You and Yours is one of several Radio 4 programmes that still have Reithian values embedded within and earlier this week they had a useful and timely piece on “Not Going To University”
On Call You and Yours we’ll be asking do you need to go to university to be successful? More than four hundred thousand students are just starting their new courses across the country, and have committed to spend at least three years and in the region of fifty thousand pounds in getting a degree. But is university the only path to getting solid qualifications? If you didn’t apply or didn’t get in, are you left feeling flat and directionless?
Increasing graduate unemployment and dumbed down degree courses have made a mockery of the “50% at university” pimped by the Blair drones who never really left student politics. So a serious attempt to remove “not going to uni” as a badge of shame is to be welcomed.
Overall there was a great deal of common sense in the programme. But in the course of the broadcast when somebody advised going out and doing any job rather than waiting for something “suitable” one of the presenters agreed about working in a supermarket or McDonalds until something “worthwhile comes along”
Now that is rather odd when you realise that companies in the supermarket and fast food areas are doing very well and are major employers. Retail is also one of the few areas where it is still possible to rise quickly through the ranks via enthusiasm and hard graft without an initial fistful of paper “qualifications”. It is also an honest way of earning money to pay the bills.
But the BBC has always had a rather aristocratic disdain for “trade” and shopkeepers because that is the feeling of the media demi-monde that inhabits and controls the organisation. Selling is a grubby little business in their opinion whereas “making” things is godlike, hence their idealisation of manufacturing, ignoring the fact that stuff is useless unless it’s sold.
That, of course, was the mistake made by the communists who ruled Russia for over seventy years. Lenin and Stalin were so obsessed with production that they forgot that the goods and the crops also had to be distributed. Transport networks and retail systems were neglected – the USSR was always a logistical nightmare.
The result? Goods stockpiled at chokepoints and zero choice for consumers who were therefore forced into buying crap products.
Maybe I can draw a more clearer picture – Thatcher losing in 1983 and Britain under Michael Foot during the 80s = British Leyland cars and BT still dictating who could have a phone…
How about we put it another way to You and Yours?
Not going to uni but you need to earn money but nothing suitable in the pipeline? You could always fill in the time in at the BBC until you got something worthwhile at Tesco or McDonalds…
H/T for pic…SodaHead
