Rock on, Cool Britannia. Our creative but unemployed young people will not, after all, lose their dole money. Ministers have accepted that the New Deal's package of work experience and training will not block the artistic development of jobless 16 to 24-year-olds provided they meet basic criteria established to confirm their potential in such areas as musicianship, designing, and novel-writing. They will instead join a new ''creative industries'' welfare-to-work option. It is heartening to detect such levels of sensitivity and flexibility in a scheme which, up till now, has been characterised more by compulsion (however worthy it no doubt is).
Ministers owe it to single mothers (who will lose their benefit if they do not sign up for the New Deal), the taxpayer, and the privatised utilities whose windfall taxation is funding so much of the initiative to set out its criteria in a strictly defined and transparent way, and explain exactly what the ''creative industries'' option involves so that it is not seen as a soft option for skivers. Cool Britannia is a good thing for the country thanks to its earnings potential and for New Labour's ambitions to hold on to the youth vote.
The latter explains why it has paid so much attention to those pop stars such as Noel Gallagher and Jarvis Cocker whose time in the faculty of unemployment at the University of Life got them where they are today, and argued for music on the dole. But for every Gallagher and Cocker, how many other putative rock musicians slipped through the net and into dead-end jobs, or no jobs at all? It is a net which the New Deal aims to close. There is no glamour in unemployment.
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