Bank of England Bombshell

If ever you wanted proof that this

government doesn't understand money and

finances, this is it. The Bank of

England sat in front of Parliament this

week and essentially said that the

government's flagship policy to help

young people has done precisely the

opposite. And I'm going to talk you

through exactly what's happened in this

video. Because whether you are young or

more mature or if you have children or

you employ people or you're just trying

to understand where the economy is

heading at the moment, this will

directly affect you and there's a huge

bout of irony in this video. But first

of all, we are here on my money channel.

I am Daniel Shan Smith. I run the black

belt barristister channel. So I am a

barristister. I am also a qualified

mortgage adviser. I've bought and sold

dozens of properties over the last well

many decades. I've been in business all

my life. I've never worked for anyone

else. I am completely debtree and I will

help you to understand uh money,

finances and creating wealth. So if you

like the sound of that, please do

subscribe to this channel here. And in

this video, we're talking about how this

government doesn't understand finances

and how this has had a massive

devastating effect on the employment

rates in this country. So first of all,

a bit of irony. Cast your mind back to

the 2024 budget, the original budget

here. One of Labour's big headline

moments was raising the minimum wage and

increasing the employer's national

insurance contributions. If you're

familiar with my channel, you'll know

that I've been very vocal on why that

was a terrible idea and that it would

create businesses uh difficulty so much

so that they might go out of business

and um curtail the employment of new

staff and all that sort of stuff. All of

which we've seen happening. But their

pitch was simple. Workers deserve more,

employers should contribute more, and

young people should es especially be

given a higher, fairer wage. Now, that

all sounds reasonable in the way that

they put it. But here's what actually

happened. The Bank of England's chief

economist, Hugh Pill, told the Treasury

Committee this week that those two

policies combined have hit young people

particularly hard. The effects, he said,

were particularly acute for workers aged

between 16 and 21. In other words, the

policy designed and sold to you to help

young workers has made it significantly

harder for young workers to find jobs in

the first place. And this is not just my

opinion, and it is not just the opinion

of the chief economist either. It is

based on the data. So let's look at the

numbers because this data shows that

youth unemployment among 16 to 24 year

olds hit 16.1%

in the final quarter of 2025. That is

the highest rate in a decade outside of

the pandemic. But it's even worse

because that number means that UK youth

unemployment is now higher than the EU

average overall because the EU average

sits at 14.9%.

We are now at 16.1.

And so for context, this is the first

time in recorded history going back to

the turn of the millennium that the UK

has been above the EU average on youth

unemployment.

We spent years, rightly or wrongly,

hearing that one of the advantages of

being outside of the EU single market

was labor market flexibility and that

businesses could hire more freely. That

our employment figures, particularly

youth unemployment, were especially the

envy of our European counterparts. That

argument has just died in this data.

talking to the younger viewers. If you

are 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, I want to

talk directly to you in this moment

because this is not abstract economics.

It is not just some numbers and some

ideas or some policy statements. This is

your life. The sectors being hit the

hardest, as you may have noticed in the

news with businesses collapsing, are

hospitality, retail, leisure, etc. Those

jobs that have historically

been where young people get their first

foot on the employment ladder, the first

paylip, the first bit of experience

getting into work, that first taste of

getting out to work and earning

something. your first experience of

showing up, being reliable, getting

something on your CV, learning how

workplaces function, dealing with your

co-workers, with your boss, the

hierarchy, shift rotors, you name it.

All of these things on those entry-

level positions, which are absolutely

admirable positions to start with,

humbling to some, are disappearing. Not

because employers don't want the staff.

Of course, the businesses want to grow.

And to grow, they need to service more

customers. And to service more

customers, they need more staff. And

obviously they need to hire more people

that want those jobs and so more young

people. That was the idea. But because

of the very cost of taking on a young

worker has gone up so sharply that

businesses, particularly small

businesses, but now we see large

businesses, whipbreads, um, beef and so

on, you know, they are simply not able

to sustain the growth or even the

existing shops with the existing staff.

it is simply making it far more

difficult to either continue or

certainly to hire more uh young people.

So they are having to make do with fewer

people or not replacing staff when they

leave and certainly not increasing the

pay wherever they possibly can. But here

is what concerns me the most about this

whole scenario. It is not just about the

money. It's the experience and the long

term because it's about what you learn

in those early jobs that nobody teaches

you at school. How to deal with

difficult customers, how to manage your

time when someone else depends on you.

How you take instructions, how you deal

with instructions, and like I said, how

you deal with your co-workers, with your

boss, how to push back professionally

when you're being treated unfairly. You

know, how to turn up when you don't feel

like turning up. You have to get out of

bed. You have to get to work on time.

All of those things are absolutely

essential life skills. If you lose that

sort of formative early experience and

you you don't just lose the income, you

lose the foundation, you lose the grip

on the working reality.

So if you're in that age group, please

take this seriously. Be more aggressive

about finding opportunities,

apprenticeships, self-employment,

freelancing, social media, building

something of your own. What are you good

at? What do you absolutely love doing or

talking about? I was one of the kids

that they told to stop talking at

school. Now I literally talk for a

living, whether it's here on YouTube or

as a barristister in court. That is what

I love doing. Clearly, that is what I

chose to train to do. As I said earlier

at the outset in my sort of intro pitch,

I've never worked for any company other

than my own. save for my work experience

that I did at school. And it's those

formative years of going and showing up.

It was only I think two weeks I did I

worked at a music shop and I turned up

and actually those those couple of weeks

really did shape my understanding of how

these businesses work. So don't wait for

the job market to come to you right now

because it is moving on and it's moving

in the wrong direction. And particularly

if you look at London,

one more data point that is worth

flagging up in this Financial Times

article that I'll link below here is

London's unemployment rate now is 7.6%.

That is the highest of any region in the

UK. Andrew Bailey, the governor for the

Bank of England, called it quite unusual

in British history. That's putting it