Preying on the young jobless

This company of charmers, who claim that all their staff "are trained to NVQ level 2 in spectator safety," took desperate young people off the dole, dangling the hope of future employment, and dumped them in rain-soaked central London hours before they were due to take up their labour as crowd stewards.

According to Bristol Labour MP Kerry McCarthy, 50 were regarded as apprentices and paid £2.80 an hour, while 30 others were unpaid as "volunteers" under the government's slave-labour Work Programme.

Kicking the young people off their coach to fend for themselves under London Bridge was all a logistical mistake which would be tackled within the company, said Close Protection UK director Mary Prince.

Prince rejected criticism about the waterlogged campsite where they spent the next night, saying that people hadn't needed to pitch their own tents because there was "dry sheltered accommodation," omitting to mention that this was communal and without privacy.

Young jobseekers do not expect to be mollycoddled, but they are entitled to be treated with decency and respect.

Unfortunately, unlike the House of Windsor, for whose members there is unstinting supply of every luxury possible, working-class youth is offered little and is then abused for failing to find the jobs that capitalist society fails to provide.

The silver-spoon multimillionaires in David Cameron's government agonise constantly over how to persuade banks to loan money to small business, speculators to invest their ill-gotten wealth and rich tax-dodgers to pay what they ought to.

Their conclusions always rely on persuasion, above all by making it profitable for the rich to meet their responsibilities.

That persuasive inclination goes out of the window when it's a question of the unemployed, especially the young. Kind words give way to abuse and persuasion to coercion.

While some of the youngsters involved may have believed sunshine stories about high-paid work materialising at the Olympics in return for their unpaid labour during the Diamond Jubilee jamboree, others were convinced that not "volunteering" for the Work Programme could have seen their meagre state benefits chopped.

That's not a voluntary programme. It's a conspiracy against young jobless people by representatives of a tiny social elite determined to provide free labour to private companies and to undermine existing workforces.

We have already seen the scandal of "welfare-to-work" outfit A4E, which enriched its directors while exercising shambolic control of public finances to the extent that a number of people connected with the company face fraud charges.

The growing tendency of the conservative coalition government, like new Labour before it, to favour charities to provide services previously delivered by paid professionals in the public sector should spark debate over whether non-union, non-wage firms should be playing this role.

Tory-approved charity Tomorrow's People, which runs the government Work Programme in the Bristol area, is headed by Tory life peer Baroness Stedman-Scott, who was censured by the Charity Commission for backing the programme in the party's election manifesto.

Despite compromising its charitable status, her organisation has not suffered commercially for having its ear clipped by the commission.

How many other dodgy "charity" organisations are making a minority rich by preying on vulnerable, frightened or desperate unemployed young people?