Be afraid, be very afraid.

I am impressed by the government’s new plan to raise the school leaving age to eighteen. Keeping young people in the education system for another two or three years when they don’t want to be there anyway is a great idea, especially as it will conveniently doctor the unemployment figures. Ok so school leavers don’t get that much state benefit, but consider how much more cash will be needed to implement this ludicrous idea, balanced against the severely undermined resources teachers have to deal with as it is, It can only get worse.

Mr Brown has said that the extended education they will receive will give them a better chance to obtain training for a new job, or improve the likelihood of being indentured and getting an apprenticeship. But to whom, and where, surely there has to be work before that can happen. Since the nineteen sixties successive governments have decimated industry in this country, by allowing cheep imports that British companies couldn’t hope to compete with and thus going out of business. It happened with Japanese steel, shipbuilding, motorbikes, cars, electrical goods white and brown. Then Thatcher set about breaking the unions and selling everything she could get her hands on to fund an inept government, and its happening now with clothing that costs two pence to make and is then sold for a fortune to idiots like you and me.

I’m not going near the subject of the common market, which is the biggest scam since Amelda Marcos discovered that she could buy an extra pair of shoes simply by taking food out of people’s mouths. The maths is easy, no jobs, no apprenticeship, keep them in school, devastate an already beleaguered education system. I don’t often make predictions, but as bad as Thatcher was, she is just a baby compared to Mr Brown, and if he succeeds Blair and has his way, we are in for a bleak time.