One thing Cameron can't rip from the young is the vote - Polly Toynbee

The lost generation can strike back at a vindictive coalition at election time. Labour must put their plight centre stage

Rachel Reeves, Labour’s work and pensions shadow, in her Leeds West constituency. 'She won’t have the young unemployed damned as feckless when there are no jobs and little support.' Photograph: Christopher Thomond

If Mosquito anti-youth alarms were fixed to its gates, this government couldn't have tried harder to repel the lost generation. But the young don't vote and don't matter, while castigating them for lack of aspiration scores well with David Cameron's party. Shouldn't a million young unemployed be causing a youthquake?

The Youth Contract has missed its target by miles. Only 2,070 young people were found jobs, when employers were supposed to be subsidised to take on 160,000 by the election. Some do get work experience, but few get real work. The cabinet secretary, Jeremy Heywood, is to report on what to do next.

Top apprenticeships at Rolls-Royce or BAE are gold dust, with more applicants per place than Oxbridge. But most of what the government calls "apprenticeships" are taken by adults already in jobs, doing in-house training. A report by the IPPR thinktank this week called for a youth levy on all large employers failing to offer real apprenticeships: UK businesses offer disgracefully few.

The Prince's Trust – no hotbed of revolution – says: "If we lined up Britain's unemployed young people, the job queue would stretch from London to Middlesbrough." It reports a 334% rise in young people unemployed for two years, warning that when those who retreated back to education return to seek jobs, they may "burst the banks of an already flooded jobs market".

Figures from the Office for National Statistics on debt-burdened graduates made grim reading, with half in lower-level work offering weak prospects. But as graduates slide downmarket, they push out those beneath them. The IPPR report on Neets (not in education, employment or training) and the semi-qualified says 700,000 young people on jobseeker's allowance waste their time on jobcentre targets to make 40 futile job applications a week, instead of going for training – because to do so would cost them the allowance and so leave them with nothing to live on.

Many despair or are bullied off benefits: 400,000 Neets have lost contact with anyone who might help. The IPPR would entice them back with a £56.80 allowance for unemployed 18- to 24-year-olds, even in training (means-tested if parents earn over £25,000).

However, Rachel Reeves, Labour's work and pensions shadow, brusquely dismissed such meanness. She won't have the young unemployed damned as feckless when there are no jobs and little support. She will produce her definitive social security policy in January, fleshing out Ed Miliband's pledge to cut the benefits bill. That's not to be done by cutting barely survivable benefit rates, (dole is just £71 a week) – but by getting people into work and shrinking the housing benefit bill by building homes.

What Labour offers the young will be an electoral touchstone. She will improve Labour's Jobs Guarantee by cutting the waiting time from one year to six months, so they are not neglected for too long. Labour's Future Jobs Fund was a success, getting 100,000 into good jobs in the nine months before the last election. Worthwhile work for the public sector and charities was paid at the minimum wage, without displacing other jobs. In contrast, this government's Youth Contract replacing it has been a disaster, except where city authorities took it over: Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds and others do well, matching skills through local knowledge of employers and colleges, with personal advisers to help on housing, travel and family or mental health obstacles. The national scheme reaches 27.5% of 16- to 17-year-old neets, but the cities reach 57%.

Recessions are hardest on the young, but they must feel this government has been vindictive: the Future Jobs Fund was abolished; Michael Gove seized back the £270m spent on careers guidance, telling schools to do it themselves with no money; Ofsted finds only one in six schools "satisfactory"; the education maintenance allowance was abolished, though the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that it increased numbers staying on after 16. Connexions, giving advice and support outside school, was cancelled, and youth services were often the first to go in tight council budgets. Even the child trust fund, giving some future capital to every 18-year-old, was abolished. Education policy focuses obsessively on the top few, and vocational courses for those not university-bound are neglected. Cameron's conference speech laid out plans for the Tory manifesto to take housing benefit away from young people, forcing them to stay home even if they don't have one.

Labour, according to Reeves and Miliband, will make rescuing the lost generation their main mission – jobs, homes, help and hope. A £600m tax on bankers bonuses will fund their jobs guarantee. Votes at 16 may help shift grey-heavy voting that skews everything toward protecting the interests of the old: candidates will need to appeal to sixth form and college students. Labour should go further: why not free bus passes for under-25s, paid for by means-testing elderly people's winter fuel allowance?

David Willetts's book The Pinch lists with brutal clarity how wealth, property and opportunity were seized by the baby boomers, who now need the downtrodden young to shoulder the cost of their old age. But are "the young" a political entity? Like every age group, they are far more riven by class, education and cash than by chronology. Sharing tastes in music or clothes only masks deepening social divides. Attitudes of the young to benefits make dismal reading for Labour: polls show they are even less supportive of benefits for the unemployed, brought up with this dog-eat-dog, A*s-only fear for their future. Ipsos Mori says those furthest from the foundation of the welfare state appreciate it least, especially when they've paid their own fees and have no good jobs or homes to show for it (though they are unexpectedly warm-spirited towards pensioners).

Outrage at Lib Dem perfidy on tuition fees may have turned many off politics. Maybe Russell Brand will rouse them – if he can be bothered to organise a revolution. Some random event may spark the fires of generational injustice. But if the young aren't going to organise, riot or rebel, then at least they'd better declare an intention to vote with a vengeance, because that might rattle Westminster's cage.

Labour will put them centre stage, intending to touch voters of all ages with concern for the plight of the young: the 1997 New Deal for the young unemployed, paid for with a walloping £5bn windfall on the utilities, was not just a great vote-winner – it worked too.

Guardian