As the FT has noted:
Boris Johnson on Wednesday promised an apprenticeship to every young person, as the government braces for a wave of youth unemployment in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.
The prime minister confirmed the government was drawing up a strategy for tackling widespread job losses caused by the virus, including through major investment in skills and training.
I should add the obvious and necessary caveat that little that Johnson promises happens. But, nonetheless, the move is important.
Firstly, if true, I welcome it.
Second, this is a step on the way to a jobs guarantee.
Third, the promise demands considerable investment in and an identification of the skills that this country really needs.
The talk will be of tech. But actually what this country needs are skills in the jobs required to build a sustainable, educated and caring economy. Asking business to provide all such skill training will be pointless: in many cases the capacity to do so does not exist. In some cases the businesses that will use these skilled people simply do not exist as yet.
So, for any programme to work the government does not just need that the training be provided: it needs to create the jobs in organisations that will employ these trained people. And it then needs to ensure that the funding is available for those organisations to meet the real needs of our society.
Do we have a government with that vision, which contradicts almost everything inherent in neoliberal thinking? I am not convinced. But if not, then the vision to deliver this state built revolution in our economy is required from somewhere else.
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Errrmmm…………………from what I’ve read , it’s you I think:)!
But I cannot deliver…..
Maybe but not through lack of trying.
Stephanie Kelton was good on Channel 4 News tonight – Niall Ferguson was warning about deficits and re-writing history as usual, insisting that the New Deal did nothing to help the States and that WW2 did more to lift the US out of the depression. He also stated I think that the US Government ran budget surpluses up to the 1970’s (something Kelton told him he was wrong) and insisted that there had to be some sort austerity after Covid-19. I know who won.
The slot before that though was full of the usual shite – markets punishing the Government for spending, taxes going up, blah blah, blah.
I will look now
There will be a blog post
I don’t think it’s the vision that the government needs. Yourself, and others have provided plenty vision.
The government just required to put it into action. It has all the tools to do so, even if this means nurturing new areas of the economy or reinvesting in lost ones.
This last point is I think important. We need a very broad range of skills and jobs, many of which may seem dull to politicians. There’s no point in having, for example, the PM promoting apprenticeships in satellite manufacturing, but ignoring insulating UK homes.
Also, we desperately require a government job guarantee. Adults with trades and professions will be out of work too. This will represent the bulk of the unemployed. These people should be the focus, before apprenticeships.
I don’t understand the point of a universal basic income when society requires jobs (not that there is either). Also, people with debt who have been used to a half-decent or decent wage/salary are not going to survive on the pittance that’s is unemployment benefit.
The vision is there. Every day there’s more and more of it. It’s action we need. We need it very soon. We need a plan for it now. Yet all this government seems interested in doing is destroying parliamentary democracy, helping their cronies get wealthier and forcing dangerously manipulative austerity on society.
You mentioned fascism in an earlier post. I hate to think it but it’s happening. Maybe the new plan is, if every country is fascist then there is no country left to fight against it.
I am not going to believe it shall come to this. I can’t. It’s too great an evil to be defeatist about.
Still we await any mention of the leagues of HVAC technicians and engineers we need to decarbonize domestic heating systems in the next ten years.
And try buying a brand new home without a gas-fired boiler.
Agreed
It’s ridiculous
all my life the govt’s have been offering the youth access to training for jobs that subsequently never arrived,
in the early 1980’s I did an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering starting on the YTS, Youth Training Scheme, I have those skills but engineering died such a death in the 1980’s I never followed a career in mechanical engineering per. se. and had to figure out a way of making those skills transferable to the service sector,
during the Blair years all the youth were persuaded to go to university, now we have some of the most highly over qualified Starbucks employee’s and Deliveroo riders in the world
,
when far too many jobs in our service economy are so low skilled that you can pick up how to do the job in your first week of employment what are these apprenticeships going to be in?
apprenticeships are for learning trades that involve a large number of hands on skills that take years to perfect,
for engineering apprentices you need large scale engineering projects for them to participate in,
for apprentices in the building and construction trades you need lots of building and construction to be happening to provide them a venue to learn and perfect those skills,
soley providing training for jobs is like putting the cart before the horse and then wandering off and reading a newspaper,
creating a real project is the first step, that motivates people to come forward to carry out the job and if it’s more than they can manage on their own they will engage a youngster to assist them and pass on the skills required to do the task,
the govt. shouldn’t be asking businesses to take on apprentices, they should be asking businesses to take on tasks that will require them to expand their workforce to accomplish them including training as required to do those tasks,
if we decided to add electrified streetcars to our metropolitan area’s transport systems as still exist in European cities like Amsterdam & Prague and established manufacturing of the required hardware within the UK instead of outsourcing the product from abroad we’d create no end of jobs and a plethora of apprenticeship opportunities,
if we re-integrated our rail system by opening up abandoned branch lines and committed to building our own rolling stock it would employ tens of thousands,
what’s the point in erecting huge wind generators if they’re fabricated in special economic zones in Indonesia from steel made in China, shipped here on freighters registered in Panama and crewed by Filipino’s, then erected here in the UK by mostly immigrant labour?
globalisation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem, a degree of autarky is the antithesis of globalisation yet Boris thinks autarkic ideas are ‘bizarre’!
ok, rant over, I’ve got to go plan the syllabus for the next induction of apprentice pizza delivery drivers, the course could involve up to several days of casual on the job training.
We need green jobs
And we need care jobs
We can create as many projects as you wish for in those areas
We will need a lot more green electrical power generation and wind power will not by it’s self be enough due to it’s variability. We need to invest in generating electricity and not just solar cells but from wave energy (could also help protect seaside infrastructure), tidal power and major energy storage such as the proposed pumped storage in the Scottish highlands.
I am dubious about nuclear power, UK gave up all it’s expertise during privatisation and the government does not even have the knowledge required to write a specification or a construction contract for one. There are much safer and fail safe designs, instead of the existing design (designed to make weapons grade uranium). Fusion power would be the answer but it needs to be funded as a “Manhattan” type project which is only available war and it’s likely to be already too late.
All this will need construction, fabrication workers, engineers, etc. and especially project engineers. UK seems to be very bad at controlling projects with major delays and cost over runs. HS2 is planned to take over 10 years when the Victorians took only 5 years without all our construction equipment.
Britain was leading in nuclear power generation at one point, but our blorious gleaders decided to sell off all our interests for a quick buck leaving us in the lurch,
I know people are windy about nuclear power and I quite understand why but some of the problems were due to cost cutting during construction that undermined the engineering integrity of the projects,
another problem with nuclear power was that the engineers set parameters for the size of projects and then the bean counters said the projects weren’t big enough to suit their business models,
up to a certain size reactors can and have been run for decades with 100% safety and full confidence of containment in the event of a meltdown,
commercial pressures drove the building of mega projects that were beyond the scope of engineers ability to guarantee full safety and definitive containment in the event of a meltdown,
we should allow engineers to build what they are confident of making work safely and just accept the costs involved instead of trying to create a cake and eat it situation,
basically, without a stable and constant supply of energy no industry or manufacturing is possible,
you can’t have power fluctuations or outages whilst smelting steel or cooking quartz to make semi-conductors for solar panels,
build a sensible sized reactor adjacent to an industrial area to supply it’s energy needs and we can get on with making the stuff we need for our national rebirth as a clean, green, hi tech industrial power.
Adam Curtis did a very interesting retrospective on nuclear power on his BBC blog some years back, it includes contemporay clips in a 56min documentary.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/efba0b39-7e33-366f-a0b0-7a412764f0ed
it illustrates how scientists, industrialists and politicians have failed to co-ordinate their efforts and created problems that never needed to exist,
an ill thought through green power programme could end up being just as huge a blorious glunder as they previously created with nuclear power.
I am afraid I will never agree until you can get rid of all the waste