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Almost everyone who works can remember their first job, and almost no one remembers it for the work. They remember being useless at it and being let in anyway. Picture the version that belonged to a certain kind of teenager: dropped at the edge of a city at five in the morning, collected by a van full of blokes who did this every day, driven out to a building site to dig a basement out for £200 a week. On one of those jobs, tearing up floorboards, he put his foot between two joists and through the ceiling of the room below. The man he was labouring for went pale and said, “Steve’s gunna to do his nut when he finds out!" and phoned the boss, who came storming back and gave him the first proper bollocking he’d ever had, and the boy stood there in the wreckage, certain he had ruined everything and would be sent home in disgrace.
He had not. They were going to pull that ceiling down the next morning anyway. The whole thing was a wind-up, an initiation, the same species of joke as sending the new boy to B&Q for sky hooks and a long weight. And that is the part worth holding onto, because that wasn’t cruelty, it was the certificate of initiation. You only get wound up like that once they have decided you are one of them. Being called ‘Dozy bollocks’ was the sound of being let in.
That is what the first job really was: a way in. Not primarily a wage, though the wage mattered, but a point of entry, a place porous enough that a fifteen-year-old with no skills and no record could slip through, be absorbed, be teased, be useful by August, and come out the other side having learned the things no classroom teaches. How to turn up. How to take an order and take a joke. How to exist among people you did not choose. The first rung of the ladder was low to the ground, and the ground it sat on was open, so a young person could wander up to it, put a foot on, and see how it felt.
That entrance is closing, and the numbers have just crossed a line they had not crossed in more than a decade. In the first three months of 2026, the number of people aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training passed one million for the first time since 2013. Youth unemployment stands at 16.2%.
Among those not in full-time education, the share who are neither working nor even looking for work has reached 21.4%, the highest since the Office for National Statistics began recording it in 1992. Graduate positions fell by a third in 2025, and job vacancies are at their lowest since the depths of the pandemic. Of that million young people, well over half are not looking at all, because a door that will not open eventually stops being a door you bother to knock on.
The government's own reviewer reached for the same image. Alan Milburn, asked to diagnose what had happened to Britain's young, reported that "the first rung of the career ladder has thinned," and for too many was "now simply out of reach," leaving them in "a hopeless Catch-22 where employers ask for work experience but the opportunities for young people to gain it have narrowed or gone." His review flatly rejected the idea that the young were unwilling: 84% of them, it found, wanted work, training, or study and could not get it. This is not a generation that refused to climb. It is a generation that arrived at the ladder to find the bottom rung gone.
Lovely Alan
The instinct is to look for someone to blame, and the truth is stranger and harder: there is no villain, only a wall, and every brick in it was laid by someone doing good. For forty years, we have steadily improved the experience of being inside work, for the most decent reasons imaginable, and every improvement has raised the boundary around work a little higher. The minimum wage rose to stop the low-paid being exploited, which is a good thing to want, and it also raised the cost of the one worker whose value on their first day is close to nothing.
Employer National Insurance went up. Employment protections thickened to prevent people from being fired on a whim, turning every new hire from a small, reversible experiment into a serious, semi-permanent commitment. The unpaid grunt tasks that used to justify a junior's existence, the filing, the fetching, the terrible first draft, were abolished by decency or absorbed by software. Each of these was right. Each protected someone real from something real. And their sum is a barrier around the world of work that grows one course of stone taller with every well-meant reform.
Because here is the thing about protecting the people inside. You cannot be underpaid until you have a wage. You cannot be unfairly dismissed until you have a job to be dismissed from. Every right, every safeguard, every dignity we have won for people at work is, by definition, a benefit available only to those already through the gate, and every one of them raises the cost and the risk of admitting somebody new. The better we make it to be in, the more expensive it becomes to let anyone in, and so the higher the wall around the inside must rise. We did not decide to wall the young out. We decided to look after the people within, again and again, each time for a reason no decent person could argue with, and the wall is simply what all that looking-after adds up to when you stand back and see it whole.
How it started
What used to stand around work was a fence. A line of posts with wide gaps between them, the kind of boundary you could slip through in either direction without anyone recording that you had. You could try a job, be bad at it, leave, try another, drift in for a summer and out again in September, and nothing was staked on the crossing because the crossing cost almost nothing. That porousness was not a flaw in the system. It was the system's great mercy to the young, who need precisely the freedom to enter cheaply, fail cheaply, and try again. What we have built in its place is not a fence. It is the wall of a fortress, high and smooth and continuous, and a fortress does something a fence never did. It divides the world absolutely into inside and outside. It replaces the gap you could step through with a gate that somebody has to decide to open. And the young are no longer kept out by a low rail; they can climb at will. They are standing at the foot of the wall, looking for the gate, and the gate stays shut, because opening it now costs the person inside real money, real risk and a commitment they cannot easily undo.
How its going
You can hear the gate not opening in a single sentence, said ten thousand times a day by people who are not villains. It would be easier to just do it myself. Not because they cannot afford the wage, but because the wage plus the risk plus the paperwork plus the months of uselessness plus the near-impossibility of reversing it if it goes wrong add up to a number at which the rational, forgivable, self-defeating answer is to keep the work inside the walls and hire no one. Every time that sentence is spoken, a gate that might have opened stays closed, and a person who needed to be let in is left standing outside it.
And once you are outside, the wall teaches you to stay there. A 24-year-old who had been unemployed for three years put the trap better than any economist: there is a taboo, he said, around needing experience to get a job when you can only get experience through a job. That is a closed loop, and it tightens as it turns. The longer a person stands outside the wall, the more daunting the gate becomes, the thinner their record looks to whoever might open it, and the more readily an employer choosing between two strangers picks the one already vouched for by someone else. The person who most needed the first chance is, with a terrible neatness, the person least likely to be handed it.
Milburn observed that the young people locked out of work, gathered together, would form the third-largest city in Britain, bigger than Leeds or Glasgow. There is already a city for them, then, a city of the excluded, and it has a literary cousin. In A Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin gives us Qarth, the Queen of Cities, the greatest city that ever was or will be, ringed by three enormous walls carved with the scenes of its own glory, so magnificent that men cross deserts and die at its gates for the chance to be let inside. And the traveller who finally makes it through the last wall discovers that the city within is a hollow place of preening merchants, locked vaults, and warlocks guarding rooms with nothing in them, a splendour that is mostly rumour, kept alive by the desperation of everyone still outside trying to get in. The walls are the finest thing about Qarth. What they principally protect is the belief that there must be something wonderful behind walls this high.
The greatest city that ever was or will be
We should be careful of building that city, because the same wall is going up around every good thing a society offers, always for the same decent reasons. Housing: four decades of protecting the people who already own homes, their equity, their values, their views, has raised the wall around ownership so high that the young now press their faces to it from outside, and we call it a housing crisis when it is really this same fortress flying a different flag.
The professions, with their lengthening qualifications and their unpaid internships that only the already comfortable can afford to sit through. Everywhere, a good society is doing good things for the people already within, and paying for it, without ever voting for it, by raising the walls against those not yet in. This is how humane civilisations ossify: not through cruelty, but through an accumulation of kindnesses each extended to the inside, until the inside is a fortress and the outside is a generation.
And here is the part that should trouble the people who made it through the gate, which is most of us reading this. The wall not only keeps the young out. It changes what it is like to be in. When the boundary was a fence you could step over, work sat lightly in a life, one thing among many, a thing you could take up and put down, because getting back in was never hard.
Raise the wall high enough and the crossing becomes the central drama of a life, a thing you sweat and strive and stake yourself entirely to achieve, and a prize won at that cost cannot then be merely one part of your existence. It has to justify the siege. So work swells to fill everything, becomes the whole of an identity rather than a portion of a life, precisely because we made it so hard to enter. The fortress does not just abandon the people outside. It slowly consumes the people inside, who gave up so much to get in, that they can no longer afford to believe the room behind the wall is anything less than the point of living.
So both sides are poorer for it, which is the thing almost no one says. The outside loses its best and most energetic years standing at the gate. The inside loses the porousness that once kept work in its place, the fresh blood, the easy exits and returns, the person who wandered in for a summer and reminded everyone it was only a job. We traded a boundary you could cross for a wall you had to lay siege to, and in exchange for the certainty of what is inside, we gave up the thing that made work survivable, which was the freedom to treat it as one facet of a life rather than the fortress you spend that life defending.
The government has at least noticed. The Milburn Review has recently named the problem and argued for tilting the state away from merely supporting people out of work and towards getting them into it. There is a Youth Guarantee, and money behind it, and the instinct is exactly right. But a grant that helps a few thousand through the gate does not lower the wall, and the wall is the thing, because every course of stone in it was laid for a reason that still stands and that almost no one is willing to unpick. You cannot subsidise your way back to a porous boundary once you have spent forty years building a solid one.
None of this is an argument against the protections themselves. The building site was often genuinely rough, and people were spoken to in ways that should not be tolerated now. Much of what raised the walls also made the inside kinder, and that is a real gain, not to be sneered at. But a wall does not know the difference between keeping harm out and keeping people out, and we have built ours so high and so smooth, with such good intentions, that we can no longer tell which it is doing. A society is not measured only by how well it treats the people inside its walls. It is measured by how easily a person standing outside them, young and unproven and useless and full of promise, can find a way in, and by whether the thing inside is still worth actually reaching once they do.
We have made the inside safer and better than it has ever been, and we have made getting in almost impossible, and in doing so, we have made work into the whole of a life for those within and an unreachable city for those without. Everyone is poorer for it. The young waste their best years at the gate, and the ones who make it through gave up so much to enter that they can no longer see the walls for what they are. A city with walls this high, so high that the next generation cannot get in and the last generation cannot imagine leaving, is not the Queen of Cities it believes itself to be. It is a very magnificent trap, and we are still erecting it.
See you on the next one.
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