Furlough gave the population at large a taste for idleness, and once lockdown ended many people never went back to work again.
No other country seems to have suffered the same degree of scarring. Other “rich economies” soon recovered pre-pandemic levels of labour force participation. But not in Britain.
To blame it on NHS waiting lists, as some on the Left do, is nonsense. In its last “fiscal risks” report, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimated that only a quarter of the long-term sick inactive population was on an NHS waiting list. This is not enough to account for the steep rise in worklessness.
Part of the explanation is no doubt our old friend, an ageing demographic. The rise in those claiming incapacity benefits, which are considerably more generous than ordinary out-of-work entitlements, is particularly marked in the 50-66 age bracket. There has also been a striking increase in mental health issues among younger people.
But whatever the cause, it almost beggars belief that, with such a huge stock of unemployed workers to draw on, employers should still be turning on an unprecedented scale to migrants to fill key positions in the labour market.
Responding to Monday’s shock surge in the economically inactive, the British Chambers of Commerce lamented “widespread recruitment difficulties and ongoing competition for skilled workers”.
The juxtaposition of acute labour shortages on the one hand and growing worklessness on the other could scarcely be more striking.
As I say, it may be a bit of a stretch to attribute the riots directly to this dire state of affairs. What is not in doubt, however, is that it provides fertile ground for social discontent, resentment and crime.
On one side we have a large, growing and increasingly alienated part of the population who can’t or won’t work, and on the other a large and growing number of migrants only too happy to fill the roles employers are crying out for.
An evident skills and geographic mismatch between the disaffected and the jobs-rich parts of the economy make this a particularly tough nut to crack. Yet things plainly cannot carry on as they are, and not just because of the social deficiencies highlighted by the riots.
Some of the biggest growth in government spending over the past decade is on welfare, with the costs of supporting such a large proportion of the population in idleness beginning to become unbearable.