So you think the best way of dealing with those who, in your opinion, don't know what they're talking about, is to produce an ill-conceived, barely literate response to their posts in order demonstrate just how superior your understanding of the situation is?

Err ... err ... err ...

For goodness sake – stop bringing logic into the equation.

Fook me. And you have the temerity to accuse others of not knowing what they're talking about.

Hang on - aren't council jobs non-jobs, "completely unnecessary" according to some? So we want people to work for nothing, doing nothing, in jobs that don't need to be done?

Good shout.

Actually, it's obvious.

You sack all the people who are doing 'non-jobs' (and why not those doing 'real' jobs too?) and then make them do the same jobs for their benefit, thus saving money on wages and, of course, pensions.

This is a bit like all those people who think that prisoners should do jobs, without actually considering who does such jobs now.

Like it! So people in say, Reading, will be paying, via tax, for my council services in Sheffield!

(Although I'd also be paying for services in other places too - not so sure now)

We could always just scrap a load of services like street lighting, refuse collection, gritting and then we wouldn't have to pay anything at all. To anybody.

It's more than that though. By hard work they can build a life here. By working hard you can earn reasonable money shelf-stacking. Titan was doing OK by being willing to work whenever no body else wanted to, working nights, workinfg 18 hour shifts consecutively when the managers needed help. Some of the Polish people keep families here working that way. Other, younger ones fund higher education here by working night shifts. All I'm saying is too many people's first reaction is that jobs are crap when they're not - it's people's attitdues that are crap. Even a graduate young Brit should be proud to do a couple of years in that sort of job to earn money, build a strong work ethic and as a stepping stone to other opportunities.

Don't feel too bad about it.
I have agreed with him on occasion.
At least you've got an open mind.

A part of the equation that is often omitted is that when, say, Poles come to Britain, they are not just seeing the few pounds they are paid but also seeing how much more that money is worth back home in Krakow.
In some ways it's more worth their while to rough it for a couple of years to build up a nice lump sum which will buy them more at the end than it would for an equivalent Brit.

Whilst I do think many young Brits would benefit from a bit of hard slog (and it is bloody hard, some of it) in the fields, let's keep it in perspective.

EDIT ... just realised that Mintball beat me to pretty much the same comment ... sorry, should have checked.

And many do. It's a myth that none will.

My own niece, for instance, worked on and off throughout her course (when she could get work) and is currently working in a shop having got her degree.

We agree on something!

It was a spectacular failure wasn't it. 35 quarters of consecutive economic growth, near total employment, inflation under control, interest rates stable, record levels of investment in the NHS and schools after nearly two decades of neglect. I can't believe we survived it. Thank goodness we now have George Osbourne to put all that right.

Just a shame that the collective memory is only of the last year or so.

Yes.

I think that the media has a lot of responsibility for that. And in general, I thinks it's worsened over the last 20-30 years.

Just to give one tiny comparison. In France, there are plenty of conservative newspapers. But if a strike is going to be held, the approach is not simply to fly into rant mode, but to actually examine the issues behind the industrial action (and France actually has lower density of TU membership than the UK). That's not saying that those papers will suddenly come out in support of the strikers, but the discussion of what is behind a dispute will be far more nuanced than here.

Similarly, when the big debate was going on about banning the burka (actually, the niqab), it was not a debate that occurred along what we'd see as traditional left-right lines. And it was, in part at least, informed by people from all sides of the debate writing opinion pieces – including actual philosophers. Imagine the same thing over here – it'd be Richard Littlejohn and Melanie Phillips etc.

Perhaps some of this is, in part, because we seem to have (or have reached a point where we have) a general cultural distrust of what I can only call intellectualism? We celebrate and reward stupidity and a lack of education, and appear suspicious of attempts to look at things in more complexity. Or so it sees to me.

Dally hankers for the times when old people were dying on trolleys in hospital corridors. It's why the [iMail[/i and its readers hate Labour so much, for denying them the pleasure of reading – and being ritually appalled by – such stories.

As opposed to of abject neglect and dehydration as under Labour's NHS?

This is actually a myth - the EU migrants are by and large not on minimum wage. The migrants on minimum wage are more likely to be ones that come from outside the EU, eg people who have got asylum here or through family route (often employed below minimum wage in family businesses etc) but there are not the hordes of migrants from the EU here on minimum wage jobs that people think there are. This is why the evidence on the effect of EU migration and wages never shows any link between EU migrants and wages of native workers being depressed.

EU migrants have on average higher qualification levels than average native workers, and are proportionately more likely to be in skilled professions than natives workers, and earn on average higher wages than native workers. You don't get large numbers of people coming from the EU to work minimum wage jobs in the UK because it wouldn't be worth their while. But those that were doing skilled work in Eastern Europe and can do the same jobs in the UK will end up getting paid more here and also, especially between 2004 and 2008, the exchange rate worked in their favour working here.

Another characteristic of EU migration is that of the migrants that have come since the late 1990s much of the migration is temporary, they come in, work in the UK for a period of time and go back, often because they are saving up money here to buy property etc in their own country because they can't afford to buy it here. Or sometimes one worker from a family (eg the male) would come here for a period, get work, send remittances back home. They were doing this because they were by and large not on minimum wage jobs they were earning reasonable salaries.

Now I know people will say "if you go to a restaurant/cafe, all the staff there are Polish girls" etc and they are probably on minimum wage. True but I bet a lot of them are students, or young people doing the "working holiday" type thing that Brits do in Australia. Again this is temporary migration.

The general idea that Eastern Europeans are coming here to work minimum wage jobs is not true.




I agree with Dally here but unfortunately the problem for today's current generation of young people is the attitude of employers, particularly graduate employers, to graduates that spend time in low paid jobs. I think back in the 70s or 80s there may have been an attitude that it would be looked on favourably that someone has 'done their time' doing hard yards in a low paid non grad job. The problem today is it becomes seen as a signal of a graduate that wasn't good enough to get a good job and has found their level. There are so many graduates around today that graduate employers don't want the stories of someone who has worked hard from the bottom and worked their way up, or has had setbacks in their life and come back from them, they want the perfect CV - got lots of UCAS points first sitting, got a good degree, did internships during their holidays and then went straight into a grad scheme preferably at a blue chip company. If you fit outside that mould then employers will be less interested.

The graduate employers will always market themselves as looking for "high fliers", "exceptional individuals" so if you go for interview as a 25 year old graduate that has worked for a few years in some non-graduate jobs, scrimping and saving while you got some experience of the real world, then those employers will say you are hardly a "high flier" are you. Why not go for the 21 year olds they have that have an untainted CV so far...

I guess its the rugby league equivalent of being a 25 year old with 6 seasons as a top performer in the National Leagues, as against the 19 year old with 2 seasons in a Super League club's academy....clubs tend to go for the young lad in their own academy...

Very true, in my job I see the actual, real, evidence (ie the payroll software) every day rather than read the bollox that gets tipped down the throat of believers of newspapers.

And while we're at it I'll screw up another myth and chuck it in the bin of bollox - warehouse jobs are meaningless minimum wage slave occupations, they aren't, depending on location most warehouse operators have to pay way, way above minimum wage for the non skilled vacancies and the skilled jobs are at a premium for the simple reason that most large distribution operators locate themselves on the same sites and enter into a perpetual upwards auction to attract and maintain their workforces.

Well our local supermarket has lots of Polish workers. They start on minimum wage and don't get that far above it. As you say, pubs, cafes and restaurants are largely staffed by East European girls (at least down here). Not likely to be on significantly more than NMW. Without exception they are more pleasant and eloquent then natives.

On the employer point, again I disagree. In my profession we like people who have had real world experience - they are more mature, get on with people at all levels better and more committed because they realise how hard the alternative is.

I've done shifts in a warehouse for a well known crisp firm (I was running their temp recruitment at the time) to get a feel for the job, it is bloody hard, time sensitive work, they get well paid because they deserve it.

Is there really no limit to the depths this lot are prepared to sink, in order to make life ever more difficult for the less well off in our society?

[url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jan/25/troy-peer-revolt-csa-feesGovernment proposes charging "commission" on CSA payments[/url

I actually shook my head when I heard that the other day, and with all the that is going on now it takes something extraordinary to make me shake my head.

I just fail to understand, and maybe someone could explain the morals behind this, of a government charged with the care of its population via social funds collected from taxes then charging for those services.

Its like we're paying twice, no its not like we're paying twice at all, we ARE paying twice for the service, we pay for the CSA through taxation because despite its failures its still seen as a necessary and sometimes good thing - then you have to pay to use it.

And the worst thing is the creaming of potentially 12% of the monies that the single parent family claimed for in the first place, how much more do they want to screw the population down for ?

They couldn't sink any lower if they held cabinet meetings at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

I'm reminded of a comment Denis Skinner once made about a tory minister: "he's lower than a snake's belly and what's more, he'd rape a rat". That led to yet another of his enforced absences from the house.

I've only just caught up with that – and I'm shaking my head too, in absolute astonishment.