No Future: Spain's youth unemployment

"No future." The Sex Pistols' anthemic banshee wail hollered out of the group's vitriolic celebration of the Queen's Jubilee in 1977. No future was against a background of British economic basket-case-ism, its punk nihilism the breeding ground for the invective hurled by The Jam, The Beat and The Specials at the hopelessness of the wasteland years of Thatcherism that were to come.

Yet alongside the no future of the early '80s, a confidence also began to emerge. To continue the musical context, it was the Thatcher rock of smug yuppie-ism, of "loadsamoney" and of aspiration of a good life, made video real through fast boats and dreamy island landscapes by Duran Duran.

No future was no future only up to a point. Thatcher's heartlessness destroyed heartland manufacturing and mining communities for which the future took years to become even a possibility, but the fast-buck avarice that burst out from the monetarist chest of a government in thrall to the diktats of the Chicago School put braces on the former barrow boys turned Gekkos who swaggered into a liberalising City.

What goes around, comes around. And it finally came around in 2008. But whereas there was a future, albeit a different future in the 1980s, where is it now? While Britain contends, against the backdrop of another Jubilee, with its own future and that in particular of its youth, Spain has to contend with one of its own.

No future. If the youth are the future, and the youth always are the future, then they need an anthem around which to rally, one which, you might hope, was less Kierkegaard than that of the Pistols. It is hard to see where one would come from, as peering through the murk of Spain's economy, it is impossible to see light at the end of the tunnel, as not even the tunnel is visible. The cloud has enveloped the economy and descended into the minds of those whose vision of a future is obscured by its demoralising density.

Fifty per cent youth unemployment. It is an appalling statistic. Nowhere else in Europe does youth unemployment as badly as Spain. And even for the lucky ones who get a job, they have now acquired a title - the "nimileuristas". Paid so badly, they fail to break the thousand a month mark. And for many of those from the youth job market who do get a job, they find themselves also with temporary contracts, meaning they are easy to dispense with.

The national government's labour reforms are meant to try and address temporary work, but the general feeling is that they won't. But whether they do or they don't, the real issue is that of creating employment, which means creating growth, and neither have any obvious sign of being achieved by a national government that made an electoral virtue of pledging to tackle unemployment.

The labour reforms are bringing the demonstrators onto the streets. The threat of a general strike comes firstly as a consequence of these reforms and secondly from an unwillingness on behalf of the government to talk to the unions. Prime Minister Rajoy has made a plea for patriotism in tackling Spain's problems, but it is one that characterises the roles that are being played in the game now being acted out, with Rubalcaba and PSOE being accused of fomenting dissent and the big bad wolves of the unions only too happy to go along with a grim fairy tale and threaten to bring everything to a halt by eating whole little Rajoy riding the fable of nationhood.

But there, amidst this pantomime, are the 50% youth unemployed and the "nimileuristas", exactly the ones who should ride the wave of growth into the future but who find that the surf, far from being up, is instead becalmed to the point of it forming a massive sea of stagnant water, silted up and incapable of movement.

No future. Rajoy has no vision of the future, other than praying to God that the cavalry of the private sector charges over the hills with lorries full of building materials. Get the youth back on the sites, let them abandon education, coin it in for a few years, saddle themselves with loans and wait for it all to go belly-up again. But even this scenario of boom to bust being repeated is questionable.

So, what is there? Not much. Street protests and a general strike (one that many seem disinclined to take part in because of a loss of a day's wages) would have been anticipated. For the youth, however, there is less to lose. There is nothing to lose. Spain is storing up a whole mess of problems and a whole mess of conflict.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.