The news from the Netherlands is enough to make a British politician weep into his tea. Dutch youth unemployment has fallen to a historic low of 5.2%, with a model that famously offers ‘no dead ends’.
Meanwhile, Westminster is once again reviewing its own job scheme, clutching at foreign straws like a shipwrecked sailor. But let us not be fooled by the seductive simplicity of this headline. The Dutch success is not a policy blueprint you can photocopy and staple to a Whitehall desk.
It is the product of a national character forged in the crucible of a small, pragmatic, and deeply bourgeois culture. Britain, with its romantic obsession with stagflation and its love of a good crisis, will never replicate it. The truth is uncomfortable: the Dutch have a society that rewards plodding diligence, not flashy ambition.
They have a vocational training system that actually enjoys respect because parents do not sneer at plumbers. They have a social compact where taking a job at sixteen is not a mark of failure but a sensible step. In Britain, we have spent decades worshipping the false god of a university education for everyone, turning our youth into debt-laden drudges who cannot wire a plug.
The Dutch model works because it is not a scheme at all: it is a culture. And cultures are notoriously resistant to ministerial diktats. So by all means, send the Mandarins to Amsterdam.
But do not expect a miracle. The dead ends are not in their system; they are in our assumptions.
