Quote The All New Chester Wire="The All New Chester Wire"Course it is. As we all sit with our broadband connections discussing all the matches we will be going to, or which of the subscription channels we'll watch the NRL on. Then again, if that doesn't happen, we'll discuss how much alcohol we'll consume instead. Or which of our many games consoles we'll play on. Yeah, it's a terrible country.'"
The affluence of the lucky ones, doesn't disprove the point. There are a lot of areas of the UK where there is basically no hope, no education, everyone grows up trapped in a cycle of dole and anti-social behaviour and draining everyone else's tax contributions paying for their welfare and policing costs.
For a country of our wealth, we are not using our wealth well, if we compare our public services and transport network to some of our western european neighbours we are behind the ball game. I'm not saying they are all utopias as some of them have problems with unemployment and racial tension as well, but for the comparitive advantages we have we could be doing things better.
The recession has highlighted something very worrying about the UK economy for the long term. Our economy is based on very shaky foundations. Our manufacturing industry has died, we don't really produce anything, we are based on basically pushing money around and borrowing and speculating. That's why everybody gets so panicky about taxing bankers' bonuses, because if the City of London moved out there would be nothing bringing income into the country. But when you have an economy built on high finance gambling, rather than skills, it all comes down like a pack of cards when that finance sector fails, which is why the government threw money we couldn't afford and will take years of hardship to pay back, to prop it up.
Our economy is going into a steady decline and over time we will become a much poorer country unless we address this. The only way out is to seriously invest in upskilling our workforce, not just the talkshop schemes you get from New Labour, but in seriously developing the FE and HE sector, not just pushing everybody to do a mickey mouse degree but giving them options to do a higher level of education to give them a skill which they are interested in and which will be useful to the economy.
All we are going to get from New Labour is cuts to the FE sector, cuts to the HE sector, scaling back public investment, so that there are more people lounging around on the dole and everybody else has to cough up increasingly more and more to subsidise the dead part of the economy, the people who have nothing to offer and will never be able to get work regardless of whether we send all the immigrants home or not.
