain’s peculiarly degenerate version of finance-dominated state monopoly capitalism offers young people little hope.

We have now several generations of young people even those with both university educations or time-served apprenticeships for whom the system can offer no guarantee of productive labour, a promising career or even the basic necessities of a civilised life.

The housing crisis — born of Thatcher’s privatisation of the council housing stock and further entrenched by successive governments — condemns young people to shared accommodation with crazily escalating rents or crippling mortgages if, indeed, these are on offer to the insecurely employed on poverty pay.

Our parasitic ruling class was content to run down an already inadequate vocational education system and rely on the infamously entitled free movement of labour that membership of the EU enabled to buttress the gaps in the employment system.

What was a useful system for the well-educated and highly skilled to move around the European labour market was also the mechanism by which the skilled and semi-skilled workers of eastern and central Europe were compelled by the calculated destruction of their socialist productive economies to migrate to fill the gaps left by anarchic and unplanned capitalism.

If this was a system of forced mobility of labour today our young people live in a system of forced unemployment.

It is impossible to calculate the human cost of leaving a million young people on the scrapheap of a failing economy. But the economic cost has been estimated at £125 billion, which is getting on for 5 per cent of the country’s GDP.

In the past 20 years the number of young people who have never had a job rose from four in 10 to six in 10.

This is not a blip but is a systemic failure and a betrayal now of successive generations.

Today more that over a million — one in eight — are not in employment or training.

The human tragedy is calibrated by the over 600,000 no longer looking for work while there are still over 400,000 actively looking for work.

There are structural changes on the labour market driven by technological change, automation and increasingly driven by technological change, automation and artificial intelligence but the decisive factor is the decline in nationally distributed capital investment in productive industry that has left whole sections of Scotland, Wales and England denuded of high-value jobs, integrated networks of manufacturing and productive local economies.

The hospitality sector, which some saw had a potential to absorb much of the demand for jobs, albeit at lower rates of pay, has seen a 50 per cent drop in vacancies. And even for the more highly educated entry-level jobs are becoming rarer.

The immediate response of most people — and the labour movement has a special responsibility here — is for government to invest in training to raise skill levels.

But workers in general and their most representative organisations, the trade unions, must complement the demand for immediate remedial steps with a rigorously analytical approach to the systemic problem.

Ask the question — is it conceivable that the British ruling class can be persuaded (or forced) into taking the necessary steps to transform our economy and provide a stable and productive life for everyone?

If this seems an unlikely prospect the labour movement must begin to prepare itself and the working class for the steps that need to be taken to replace this system with one of working class power, liberation and socialism.