There’s a growing movement in the current government that sees unemployment and poverty to be solely based on choice by the individual. Their attitude is that jobs exist for anyone willing to look for them. Indeed they created a new class of job, zero pay positions, to ‘prove’ that work existed.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. Whilst there will always be individuals who are unwilling to work they are certainly not in the majority but jobs aren’t available everywhere and minimum pay jobs do not provide enough pay to commute. Even if this wasn’t the case this attitude shows that the government do not understand how to fix the problems the UK is suffering from.
We do not have an export industry, at least not one we can solely rely on. Low paid menial jobs only circulate money internally (except where the companies involved are shipping the money overseas anyway) they do not help the nation thrive and do not provide any career path to keep people working.
Instead of creating low and zero paid jobs to quickly drop the unemployment figures we should be creating opportunities. A small outlay to properly train the unemployed provides people who can carve careers, people in careers hold on to work far longer than untrained menial workers. We shouldn’t be creating shelf stackers we should be creating scientists and engineers.
This is the area the UK used to be strong in, we export intelligence, we export expertise. By creating a nation of skilled workers we can export knowledge, something we definitely have the space to produce. Scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, people who have pride in what they do, will work and the returns will be far greater than just padding a corporations staff count.
At the moment the government is taking away the education we need to keep the UK relevant in the current world, we need to create an educated class, we need to make sure EVERYONE, no matter their social standing, has access to good education. Nobody should feel they can’t reach higher because aren’t good enough. This is equality on a grand scale, it’s not about race, colour, gender or age – it’s about the whole country working towards a far brighter future than we are currently aiming for.