Disaster of Brexit is a warning against simple solutions to hard problems | Richard Partington

Alan Milburn says youth unemployment has no quick fixes – an idea with an important lesson for the wider economy

Mainstream politicians are rarely direct. It is part of the reason why their populist counterparts thrive: they say it like it is. No nonsense. Let’s get things done. But last week Alan Milburn had a frank rebuttal:“Everybody goes for the bloody easy solution, don’t they? You can’t just go for the easy solution, OK? There are no easy solutions, guys. None. They’re all hard.”

Speaking at the launch of his review into Britain’s youth worklessness crisis, the former Labour cabinet minister was arguing that one tax U-turn could not fix a problem decades in the making.