We had lunch at Sainsbury's today, which has free newspapers, so for balance I read The Sun and then The Daily Mirror.
The Daily Mirror editorial was fairly motherhood and apple but ended with the following classic (in print, it was bold, underlined italics):
Mr Duncan Smith should be focusing on how to raise the skills of British workers rather than chasing a few cheap headlines. What’s holding people back is a lack of jobs and investment in training – which is down to the Government’s economic policies.
They get an extra minus mark for "should" instead of saying "it would be nice if", what riles is the implication that lack of jobs and investment in training can blamed on the current lot's economic policies. Their economic policies are indeed awful, possibly marginally worse than Labour's, but even if they were perfect, there's not much they could have achieved after one year in charge.
If they'd made it clear that the lack of jobs etc. is down to the cumulative effect of successive UK governments' economic policies or education policies for the past few decades (or even centuries, I wasn't alive at the time) regardless of whether they were Tory or Labour, then fair enough, but the Mirror is supposed to be a Labour-supporting paper so this is a bit of an own goal either way.
The standard of propaganda pushed out by The Sun is just far more sophisticated, the conclusion at the end of the Sun Says comment on the same issue is as follows:
Britain needs skilled migrants and must not shut them out. But we also desperately need our young back in work. What's the answer? We must improve education - which Michael Gove is doing - so our young can compete in the world, particularly in science and technology.
And we must create more jobs. That calls for a low-tax, low-regulation economy encouraging entrepreneurs to start businesses here. Good jobs for all must be our aim.
That's far more stirring stuff. The discerning viewer will note that they say something positive about a Tory minister (probably deservedly so, Gove's heart seems to be in the right place) and the rest is Indian Bicycle Marketing.
They pander to the widely held notion that the Tories are the party of low-tax, low-regulation, when nothing could be further from the truth. And it's also pretty ironic that The Sun, the organ of dumbing down, should make a po-faced plea on behalf of "science and technology".
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11 comments:
The thing with "the investment in training" is that you then get government involved and they don't have a clue what's required.
The plumbing trade refers to CCs or "course cowboys", guys with NVQs in plumbing who are completely clueless. They generally find that many of them bluffed it, or are little better than any random lad off the street.
Thatcher started the rot with NVQs. The City and Guild qualifications were pretty good and respected by industry, but didn't get enough people off the dole queues.
But the real answer is lowering the risk for employers, and getting rid of the minimum wage. I could take a lad off the street who was smart and keen and teach him programming, but he'd barely make me any money in year 1.
Who brought in the tickbox mentality, new qualifications over experience, cog in the machine employee skills set, KFIs etc.?
JT, clearly in an ideal world, the government would have little rôle in all this. In olden times we had 'apprenticeships', it was certainly in the 1980s that these started being phased out, but why on earth the government encouraged or allowed this to happen is a mystery to me.
The gimmick with apprenticeships was that the pay was lousy (maybe £100 a week in today's money) but you got an accepted qualification. The NMW drives a horse and cart through that, but I think the rot set in much earlier.
As ever, I ought to mention having a Citizen's Income would subsidise being an apprentice or being a student (or indeed being unemployed) without skewing people's choices in one direction or another.
JH,New Labour made things far far worse than before, but it wasn't exactly perfect before then.
It's a load of things. The biggie is that (for a load of reasons) people no longer had Jobs for Life and time-serving career ladders after the 80s. This meant that companies couldn't invest in a person with the expectation of getting a payback within a decade. So, they relied on people getting a degree instead.
Not saying that all that old stuff was better. I'm glad the guilds and government grand projets and subsidies are gone, but this is a downside.
Britain's science and technology graduates are as good as anybody else's, they're just not the cheapest. In a global market, that's all that matters.
RlJ - they are not the 'cheapest' because they carry an excrutiating tax overhead on all they produce. As the Soaraway Sun say - cut taxes and reg-yew-lay-shun, and then 'our' graduates will be as 'cheap' (or able to add as much value) as anyone else's.
MW I am not sure that the 'Soaraway Sun's' last paragrpah is pro-Tory. It could be read as a dig to the Tories to get on and cut taxes and regulation as they appeared to have promised to do...not that they do of course. I am engaged in (a largely pointless) correspondence with my Mp - Tim Yeo - whose responses demontsrate a depressing statism and just as much love of regulation as the rpevious lot. Oh well.
Lola,
Hardly surprising that Yeo is a statist. He is paid by a number of companies that depend on government spending/regulation based on global warming fearmongering.
RLJ, quite probably true - but see L's response.
L, the last bit is either Indian Bicycle Marketing or a special plea on behalf of News Corp. Difficult to tell from this angle. See also JT's response. Yeo had his snout firmly in the trough last time I looked.
MW - Oh I agree, Yeo is a paid up member of the crony capitalism club. All you can do is keep at them. Plus bring on 'recall'.
Re IBM - yep, but although it may be special pleading for newscorp, it also happens to be true.
Good one for doing a balanced approach. You should try watching Russia Today and Al Jazeera as well as bbc and sky. Its all propaganda.
Which prejudice do we support?
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