What industry? Powered by whose skills? or The Zombies return………
The entertaining Ken Clark - political mugger and cringingly bad DJ, friend of teachers and firemen and proud step-father of the Tories economic legacy is briefly reminded of some of his sins in George Walden’s Times comment about his ‘policy as of transforming the polytechnics into universities’… ‘ a bad idea whose time is over’
John Denham, the current Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills is wearily dealing with yet another debilitating consequence of the Tory years, the long wasted years (or years laid waste) when the Polytechnics’s mission was abandoned, and for which the UK will be paying the price for many more years to come. Where are the fantastically well trained managers and engineers that in France for example proudly call themselves ‘Polytechnicians’. Where is the highly numerate, skilled workforce that powers China’s manufacturing base. These aren’t questions, they’re facts on the charge sheet.
The present deadly recession was indeed made in Downing Street - Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street, and in Ronald ‘Voodoo Economics’ Reagan’s White House. Trickle down Economics was really Trick or Treat. Right-to-Buy destroyed social housing, left ghettos behind and unleashed and fired up the grotesque inflationary housing bubble, the credit and spending incontinence, that’s brought us to the emergency ward. Howe and Lawson - the Grim Reapers - scythed the heart from British manufacturing and bought our silence with the Fool’s Gold of Financial Services, the famous ‘service industries’ that would guarantee our post-industrial future but were nothing but silken cushions of pestilential gas for city slickers who primped and preened themselves as masters of the universe.
