Andy Burnham thinks he has answer to Neets crisis - but he couldn't be more wrong

I can’t remember my first job, but it was almost certainly as a babysitter, around the age of 14. I used to make a few pounds sitting in a neighbour’s house doing my homework in the evening until they reappeared between 10 and 11pm and walked me home, just a few doors away. There followed, in no particular order, a Saturday job in a clothes shop so cold it almost gave you chilblains, clerical work which mainly consisted of filling envelopes, a stint in a butchers which has given me a lifelong aversion to the smell of raw meat, several jobs as a bar maid and, when I was at university, summer jobs checking the markings on O and A-level papers. As a graduate in London, it took me a while to settle. After an appallingly stupid decision to try to become a lawyer, there was two years in a merchant bank (hey, it was the 1980s), a few months as a receptionist at an art book publisher, more Saturday work at Burberry’s, a spate at Waterstone’s and, finally, the lowliest job that has ever existed in journalism. It was a foot in the door. I was on my way. All of which is to say that I feel qualified to comment on the Neets crisis, which the Prime Minister has promised to tackle by guaranteeing training and work opportunities. That is the socialist answer and it is not the way to go. If you want to put more young people in work rather than ruining their lives by allowing them a lifetime on benefits, then make it easy for them to get a job. I never had any problem whatsoever in picking up work when I was a teen and a 20-something, but there were far fewer restrictions back then. Not only were what is now called zero hours Saturday jobs extremely common but quite young children were doing paper rounds. There was no age-related curb on the number of hours you could work; if you were ambitious and nine (not unheard of) you got on with it. And no matter how nutty the Labour Chancellors were back in the 1970s, none of them was stupid enough to make it more expensive for an employee to take on more staff. Andy Burnham is not going to do anything to tackle the Neets crisis because socialism is in his DNA. It is not the state that will solve this problem, but the free market and until we have a PM who understands that, the younger generation will be failed. But there are signs of life in the blue corner: Kemi’s ratings are rightly soaring and she certainly has the right instincts. Back in the 1980s there was a famous (anti-Thatcher) catchphrase: “Gis a job.” Go on Kemi, turn it back on them. Give them a job.