The majority of young people in Britain today are either working or

Comment on BNP Policies : BNP Democracy Policy by David.

The majority of young people in Britain today are either working or in education/training. You make it sound like half of all young people are on the dole milking the system!

“It’s true that mainly due to our benefit culture many of our young people do not want to work”

The benefit culture bit doesn’t make any sense, you barely get benefits when young, so please explain further why young people aren’t working because of benefits?

The problem isn’t our young people don’t want to work since the majority of young people are gainfully employed or studying/training. The problem is many are poorly educated and unskilled and so though we have unemployed people (and they aren’t the young who are unemployed, the worst age group for long term unemployment is the over 50s) they lack the required education and training.

The UK has moved away from the old manufacturing industries where basically a young man could leave school at 15, go straight into a manual/labor type job, get some training on the job (possibly an apprenticeship) and work their entire life in a ‘semi skilled’ job (think working at a shipyard): when I say semi skilled I’m think didn’t need an education beyond basic schooling, so it is skilled, but not a skill set like a doctor needs that requires a lot of book type studying (and I’ll accept that’s explained poorly).

Nothing wrong with people not wanting to have a highly skilled career, but it does mean we have a shortage of highly skilled workers in some sectors.

What we have now is 21st century industries (like the low carbon industries) that require more than hard work and on the job training, they need a well educated work force willing to train to a high level. Unfortunately many of our children (and their parents!!!) have the opinion education isn’t important and when they leave school all they can do is take unskilled jobs or jobs that require minimal skills and a basic education (the number of those jobs are slowly falling though hence the problem).

It was fine 40+ years ago to waste your time at school, you could get a job for life down the pit or on the shipyards etc…, but today those jobs for life don’t exist because those types of jobs have moved to countries with a workforce willing to work for peanuts!

IMO this is an attitude to education problem, way too many people don’t see education and training as important. the Labour government have tried to change this attitude, but it’s a multiple generation problem that could take over a generation to put right. The concept of 50% of our children in education or training is admirable if unachievable IMO and might help long term with attitudes.

Truth is we are stuck with people who will work hard when they get a job, but don’t want to work hard at their education and so what job they can get is limited to unskilled/low skilled.

As long as it is this way we’ll have to fill the skill shortage gaps with migrant workers who have those skills. For example we don’t have enough British born dentists, if we don’t allow foreign dentists how do we run an effective dental service for the entire country?

You’ll note everything above is talking about skilled jobs that are slowly increasing in number in our economy while unskilled jobs are falling. When it comes to unskilled/low skilled jobs like picking fruit, working in ASDA etc… I see no good reason why the vast majority of those jobs shouldn’t be filled by British born workers. So I agree there is an issue there.

David