Article

Youth Mobility Scheme Risks Triggering Widespread Unrest

Introduction

This article is based on comments incorporated into an article published in the Daily Express on 19th May 2026

Now that we know from the King's Speech that Starmer intends to press ahead with his EU youth mobility scheme as part of his EU Reset, it would be appropriate to flag up the threat of widespread unrest that could result. An importation of many thousands of EU youth unemployed will add to the strained labour market here, which has been particularly damaged for young people. On top of that, the rental market for accommodation has been hit by Labour’s Renters Rights Act. That adds up to a dangerous combination.

Attacks on young people since 2024

The bad but non-violent impacts on our own young people of the current Government's assault on them were predicted in blog in March last year, and are all coming true, before the EU Youth Mobility Scheme. These include squeezed job opportunities due to the increases in the Minimum Wage and Employer National Insurance Contributions. UK youth unemployment has risen sharply, and is particularly bad in London.

A haphazard method of governing

On top of the fault of not understanding the impact of their individual measures on an individual person, they now add the unforgivable trait of failing to grasp that several of their measures can accumulate and cause exponential damage to a single person or stakeholder group. It seems to have eluded them, regarding their offensives so far, that a single person could sit under more than one of their labels: pensioner, driver, electricity-user, second-home owner, farmer, small business, employer. But then it must by now be clear that Starmer does not know or understand what the individuals in his cabinet are doing, and still less how their changes overlap.

EU Youth Mobility Scheme

Now the EU Youth Mobility Scheme will come on top, adding extra job-seekers into a stretched market in competition with the UK’s own young unemployed. We can expect an influx of foreign nationals looking for work, with no need for them to have a job offer before coming here. The natural first landing place is London, where the situation is even more stretched than in other parts of the country.

  • How are they going to support themselves upon arrival? Welfare benefits? What does that do to the government’s budgets, to taxes and to borrowing?
  • Are they eligible for NHS treatment and for free? What does that do to the NHS budget, to taxes, to waiting lists, to the accessibility of NHS treatment to those of us who are here already and pay for the NHS?
  • Where are they going to live? The rental market has been turned into a disaster by the Renters Rights Act, with a reported drop in supply in London, where a large percentage of EU arrivals can be expected to head for.

Reducing supply plus increasing demand leads to higher rents, and current residents being priced out. That sounds like an increase in housing benefit payments, already out of control, and further pressure on the public finances, taxes and borrowing. This is also likely to lead to an increase in homelessness and rough sleeping, and to a rise in demand on councils for bed-and-breakfast accommodation. How will that be funded? Do we get council tax and/or business rates being increased again? Why should the payers of those taxes be expected to cough up for this purpose?

Do councils end up cutting other services, used by current residents, to pay for this? Do the newcomers end up receiving housing benefit as well such that the rest of us are subsidising them to outbid our own people for rental accommodation?
Chance of unrest
There is such a cauldron of anger about Labour’s running of the country, particularly about Starmer’s lying about not reversing Brexit, that this particular betrayal could lead to flashpoints at a local level, and possibly to outbreaks of violence against the arrivals from the EU, over accommodation and jobs primarily, but also over access to public services.

Such unrest in turn has knock-on effects for policing, public order, A&E waiting times, prison overcrowding, new cases for the justice system…and public finances, taxes and borrowing.

Conclusions

These knock-on impacts need to be highlighted, and discussed in Parliament, prior to the intended Youth Mobility scheme being committed to. The Prime Minister's depiction in his own speech of the wonderfulness of young people having the opportunity to live and work in one another's countries should be set against the downside risks of this scheme, and its negative interactions with the current Government's other measures since taking office – and before the Prime Minister signs us all up to it.

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Bob Lyddon
Bob Lyddon
May 29, 2026

Bob runs his own management consultancy in finance and banking, and is an expert on the off-balance-sheet financing mechanisms of the EU, and the threat they pose both to EU member states and to the global financial system. He has also written on the total cost of EU membership, the UK’s residual liabilities to the EU after Brexit, and the hidden subsidies afforded by the UK to other member states due to Freedom of Movement and Freedom of Incorporation, which remain ongoing. Bob holds a Cambridge B.A. First in Modern languages and an Open University M.A. Distinction in History.

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