In this day and age you would think the governments "joined up thinking" would have a included the sensible approach to making sure the increasing millions soon to hit the dole queues, would be eligible to have training.
You know, to keep their skills up. To ensure that when the country pops out of the depression, we'll be in fighting fit form to take on the world and hold our own with a huge array of newly trained and qualified people champing at the bit with a new found vigour, highly toned skills and boundless reams of energy.
You would have thought!
Sadly, this government thinks otherwise and from september 2009 are bringing in a bizarre system, where they will provide funds for people to be trained. They will actually provide 100% of the funding. But with one small proviso. They will give the training providers 20% of the training costs up front. And then (and here's the kicker) they will fund the other 80% once (so making the magic sum of 100%), the unemployed person has found gainful employment within 6 months of them finishing the training course and been unemployed for 6 months.
So? I hear the cry go up, they're getting training, providers are getting paid?
Well imagine this scenario. You're at work and your bosses come up with a scheme, where instead of you getting paid your monthly salary all in one foul swoop, they give you 20%, and say that if you do a really good job and bring in outstanding results at the 1/2 yearly review stage they'll give you the other 80% of your salary in six months time, if you can keep it up.
Happy with it now?
The governments cack-handed approach to this has of course meant that meaningful providers who would have given the unemployed meaningful achievable training routes back into employment or self-employment, are now pulling out in droves. Leaving the really bad, or the ones who can use this now endless supply of even cheaper labour (as they'll get even more money into their coffers), as the only things left for those seriously unemployed; who could well end up to be a new underclass, permanently pinned on the spokes of poverty.
This might have worked when the economy was booming and bust defeated, and jobs were like confetti on ticker tape day. But in the current cooling clime, it is one of the worst ideas they have come up and stuck with.
Once people realise it, the ranks of the disaffected and jump-shippers could finally become a stampede.
Naturally when it is brought in and fails, they will blame the providers for not living up to the schemes expectations. Instead of them standing up, throwing their hands in the air and just going "yep, we cocked up."
This is nothing but a rear-guard action, by a rear-guard rump of a government, for which everyone else is to blame for everything's that happening, and they happily waft about losing the precious few tenuous grips on reality that they once had.
The one happy thought which trickles through peoples mind is, like dust in a storm, they'll be summarily kicked out of power come the prevailing electoral wind. Will things get any better afterwards? Oh where is my sick bag.
We are interconnected as never before. Our prioritise used to be small; the family, the village, the town, the city, the county, then the country states. But we've reached a stage where what happens on one side of the world, will in seconds impact the another. We have to think of ourselves as global citizens, and not the old insular back-biting, back stabbing, parochial entities of old. We have to go beyond the "every person for themselves" motto as that's plainly failed, in all its iterations.
"We are a species that goes beyond our limitations," says Ray Kurzweil. A shame governments religions, and fundamental fruitbats try to place so many restrictions hindering the pace of change, pace of development and pace of fairness for the whole of humankind.
And talking of wheels coming off wagons. Oh dear. Is this already the start of the end, of the obama love-in?
And in keeping with the time of diy, here's my wee little homage to the season of happiness.
n-l
m
