2014 August 12 « Dr Alf's Blog

English: A caricature of Peter Cooper (1791-1883), inventor, industrialist, and philanthropist. Cooper led a successful fight to build a public school system in New York. His most lasting monument is Cooper Union in New York City, his attempt to offer education to the working classes. This caricature plays on Cooper’s name. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Making of the English Working Class (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

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Dr Alf poses a difficult question in that it is probably too late for the UK’s working classes to ever catch up with the requirements of the job market because the skills they now need are not the ones being taught and because the majority of them perhaps do not “get it” and will not change.

They typically lack additional language skills, or the money to go abroad to live, so they are limited by the UK job market which has 47 people chasing every vacancy and too many of those part-time.

They may also lack the drive of many of the better educated immigrants or the money to buy franchises/set up small SOHO enterprises.

Too often, I fear that they want no risk, the ability to still go on holiday and money on a plate.

WHAT THE POLICYMAKERS HAVE ALREADY DECIDED

Dr Alf wonders what the policymakers ought to do about the working classes but essentially they have already been written off as economically useless, and their roles will be replaced first by better motivated and more efficient immigrants and later these roles will be automated.

Politicians would like to pretend that this is not the case but they are not enforcing anti-ageism legislation, they are not encouraging firms to invest their cash mountains fast enough or at all, and they are not pressuring the banks to lend.

The UK working classes have a proud heritage. Sadly, now the UK working classes are on their own, and have to create their own salvation. Under David Cameron’s government, there are increasing barriers to social mobility but matters were not that much better under the Labour governments of Blair and Brown.

To take the US example, the American Dream is dead – it’s no longer enough to rely on hard work and education to make your way in life.

Unfortunately, once again, we live in a world where the super-rich, the privileged and the well connected take the cream.

WHAT IDEALLY SHOULD BE DONE

The working classes should be sent to business boot camps at the weekends and during the week if they are unemployed. These boot camps need to be intensive, ”in your face”, energizing and motivating in nature. This is to inculcate the necessary mindset for success and a “can do” attitude.

Local authorities need to be made to reduce in number and get out-of-the-way. This means less red tape, no more massive holdups when it comes to planning permission for businesses just starting up and a sensible approach to parking rather than one that stifles trade.

Proper business mentors, properly paid, not David Cameron’s unpaid ones, should provide coaching and mentoring to get these people into the right mindset and then into business planning mode, as a precursor to doing their own thing.

People like for example Dr Alf or myself or our peers, could easily help with the coaching.

To be clear, the barriers are the political classes, the bureaucrats and not necessarily the working classes who just need the right encouragement. For those that then “get it”, they will progress; the others, with ossified attitudes, are probably doomed to eke out a miserable existence, grow old and die.

In addition, there should be benefit recycling, faster writing down allowances on plant, machinery and cars and no more business sapping green taxes or attempts to stop fracking or nuclear power. There should be fiscal incentives for the self-employed, for their risk-taking and innovation.

A further measure would be the complete cessation of overseas aid, the stopping of the Barnett Formula and restructuring of the Monarchy with the so-called Crown Lands and assets put into a Temasek style Sovereign Wealth Fund. That fund would modernize our infrastructure in terms of roads, bridges, airports, railway lines, track, signalling and rolling stock. Building these things would create jobs for the working classes and stimulate employment more widely. It would also create tourism style jobs, as the number of foreign tourists rises and those tourists spend longer on each trip.

John Gelmini

Official photographic portrait of US President Barack Obama (born 4 August 1961; assumed office 20 January 2009) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The following views are those of John Gelmini and not necessarily shared by this blog.

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RESPONSE FROM JOHN GELMINI

ISIS has grown out of the vacuum created by Barack Obama’s foreign policy. In Obama’s haste to remove US troops, the US administration ignored effective risk management. Obama’s foreign policy has been naive and simplistic, in my view. Here in the UK, David Cameron’s foreign policy interventions have been equally ineffective.

ISIS are very much the creation of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, who are funding the establishment of a Caliphate at arms length, while we (in the UK) are supplying those regimes with arms in exchange for oil and support for the dollar.

ISIS is like a Frankenstein, out of control, and either we deal with them now effectively, or they will eventually come to cause us more trouble closer to home.

We need to challenge militant Islam properly, wherever we find it, starting with these people, and then their sponsors, the troublesome Emirs and despotic rulers, whom we should have replaced years ago with more malleable people who understand that to remain in power, they have to precisely follow our interests or face the consequences via regime change.

Assad is a despotic ruler, as was Saddam Hussein, but both of them kept the genie in the bottle and acted as bulwarks against Wahhabism and Saudi sponsored terrorism, courtesy of Prince Bandar.

Far from supporting the Syrian rebels, we should have left well alone there.

President Obama was always out of his depth but Hillary Clinton’s prognosis is not entirely right either.

Syrian rebels, or at least many of them, are cut from the same cloth as ISIS, Boko Harem in Nigeria and Al Shabab in Somalia. All of them, plus similar peers in the Caucasus, need to be dealt with effectively. It’s time to take the gloves off, engage the World’s best special forces against terrorism – for example, those of the US, the UK, France or possibly Israel. Additionally, those elements that exist in the UK need to be deported if they are from elsewhere, or have the full force of the 1318 Treason Act applied to them if they were born here.

We have gone soft, by allowing our Judea Christian heritage to be traduced and by allowing Pan Arabists in the UK Foreign Office, and the US equivalent, to allow Wahhabiism to flourish, unwanted mosques to be built and the young radicalized to the point of being brainwashed.

Our armed forces, in the UK, must be rebuilt, using the reintroduction of National Service, assisted by scramjets, drones and fighting robots with terminator capabilities so that we can defend ourselves here, and deal with militant Islam/future threats anywhere on the face of the earth from a control room in Northwood Hills, liked to military satellites in space.

John Gelmini