It’s Not Just About Migration

Young Britain is being hit by three things at once: a collapsing entry-level job market, a housing ladder with the bottom rung sawn off, and a tax-and-benefit system tilted to protect pensioners. Only one of those three has a face you can put on a poster. That is why the argument is about migration — and why it is the wrong argument.

The Wrong Question in Makerfield

On 18 June, the former mining seat of Makerfield votes in a by-election that has become a test of who owns Britain’s discontent. Labour won here comfortably in 2024, 45% to Reform’s 32%. Six weeks ago, in the May local elections, Reform swept every council ward in the constituency — roughly 50% of the vote to Labour’s 27%. To hold the seat, Labour has parachuted in the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham, who needs a Commons seat to run for the party leadership. The latest Survation poll has it at 49 to 39.

It is a constituency full of young people who cannot get a job or a house. And in the final days of the campaign, Burnham’s headline offer was aimed not at them but at pensioners: a pledge to keep the state pension triple lock untouched, and to ease the fiscal drag pulling pensioners into income tax — in effect, a pension-age tax cut. Reform, meanwhile, campaigns on migration. Between them, the two parties fighting hardest for Britain’s left-behind towns are offering the old a tax cut and the young a scapegoat.

First, Give Migration Its Due

Start by conceding what is true, because the argument collapses without it. Rapid population growth is real and it has consequences. Britain’s population has grown faster than its housing stock for a quarter of a century, and that adds genuine demand-side pressure on rents and prices. At the lowest-paid end of the labour market, sustained high migration can shade wages down at the margin. Anyone who tells young people that migration has nothing to do with their problems is insulting them, and they know it.

But “not nothing” is not the same as “the cause.” The honest claim is narrower and far harder to dismiss: migration is the smallest and most visible of three forces, and it is carrying the blame for the other two.

The Jobs Nobody Can Get

Youth unemployment has reached 16.2% — 729,000 people aged 16 to 24, the worst in over a decade. In London it is 24.9%. More than one in five young jobseekers has been out of work for over a year. Vacancies across the economy are at their lowest since 2021.

None of that was caused by arrivals. It was caused by a weak economy meeting a technology shock. Graduate roles are down around 45% year on year. Employers are openly shifting budgets out of junior hiring and into AI tools that do the drafting, scheduling and basic analysis that used to be a graduate’s first job, while the rise in employer National Insurance has made every junior hire more expensive. The Institute for Public Policy Research puts up to eight million UK jobs in the firing line. A junior administrator costs around £24,000 a year; the software that covers much of the same work costs less than a phone contract. We documented this collapse when youth unemployment first crossed 732,000. The bottom rung of the career ladder — the rung every previous generation stepped onto — is being quietly automated away. No migrant did that.

A Ladder With No Bottom Rung

The housing story is older and even less about migration. Since 1997, average earnings have roughly doubled. House prices have risen about four and a half times. That gap did not open up in the last three years of high net migration; it opened over decades, driven by a planning system that will not permit building and a tax system that rewards holding property over earning a wage. Migration adds people to the queue. It did not build the wall they are queuing at. We have argued before that the housing crisis was a policy choice, not an accident — and choices have authors.

The Cohort Nobody Will Touch

While the young are told to compete harder for shrinking jobs and unreachable homes, one group is fenced off from every spending cut. The state pension rose again in April to £12,548 a year under the triple lock, a guarantee whose annual cost is now forecast to reach £15.5 billion by 2030. Working-age welfare, by contrast, is where every Chancellor goes looking for savings, and frozen income tax thresholds drag more low earners into tax each year. The pattern holds across governments: pensioner benefits are untouchable, the young are cuttable. We set out the arithmetic of that ratchet in our piece on the triple lock.

Makerfield shows the politics in miniature. A Labour figure, campaigning for the leadership of his party in one of the most squeezed young seats in the country, led with a promise to protect and extend the benefits of the old. That is not a criticism of pensioners, many of whom are far from wealthy. It is a description of where political power sits — and which generation it is willing to spend.

Why Migration Takes the Blame

So why does the whole argument keep collapsing back onto migration? Because it is the one strand with a human face. You cannot put a planning committee, a Bank of England interest-rate decision or a large language model on a leaflet. You can put a person crossing a border. Reform wins by naming a villain. Labour, frightened of Reform, answers on the same ground — visa crackdowns, tougher settlement rules — because it is easier to look tough on migration than to admit you cannot quickly build houses or conjure entry-level jobs.

The result is a politics that is loudest about the cause that matters least, and quietest on the two that matter most. In Makerfield that means Reform points at the border and Labour reaches for the pensioner vote, while the 24.9% of young Londoners out of work — and their equivalents in every town like it — are offered nothing that touches the actual problem. The young get a scapegoat instead of a solution.

It Was Never “Boomers Had It Easy”

None of this is a charge against an older generation, and it is important to be precise about that — not least because the lazy version of this argument is simply wrong. UK Boomers did not have an easy ride. The older ones came of age in the 1970s: stagflation, the 1976 IMF bailout, the Winter of Discontent, and the mass unemployment of the early-1980s recession. They worked through real hardship.

The point is structural, not generational. The system handed that generation advantages the young will never be offered — homes bought at around three times income, university that was free and rare enough to be worth something, and a retirement settlement now protected by law while everything around it is cut. A Boomer did not design the planning system, freeze the tax thresholds, or buy the AI replacing graduate jobs. Governments did — Labour and Conservative alike, from 1997 to now. The unfairness is in the policy architecture, not the people who happened to benefit from it.

Which is why migration is the wrong question for Makerfield, and for Britain. It is real, but it is small, and it is visible. The forces actually hollowing out a generation — an automation shock no government is managing, a housing market a generation of governments chose not to fix, and a welfare state that protects the old by spending the young — have no face to point at. That is exactly why nobody in power wants to talk about them. Until they do, every angry vote in every left-behind town will keep being spent on the one problem that was never the main one.