Sunday - December 11, 2011

Can’t Say Better Late Than Never

A million young Britons are on the dole while motivated foreigners fill job vacancies

The economic news has been relentlessly bleak. But it is not the Eurozone nor the banking crisis that presents Britain with its greatest potential crisis. It is unemployment - or rather the fact that so many Britons today are actually unemployable.

This week, unemployment hit a 17-year high of 2.6million and experts warned of a ‘lost generation’ of young people since more than one in five, or one million, aged between 16 and 24 are now out of work.

But these statistics are far from the only ones we should be worried about. What is really alarming is that while fewer and fewer Britons have work, foreigners seem to be taking all the jobs that are available.

Last year, as the number of Britons with jobs fell by 311,000, the number of overseas-born people taking jobs in Britain rose by 181,000 or by 495 per day.

To politicians, obsessed as they are with equality, the disappearance of the working class is a wonderful endorsement of their policies. They boast how so many more of our young are in higher education than ever before, being trained to do something useful in society when they leave college. And it is true that some of them are.

But huge numbers of the young emerge from their colleges resolutely unemployable in any obvious capacity.  They have been gulled by these boastful politicians into learning subjects which are entirely unsuitable for higher education, ranging from media studies to hairdressing - subjects which in the past were learnt on the job through apprenticeships and experience.

There are three unbudgeable historical reasons for the unemployment catastrophe we face. The first is the wrecking of our educational system during the Sixties and Seventies. The second is the dismantling of our entire manufacturing and industrial base during the Eighties in favour of ‘service’ and ‘financial’ industries. And the third is the welfare state - which is largely responsible for the erosion of the work ethic in our society.

Fifty years of bad education, 30 years of placing all our hopes in the City of London, and three generations of welfare dependency have put this country in a position where it is almost impossible to see how it can help itself out of its difficulties.

No politician dares to tell the truth to the million unemployed young people, and the millions more ‘students’ who hope to be employed when their studies are complete.

The truth is that this country has been ruined by a political and establishment class with no vision. A class which has undermined the notions of endeavour and duty and replaced them with a cradle-to-grave sense of entitlement in which the State would always bale you out if you were too lazy or too incompetent to work.

It was this deluded liberal class which instilled the belief that to work in a shipyard or a factory or to learn a craft is humiliating —much better to go to a Mickey Mouse university to study some pointless degree.

The result is that we live in a country which makes hardly anything the rest of the world wants to buy. A country whose future is deeply perilous and which has long since lost belief in the three things which made Britain great in the days of Brunel and Wedgwood: training the young; trade; and honest, hard work.

Surely this is a UK-only kind of situation that could never ever possibly happen here in the USA. Right? I’d ask Pedro, Juan, and Jorge their opinions, but they’re over there up on that ladder, still painting that house since 7 o’clock this morning.

It’s a good essay, well worth the 10 minute read. One thing about it that I do disagree with though, is that the old English class prejudice against being in trade is still in evidence: although the author bemoans the lack of painters, plumbers, electricians, and other manual laborers, he can’t let go of the rotten “this kind of work is suitable for those with low intelligence” attitude. Wrong. Wrong, wrong. “dirty hands, empty head” is a crock; there is no reason on earth that a crown molding specialist can’t have a degree in philosophy, or that an electrician couldn’t possibly understand quantum. Besides ... these days a plumber earns more than a corporate middle manager, sets his own hours, runs his own show, and doesn’t ever have to attend a Monday morning status meeting. 

Posted by Drew458     on 12/11/2011 at 07:44 PM   
Filed Under: • Education • UK • work and the workplace •  
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