Milburn NEET Report Warns of 'Anxious Generation' in Britain

Alan Milburn, the government's jobs adviser and a former Labour health secretary under Tony Blair, will publish next week an interim report into Britain's NEET cohort that the Times said warns of "a rising tide of mental ill-health, anxiety, depression [and] neurodiversity" trapping young workers. Of the 946,000 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training, more than half have never worked, and a quarter are classed as unable to work due to long-term sickness or disability. Among the latter, 43 percent now cite mental health problems as the primary reason -- up from 24 percent in 2011. "The system is trapping people in worklessness rather than enabling them into work. We're at a risk of just writing a whole generation off," Milburn told the Times. "This is a bedroom generation. They are sort of living in their bedrooms. They are on all the time, they're never off." He pushed back at the snowflake framing: "They are not snowflakes. People say it's a soft generation. My view unequivocally is that it isn't. It is an anxious generation." Britain's NEET rate is roughly double Japan's and Ireland's and three times the Netherlands'. The report's recommendations -- mental health support, flexibility, and an explicit role for the NEET cohort in the skilled-labour shortage -- arrive the same week ONS figures put net migration at 171,000 in 2024, a fifth of the 891,000 peak in 2022.

A second structural critique, this time of the criminal-justice system, landed on the same Saturday. Queen Mary University of London and the civil-society group Defend Our Juries published a report identifying 286 cases of protest-related civil disobedience in England and Wales -- climate and Palestine-solidarity activists -- in which custodial sentences had become more frequent and longer. The report frames the trend as the creation of a "new breed of political prisoners," with sentencing levels for direct-action protest now comparable to violent crimes. The week before, Britain's chief constables had called for blocking under-16s from unsafe social media platforms; Peter Hyman, former headteacher and adviser to Blair and Starmer, told the Guardian that schools were becoming a "pipeline" to worklessness and pressed for a social media ban -- a line that runs into the Milburn report at the policy seam.

A specific UK loss reached the public on the same day. Ayrton Redfearn, a 23-year-old from south Devon, was killed in action in the Donetsk region on May 9, his mother confirmed; he had joined a specialist unit supporting the Ukrainian army in 2025. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said it was supporting the family. On the maritime front, the UK Carrier Strike Group tracked the Russian intelligence vessel Yuri Ivanov during NATO's Exercise Dynamic Mongoose in the Norwegian Sea alongside Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 and the Portuguese frigate, the UK Defence Journal reported; the UK Maritime Trade Operations centre separately reported multiple suspicious skiff approaches in the Gulf of Aden on May 23, including a large skiff with two outboard engines observed carrying both ladders and weapons, after an earlier approach near Yemen's al-Mukalla.

The Channel and the asylum file moved too. French border police temporarily suspended the EU's biometric Entry/Exit System checks at the Port of Dover on Saturday after thousands of holiday travellers faced delays of up to two and a half hours; the port confirmed French authorities had invoked Article 9 of the EES regulations to reduce processing time. The same week, the bilateral UK-France "one in, one out" small-boats returns scheme drew its first public failure: an asylum seeker returned to France under the agreement covertly re-entered the UK and told the Guardian he had been beaten by smugglers after refusing to work with them, alleging at least 18 others had managed similar covert returns.

The Brexit conversation reopened with a senior name. Former Foreign Secretary David Miliband called for a "national consensus" on rejoining the European Union; the intervention follows weeks of polling that puts the Reform UK party ahead in voting intention and is reported alongside the ongoing internal Labour Party turmoil that has seen more than 95 Labour MPs urge Prime Minister Keir Starmer to set out a departure timetable, the resignation of Health Secretary Wes Streeting and junior minister Jess Phillips, and four other ministerial-aide departures since Labour's May local-election losses -- a count of nearly 1,500 English council seats lost to Reform UK, which alone took 1,454. Starmer was meanwhile abroad in the E3-Ukraine format on Friday, hosting Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron by video call to discuss reviving peace diplomacy with Russia; his spokesperson said European support for Ukraine "will be reinforced further in the coming months."

Franziska Brantner, co-leader of Germany's Greens, called for an explicit European nuclear deterrence debate built around a British-French nuclear umbrella, citing what she described as the declining reliability of the US shield under Trump. Analysts the same week pressed the EU to offer Ukraine security guarantees under the Lisbon Treaty's mutual defence clause -- a step short of accession that Chancellor Merz has floated. Britain, with one of the two European nuclear arsenals, sits at the centre of both conversations. On the corporate side, BAE Systems outlined a supply-chain entry path for SMEs into the defence sector, and Brewdog founder James Watt pledged shares in a new beer brand to compensate his original Equity for Punks crowdfunding investors.