Prospects

A cursory glance at the Business section in yesterday's Daily Telegraph saw two opposing headlines - 1) Goldman Sachs employees are to earn an average of £269,000 of pay and bonus this year and 2) unemployment levels in the youth population has reached record levels - the Lost Generation' as some refer to it of kids with no prospects. The thought that may link these two headlines was Lord Adair's comment on banks who said they largely 'dealt in products that served no social purpose'.

You see, the problem with being over 50 is that you become much more of a curmudgeon - the sort of person that your 20+ year old child might look at and say, 'Here goes dad again on his hobby horse. He's so out of touch.' And as I write this blog entry, my son's face is covered in bovril and he is playing peekaboo with his bib. Being a curmudgeon is not a good thing in bringing up an 11 month old baby, I would venture to say.

That said, it's a real point that so much of what we call success and acceptable serves no real purpose to society at large. If we look at the schools system, one of my nephews failed to get certain grades at A level interims in the Lower Sixth that he was told he could not go onto A levels at that school. Rejection at that age is not healthy, and how we have got to league tables of kids and schools under a then sitting Labour government is beyond me.

But what it all means, as we ponder the fact that there aren't enough university spaces for British kids and if they get there they clock up immense debt, is that we are loading the dice against kids from an early age. I fear for the prospects for little Scott and my unborn child as in another 10 to 15 years this whole situation will only get worse and prospects will decrease.

Why do we heap pressure on kids at such an early age? Is it character building? Does it prepare them for the real world? I don't think so, because the employment laws now mean it is so difficult to get rid of under performing employees that our labour pool is going down in terms of performance not up while the opposite is happening in our kids. Again, somehow, the standard bearers of the common people, Oxford-educated Labour men, brought all this in.

I sit here looking at my little one as he plasters a piece of buttered toast on his head. I just hope that the education system and society give him the chances his sunny little face deserves. For that to happen, we do have to stop this patently dangerous and unnecessary polarisation in wealth that goes on which we all underwrite. If the money could be spread more evenly, we could have more schools, more opportunity for our young and they don't deserve to be victimised because we adults got it so badly wrong. I don't subscribe to the bankers' view that if they didn't earn so much money then we wouldn't have the standard of living we have - because it is so badly wrong.

Curmudgeon time has ended, it's back to chasing the little fellow around the floor with a policeman's hat on. Just don't get me started on the environment but maybe I'll tackle that tomorrow.


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