It has taken a very long time in Britain for us to acknowledge the seriousness of youth unemployment. It is now nearly a decade since there were clear signs of its scale and structural significance. Yet there are still influential people blandly demanding “real jobs at real wages”, as if by some well‐meaning magic the problem could be wished away. Those who drew attention to the problem in the seventies were routinely criticized from left and from right alike as hysterical pessimists. From the right we were told that recession would fade and that economic recovery would absorb young people in an expanding labour market. On the left it was widely believed, and the belief absurdly persists, that under a sensible government the problem would be easily dealt with by a further straightforward extension of conventional education.