Time bomb of jobless youth

THE FRIDAY THING: THERE are times when you begin to think that your number’s up.

We have well over two million people out of work, almost a million young people without jobs and the population of the world is due to hit seven billion some time next week — providing the man who’s counting hasn’t shot himself or been distracted and had to start again.

It surprises no one, with the possible exception of the Government, that the unemployment numbers copy Euro lottery figures and are climbing. You can’t cut and slash your way through the nation’s work force and then shrug your shoulders in disbelief when the number of folk on what they used to call the dole races into the millions.

All unemployment is tragic and the country has more pockets of human tragedy than a conjurer’s jacket, but the soaring numbers of young people without a job is not only damaging in the present but is a ticking time-bomb for the future.

I dare say that a good percentage of the young unemployed were in the queues for “X-Factor” auditions because the world of celebrity has never seemed brighter or more dazzling even – though for all but a tiny, tiny few it illuminates hope for less time than a solitary spark.

Forty years ago we all wanted to be Beatles, Rolling Stones or, heaven forbid, Cilla Black, and spent hours in front of mirrors miming and strumming tennis rackets and frying pans living out a fantasy.

But there was no artificially created short-cut TV vehicle promising a ride to the dizzy heights of fame and fortune (manipulative, cruel and pointless though they are). So we put away the rackets and returned the pan to the kitchen and went to work.

We, as a nation, cannot afford to condemn a million (and growing) young people to the scrapheap. Yes, there are stories of companies with jobs on offer and no takers, or takers that start work but rapidly tire or get bored and simply disappear, but my bet is that they are in a tiny minority and, in the main, are part of that cycle of despair that lives in second or third generation homes that have been, and still are, dependent on the benefit culture.

Most young people want to work and need to work and are being badly let down. The price could be a whole generation without any sense of a work ethic and the consequences of that are too horrendous to contemplate.


ADDICTS all over Oldham have been suffering from severe withdrawal symptoms this week. You’ll have seen them everywhere, wandering around in a total out-of-touch daze, looking disbelievingly at their hands.
Is it cannabis, cocaine or alcohol you ask? What is the epidemic of severe, life-threatening loss that has brought about this sudden sense of disconnection from the world?

Well, let me tell you. It’s a berry. Not a berry you put in a pie and eat with custard, cream, ice cream or all three, but a berry so grand and full of itself that it has a capital letter. Much to the distress of the bereaved owners of the beast, it has developed a worldwide glitch and has not been operating properly for days. Cue much wailing and many tears.

It’s a Blackberry, which is, in case you don’t know, a kind of mobile phone only much more sophisticated and along with its regular users, considers itself to be above the herd.

Now, if you are a normal mortal who can go 30 seconds without wondering (or maybe frantically hoping) that someone is desperate to get in touch with you, not only by phone but also by e-mail then you won’t have a Blackberry (which also records videos, downloads music and, it seems, does everything except tuck you up in bed at night.

True Blackberry users will, of course, have their precious machine with them in bed just in case, in the early hours of the morning, someone wants to send them an email or a text message.

Addicts have them in meetings and can be seen surreptitiously looking down at their laps ignoring important discussions just to see if anyone is trying to contact them. Maybe asking what they want for tea.

Will the owners of the Blackberry company face litigation as deprived users take legal action for the stress being without their live-saving friend and companion for a day or two has caused?

How on earth did we manage to get by in ignorant, out-of touch, pre-Bb days?


THE good folk of Shaw are, quite rightly, up in arms about Oldham Council’s decision to close their local baths and, adding insult to injury, to build a new sports centre in the middle of Royton.
Unfortunately the Crompton and Shaw folk have done themselves no favours by electing six Lib-Dem councillors to represent them in Oldham. Crompton and Shaw are, politically at least, Labour-free zones and at a time when Labour has control of the council, that is not a good place to be.

Labour knows it will lose no votes in Shaw and Crompton because it has no votes to lose whereas in Royton, it is a different story.

Building a new sports centre in Royton will certainly be a vote winner come the elections next year.

But will Royton folk be altogether delighted with having to share their swimming pool and leisure centre facilities with their near neighbours?

Won’t the double use of the new pool mean that instead of swimming in the water, folk will be able to walk across on the bodies of those who have only inches in which to swim and have thus clogged up the pool?