Wes Streeting is selling North Sea oil as a youth jobs program.
Those of us who have spent years watching the same pitch land in communities that need work recognize the shape of it. A politician stands before a place and tells the room that extraction is the answer. The drilling will generate tax receipts. The tax receipts will fund services. The young people will have jobs. The pitch sounds the same whether the extraction is North Sea crude or a frac-sand mine in western Wisconsin. Up here, where the shop doors face Highway 13 and the hardware store on Main Street has been fighting to keep its lights on for years, we know what happens when a payroll tax adjustment is sold as a job-creation program. The arithmetic runs on the same ledger.
Streeting, the former Health Secretary who launched his leadership bid against Keir Starmer this month, laid out two proposals in a Sunday Times interview: cut employers’ National Insurance contributions to make hiring young workers cheaper, and approve new North Sea drilling licenses for the Jackdaw and Rosebank fields. He framed both as responses to the growing number of British young people outside education, employment, or training. The government already exempts employers from paying National Insurance on any worker under 21 earning up to £50,000. The incentive exists. It has not solved the problem. The constraint on the small operator in Friendship or the family dairy over near Coloma is not the percentage on the payroll line. The constraint is the corporate consolidation that has eaten the margin down to the drywall. When a young kid from Adams-Friendship High School graduates and the only jobs left in the county are stocking the shelves at the Family Dollar or running a line at a CAFO three counties over, a payroll credit does not build a membership. It gives the employer a government voucher to pay a wage the local economy already cannot sustain. The rhetoric of “making it easier for business” is the old Meritocracy Myth in a different suit. It tells the worker he is the problem the boss is solving, and tells the boss his payroll line is the choke point. The choke point is the consolidation that turned the local high school graduate into a cost center before he ever walked through the door.
The independent review Streeting cites already flagged the tension: employers say the recent tax and minimum wage increases are a deterrent, but the government’s Low Pay Commission, which examined the employment data, concluded there “isn’t one straightforward impact” from those policy changes. Alan Milburn, who led the review, conceded the pattern has been going on “since time immemorial.” That is the telling detail. The youth employment gap is structural. It is the product of decades of the same extractive economics Streeting now proposes to accelerate with a drilling permit and a tax cut. You do not solve a structural problem with a fiscal nudge aimed at the quarterly hiring decision. You solve it with the kind of sustained investment in people and places that the extractive mind cannot frame, because the extractive mind thinks in quarters and election cycles, not in generations.
Then comes the energy play. Streeting broke with Labour’s 2024 manifesto commitment to halt new North Sea exploration. The Conservative Party and Reform UK have been pushing for more drilling on the grounds that the Iran conflict has driven up global energy prices—the nationalist shell game at its most legible, where a geopolitical crisis becomes the justification for enriching companies that were going to be enriched anyway. Streeting adopted the opposition’s position and repackaged it as progressive youth policy. He said plainly that the new drilling licenses “will not necessarily translate into cheaper bills.” The oil is for tax revenue, not for the people paying the energy bills. He said this out loud. The revenue goes to the treasury; the price at the pump and the cost of the propane run by the global market. Those same licenses lock in emissions the young workers he claims to champion will pay for in flood damage and heatwaves, not just in pounds. The companies drill, the government takes its cut, and somewhere in Sunderland or Stoke a young person is supposed to benefit from the fiscal arithmetic—eventually, indirectly, on paper.
Wendell Berry, writing in The Unsettling of America, calls this the extractive mind—the habit of treating land, resources, and communities as inputs to a system whose benefits flow elsewhere. The North Sea is not Adams County, but the shape of the bargain is the same one those of us in the central-Wisconsin sand counties have seen: a corporation extracts, a government collects, and the community downstream gets the externalities and the promise that the revenue will circle back. It never circles back fast enough, or in the right direction. The manure lagoon off County G did not lower our fertilizer bills. The North Sea platforms did not lower the heating bills in Aberdeen. They paid the royalties, and we drank the nitrate. The politician selling extraction for tax receipts is telling the truth about who gets to keep the money. The lie is the one he tells about who gets to keep the land.
The fiscal math on the employer side carries its own contradiction. Streeting ran the National Health Service until his resignation. He is now proposing to cut the employer contributions that fund that service without identifying how to replace the revenue. The same wards and waiting lists he once championed would feel that cut before any young worker sees a job on the other end. Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said the plain thing on the BBC: “Any tax break in this system will cost and has to be paid for.” The money that pays nurses and keeps clinics open in Britain flows from the same stream Streeting wants to trim to subsidize hiring decisions employers are already partially exempted from making. The policy treats young workers as a fiscal liability the state has to bribe the employer to absorb. The small operator in Friendship is not hiring a young neighbor as a risk; he is hiring him as an investment in the county that keeps his own doors open. When the seed dealer, the feed buyer, and the regional chain pharmacy have all consolidated into the same corporate ledger, the local shopkeeper is already squeezing his own hours to keep the lights on. He does not need a tax break on the National Insurance line; he needs a competition regime that stops the consolidated operators from pricing his labor into the pavement.
Starmer has held to the position that long-term energy security depends on wind, solar, and nuclear—on building capacity rather than draining what remains underground. Berry called the alternative “solving for pattern”—finding the answer that does not generate new problems while addressing the old ones. A North Sea drilling permit does not solve for pattern. It solves for the next leadership vote. The young workers Streeting claims to champion will pay the energy bills he admitted will not get cheaper. They will inherit the carbon budget he is drawing down for a leadership bid. And the structural gap in their employment prospects—the one that has been widening since time immemorial—will still be there when the last well runs dry, because it was never about the oil. It was about what a society chooses to invest in, and what it chooses to extract.
The truth is simpler. Young people do not get pulled back into productive work by giving their bosses a payroll subsidy. They get pulled back by stopping the corporate consolidation that drove the independent shops into the dollar-chain graveyards. An economy does not get energy security by selling the North Sea and pretending the revenue stream will heat a working-class kitchen. The shop floor does not care about the tax receipt the treasury books in London. The shop floor cares about the truck that pulls into the yard on Tuesday with parts we can afford, and the kid from the high school who shows up on Wednesday and learns how to rebuild a carburetor because there is a wage in this county that makes it worth his time.
Streeting is balancing a ledger. We are trying to keep a county. The math does not overlap.