You're being downvoted - probably - for blaming "former eastern-bloc countries" for the state of things in UK. Well, it's just not that simple. From purely economical point of view the recent arrival of labor from Eastern Europe was a positive, it added 0.25 percentage points to UK's growth (according to research done by Treasury). That's no surprise, since the immigrants are coming in for jobs (often for the low skilled jobs, since they don't know language enough to start a career in their field), so don't demand rents, education and healthcare right off. Non-European immigrations affected jobs market negatively, yet only in two years of recent recession, in 2009 and 2010. There are, of course, other, non-economical aspects, and here it's not so rosy. This article touches the issue from many points of view: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/10822956...

Then, there's Germany. The only country in Europe where young people have relatively no problems with getting a job. Why? Germans keep their job market closed, so that's seems like an easy answer. Yet, France and some others did the same, and it didn't help. And surely, Germany is significantly stronger economically that the rest. However, they too had a period of high youth unemployment rates. So that isn't it either. However, in exactly that period they introduced Nationaler Pakt für. Ausbildung und Fachkräftenachwuchs (Vocational and Educational Training Pact) - a solution that allows young people to simultaneously work and study. It's not a system with no flaws, but it worked. Source: http://www.worldcrunch.com/opinion-analysis/how-germany-beat...