You Can’t YouTube Your Way Out of a Broken Economy
Britain keeps offering individual solutions to structural problems.
Britain has a problem. Actually, Britain has several problems — and that’s precisely the point.
We have millions of people receiving working-age benefits. We have people who are unemployed, people who are economically inactive, people unable to work because of long-term sickness or disability, people who might be able to work with the right support, and people who have effectively disappeared from the labour market altogether.
We have young people who aren’t working or studying.
We have employers complaining about skills shortages.
We have workers already in employment who aren’t earning enough.
We have graduates struggling to find graduate-level work, trades struggling to recruit and train enough people, businesses complaining about recruitment, and a government staring at an enormous welfare bill wondering how to bring it down.
Meanwhile, Britain has another problem.
Productivity has been weak. Investment has disappointed. Housing costs consume enormous amounts of people’s incomes. Public services are under pressure. Mental ill-health and long-term sickness have become an increasingly important part of the economic inactivity debate.
And hovering over all of this is Brexit.
Ten years after the referendum, whatever anybody thinks about why people voted for it, Britain now trades with its largest neighbouring market through a relationship containing more barriers than existed when it was an EU member.
This is the country into which we’re now trying to move people from welfare into work.
And that’s why I find some of the conversation around this so astonishingly shallow.
Because we’re discussing an extraordinarily complicated economic and social problem as though the country simply contains a large group of people who haven’t yet realised that McDonald’s is hiring.
Whatever happened to the high-wage, high-skill economy?
I remember Boris Johnson telling us where Britain was supposedly heading.
After Brexit, we were going to move away from an economic model dependent upon cheap labour.
Britain would become a high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy.
That was the promise.
Because almost a decade after the referendum, we’re still having political conversations about getting unemployed young people into McDonald’s, B&M and other entry-level jobs and presenting that as evidence that we’re finally getting serious about economic inactivity.
There’s nothing wrong with working at McDonald’s.
There’s nothing wrong with working at B&M.
There’s nothing wrong with cleaning, stacking shelves, delivering parcels or serving food.
But those jobs cannot constitute Britain’s economic strategy.
If our answer to a young person entering adulthood is simply “there’s a shift available over there”, we’ve confused employment policy with economic development.
And those aren’t the same thing.
The benefit bill is the symptom
This is where these conversations usually go wrong.
People look at the welfare bill and see the problem.
I look at it and ask: what produced it?
Who are these people?
How many are genuinely unable to work?
How many could work with appropriate healthcare or workplace adjustments?
How many are waiting for treatment?
How many are struggling with mental health?
How many lack qualifications?
How many live somewhere where the available jobs are poorly paid?
How many need childcare?
How many are carers themselves?
How many have become disconnected from the labour market?
Those aren’t excuses.
They’re different problems requiring different interventions.
A person with a serious long-term health condition isn’t the same policy problem as a healthy 20-year-old who left school without qualifications.
Neither is the same as a 55-year-old whose industry disappeared.
Neither is the same as somebody already working but still receiving Universal Credit because their income doesn’t cover their circumstances.
Yet politically, completely different circumstances can become compressed into one enormous category:
Then comes the equally enormous solution:
Problem solved.
Except it isn’t.
Moving somebody from one low income to another isn’t transformation
Suppose we get someone into McDonald’s tomorrow.
Good.
Seriously.
They now have somewhere to go. They’re earning money. They’re interacting with colleagues. They’re developing basic workplace skills. Perhaps their confidence improves.
Those things matter.
But now ask the question Britain seems strangely reluctant to ask:
What happens after one year?
What happens after five?
What skill have we helped that person acquire?
What has happened to their earning potential?
What has happened to their productivity?
Can they afford housing?
Can they build savings?
Can they progress?
What part of Britain’s productive economy are we preparing them to participate in?
If that’s the entire policy achievement, then we haven’t necessarily solved very much.
They may still receive Universal Credit. They may still struggle with rent. The state may still support their income. Their productivity may barely have changed.
And Britain still hasn’t created the skilled worker it keeps telling us it desperately needs.
And then came the YouTube solution
I was discussing exactly this online when somebody replied to me.
His argument was essentially that not everyone is capable of skilled employment.
Of course they’re not.
I agreed immediately.
Then came the solution.
Work 35 hours a week in an unskilled job. Read books. Watch YouTube. Practise a trade. Perhaps shadow somebody already doing the job for free.
And suddenly the whole British debate was sitting there in front of me.
Because this wasn’t really a description of a skills system.
If the country doesn’t train you, train yourself.
If the employer won’t invest in you, invest in yourself.
If you can’t afford training, find it free online.
If you need experience, somehow find it yourself.
And if you don’t succeed?
Well, presumably you didn’t want it badly enough.
Britain keeps individualising structural failure
At some point we have to ask what responsibility the country itself has.
Personal responsibility matters enormously.
But personal responsibility cannot manufacture an industrial base.
It cannot build a college.
It cannot create an apprenticeship system.
It cannot build a railway.
It cannot finance a laboratory.
It cannot construct an electricity grid.
It cannot create a domestic supply chain.
And it cannot create millions of productive, skilled jobs through individual determination alone.
It isn’t 1996 anymore
This is another reason these conversations frustrate me.
People talk about employment using a world they remember rather than the one that exists.
The global economy has transformed.
China became an industrial and technological superpower.
Eastern Europe integrated deeply into European manufacturing.
Automation transformed factories and warehouses.
Software transformed offices.
AI is beginning another transformation.
Supply chains became global.
Capital became extraordinarily mobile.
Countries are competing intensely for the industries expected to matter over the coming decades.
Britain changed too.
We became overwhelmingly service-based. Manufacturing became a much smaller share of employment than it once was. Technical education was reorganised repeatedly. The relationship between employers, training and the worker became more fragmented.
And then we loosened our economic integration with the largest market sitting on our doorstep.
So no, the answer in 2026 cannot simply be the answer somebody remembers from 1996:
“Get your foot in the door, work hard and you’ll be fine.”
LEADING WHERE?
The rest of the world didn’t stop
British young people aren’t merely competing with other British young people.
They’re entering a global economy.
Manufacturing, batteries, electric vehicles, renewables, robotics, infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
A longstanding vocational model connecting employers, recognised occupations and formal education.
World-leading universities, research institutions, technology companies and enormous pools of investment capital.
Natural-resource wealth converted in part into long-term national financial assets and investment capacity.
None of these countries is perfect.
That’s not the argument.
The argument is that countries develop capabilities deliberately.
They don’t simply wait for millions of individuals to independently develop exactly the skills the national economy happens to require.
Everybody isn’t starting from the same place
There’s another assumption hiding underneath the “just teach yourself” argument.
That everybody can simply go home and do it.
One 20-year-old might live with financially secure parents, have their own bedroom, a laptop, a car, broadband and enough support to undertake an apprenticeship on relatively poor initial wages.
Another might be paying rent, travelling two hours to work, helping their family financially, caring for somebody or simply trying to keep themselves afloat.
Another may have left school without the educational foundations necessary to open a textbook and independently teach themselves a technical subject.
People aren’t interchangeable economic units.
That doesn’t mean removing individual responsibility.
It means recognising reality.
Britain cannot acknowledge enormous inequalities in childhood, education, health, housing and wealth and then design employment policy as though everybody reaches adulthood standing on exactly the same starting line.
Somebody educated at Eton and somebody leaving a struggling school may both technically possess access to YouTube.
That doesn’t mean they possess equal access to opportunity.
YouTube is brilliant. It isn’t an industrial strategy.
I learn things online constantly.
The internet has given ordinary people access to an extraordinary amount of information for almost nothing.
But access to information and professional formation aren’t the same thing.
You can watch electrical videos. That doesn’t make you an electrician.
You can watch somebody weld. That doesn’t provide hundreds of hours of supervised experience.
You can watch engineering lectures. That doesn’t suddenly give Britain another engineer.
High-skill economies require institutions.
And critically:
BETWEEN THEM.
That’s what a skills system actually is.
So what exactly are we trying to achieve?
If the objective is simply to reduce the number of people claiming benefits next year, getting somebody into almost any sustainable job might improve the numbers.
But if the objective is to make Britain richer, more productive and more competitive over the next twenty years, the question becomes completely different.
What are we training people to do?
What industries are those people going into?
Who is investing in those industries?
Where is the progression?
Where are the higher wages coming from?
What are we producing that the rest of the world wants to buy?
That’s economic strategy.
And suddenly McDonald’s looks very different.
Not because there’s anything wrong with working there.
But because it was never supposed to be the answer to those questions.
You can’t YouTube your way out of a broken economy.
Britain has spent years discussing increasingly structural problems through the language of individual behaviour.
And perhaps that’s comforting.
Because individual problems have simple solutions.
Structural problems are considerably more difficult.
They require governments to admit that investment matters.
That industrial policy matters.
That education matters.
That housing matters.
That healthcare matters.
That Britain’s relationship with Europe has economic consequences.
That decades of decisions accumulate.
And that sometimes an economy isn’t failing because millions of individuals simultaneously forgot how to try.
Britain was promised a high-wage, high-skill, high-productivity economy.
If, almost a decade after the Brexit referendum, our answer to economic inactivity is increasingly to funnel people into the same low-paid, low-productivity economy we were supposedly escaping, perhaps the question shouldn’t only be:
PEOPLE WORKING?
Perhaps we should also ask:
HAVE WE BUILT
FOR THEM TO WORK IN?
China isn’t waiting.
America isn’t waiting.
Germany isn’t waiting.
Technology isn’t waiting.
And Britain is not going to compete in the economy of the 2030s by telling somebody finishing a shift at McDonald’s: