ABSTRACT
Unemployed youth have always been a special cause for concern over and above the obvious fact of their being without work. Historically, workless youth have served as a focus for successive panics and fears as to the supposed social and political implications of large scale and long term youth unemployment. Young men unemployed today seem very likely criminals and political bomb-throwers tomorrow. The great fear buried in the middle of this declamatory rhetoric was that of the contamination of respectable and industrious youth, by workless and therefore suspect and subversive youth. A scattering of newspaper and journal headlines reveals the content of the current panics about the youthful unemployed. Youth’s quiescence is merely a part of a much broader paralysis of a labour force confronted both by rising unemployment and by a government which has been unwilling to grant to the leadership of labour any serious say in the business of the regulation of the economy.
