by Bo-Gilly » Tue Aug 09, 2011 6:02 pm
[quote="marco"]new rule.
[size=150]Mention politics from here on and your post gets deleted.[/size]
Well since you haven't deleted the original offending posts and left them there for everyone to see, I'll say my bit anyway - otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.......I'll leave it to you to use your admin skills to silence me.
[quote]Paul H » Tue Aug 09, 2011 12:30 pm
The rot started well before the Tories who had to make the hard choices after Labour left the country in a mess as usual.
I dont think it is about consumerism. Its more than that. Benefit dependancy, non working culture, thinking the country owes you something, over population, soft on crime - all the things Labour are responsible for.
I thought your first post was obviously a joke and I chuckled when I read it, but on reading your second post I can see that perhaps you are actually serious. Now is not the time to score cheap party political points, and clearly both the Tories and New Labour have a responsibility for the sort of society we have today.
But if you want to try to understand much of what is wrong today then you can start by pointing the finger at ill-informed people who make ill thought out comments and are plainly guilty of tabloid-fuelled knee-jerk reactions.
The situation were are witnessing was always eventually going to arrive, whichever party was in power - it's been a pressure cooker ready to explode for a very long time. Youth unemployment stands at almost 1 million, the highest ever. And the total amount of young people not not working, including those studying etc, is 3 million, ie 3 million young people not earning any wages at all. Despite that, today's youth are sold the false unachievable dreams of fame and wealth. They are told day in and day out that they should aspire to own vast amounts of material wealth, and that to aspire for anything less than that represents failure.
And yet youth in huge swathes of our communities are given zero chance of achieving anything. Employers would rather opt for the easier and cheaper alternative of offering jobs to fully trained EU nationals, than to give British school-leavers any hope of learning a trade/skill. This attitude is backed up by those who let their tabloid newspapers do their thinking for them, and who at any given opportunity vilify young people dismissing them all as chavs, lazy, feckless, etc.
Well all the pent-up frustrations have finally turned ugly, and very ugly too - with the first confirmed fatality in Croydon. But no one should be very surprised - did anyone really think we could cripple Britain's youth and then taunt them for being lame indefinitely ? And blaming it all on the Tories, or all on New Labour, is far too simplistic. We haven't arrived where we are today because of something which happened before or since May last year - we need to go much further back, years, if not decades.
The only thing which has happened recently is that the crises has become more acute.
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