This country as gone into terminal decline

[Carmes]

I have 2 young children in school.

I am becoming more and more anxious about what sort of jobs / careers they will have open to them.

I work for very large company with 10,000s of employees.

20 years ago whe I started work here there would be 100s of entry level jobs at any given time. These are jobs that don't require experience or a degree, ideal for a school leaver, and I know dozens of people who started their career this way.

Now there are maybe 10 jobs that would fit the same criteria.so. All the jobs have been offshored.
Now are the vacancies are for very specific technical skill set or experience.

This doesn't bode well for someone who has left school at 18'or even university.

Multiple posters have pointed out that you are wrong but you just can't accept it.
No point in arguing with people like this..

DS was top of his class. Passed Level 2 with a near perfect score

Neither him or his peers were allowed to go to do an apprenticeship as they hadn’t got GCSE English.

This country is too soft dishing out handouts and benefits to lazy working age folk who choose not to work. They are the ones draining the resources and it needs to change.

The Daily Mail rhetoric has certainly worked!

@penelopelondon I have nothing but praise for the people who came here to work. It's the boat people (mainly men, oddly..) who piss me off. The french just appear to wave them off from their beaches, too.

@Beekeepingmum i said healthy life expectancy which is different to life expectancy?

Same. Young adults have no concept of job shortages as being a cyclical thing. They think their lucky entry into a job saturated market was how it’s always been. This comes and goes. It’s not very good now, but it will improve again.

You can be cut out to be a plumber, electrician or carpenter etc however if you don’t have the right GCSEs then it doesn’t matter how good you are you ain’t getting in.

i do really worry for the unskilled. The world is becoming increasing reliant on highly skilled work and low skilled labour is becoming unaffordable. If someones eoonomic output is worth £10 and the minimum wage is £12 they can only be employed at a lose which generally won't happen. Even above that we have a group of people where their economic output is still not worth enough to live and they need government support. As the minimum wage increases more people fall into this catagory. We need a serious focus on helping people increase the value of their output - training has got to be key to the future. Blair was this with his drive to increase university education. There are some traditional jobs that are doing well electricans etc but who knows what the future holds mechanics will generally be out of work once electric vehicles become the normal - the motors just don't go wrong enough.

Today's children need to learn a trade. For decades, "hands on" jobs have been frowned upon by parents who want their little darlings to go to Uni and become IT consultants, whether they were capable or not. Hence so many graduates in irrelevant subjects doing minimum wage work.

Becoming a motor mechanic, electrician, plumber, joiner, plasterer, etc and you're set for life. You can either work for someone or it's easy to set up your own self employment, maybe even grow it and start employing others. There is already a massive shortage of workers in these trades which will only get worse as the older ones retire.

If not manual skills, then look into something like a train driver which is a mix of manual skills and brains, especially now they're all computerised. If you're good on the xbox, you're likely to have the hand/eye co ordination etc to be a train driver even if you're not "good" with hand based tools.

Nothing in this country works any more. We have lost so much amenity but are having to pay far more for the dimished services we do get.

The roads are terrible, litter everywhere, not enough police, water companies that pay the bosses an absolute fortune but the water tastes like chemicals, the NHS is failing people in terrible ways and a lot of it is covered up. If you have a pet, the vet bills are likely to be insane as is the cost of pet insurance. The cost of food and fuel and everything else is beyond a joke and people are miserable, utterly miserable. You can't even drive at night or in the rain without being blinded by LED lights that nobody asked for!

Trying to get through to companies on the phone is impossible. I was on hold for an hour and twenty minutes trying to get to see my GP a few days ago. There are so few NHS dentists too.

I am trying to rehabilitate from botched NHS surgery (that they would not even investigate). I walk quarter of a mile from my house twice daily in two directions and in that distance there are five road signs that have been knocked down or rotted off at the base and never re-installed. If they are supposed to be there, they are supposed to be there.

The pavement I am walking on is destroyed by frost and the levels of litter are absolutely stunning. The road is potholed and yet they have put in rumble strips outside peoples homes when the sound must be driving them insane. Nothing is thought through in this country any more. Just getting around it is difficult.

I used to love this country but I no longer feel proud to be British. It's a dump.

I despair.

Wow, @Yalta I didn't know that was a thing, re GCSE English.. some people just don't have a command of written english, doesn't mean they're stupid.. am shocked.

Our higher earners pay some of the highest taxes in the world yet our middle and lower earners, some of the lowest.

This is important point which is forgotten somewhat

i hear ya, but you cannot blame the 'demise of the UK' on a few poor sods who risked their lives crossing the canal in a dingy, please don't tell me you believe that...

I don't know where all these jobs are that lazy Brits supposedly don't want to do. They must be down south because there aren't so many in Wales.

I currently have an unemployed 18 yr old who is struggling to get anything. He's applied for kitchen work, supermarket work, warehouse work etc and not got anything. Apprenticeships for plumbing etc are very thin on the ground. He's not university material and is a typical rather taciturn teenage boy so I suspect doesn't interview well, but for every job there are lots applying. Even McDonald's isn't hiring currently .

This isn't just about you.
Most people do not work 50 hour weeks.
Some people are racist, although they would probably deny it.
Are you suggesting that carers wages should rise (specifically carers)? What would be the consequences of that? People having to pay even more for already expensive care. Haven't you noticed that people don't want to do this?! They are already resentful and expect tax payers to pay. Some put their properties into trusts and use other tax planning to try to squirm out of paying their own bills. How would this work if carers simply got paid more?

I agree with you on the foreign students issue. This was inevitable once fees were introduced and Unis expanded massively. Would you therefore be in favour of lots of Unis going bankrupt and closing? I would, but would you?

The employer NI increase has caused a problem for the economy. It has even been described as a kind of Liz Truss event. As this is a Labour Government they exempted teacher pay and NHS pay from the higher employer NI rates and are hitting farmers, land owners and employers. The problem with that is that employers then freeze hiring as they don't have a suddenly £1m extra profit from which to fund the extra costs and obviously many employers then turn to subcontractors instead. It is not rocket science.

I would rather the estate cut back massively and we had lower taxes but it is not surprising I would say that as I am in the top 10% (those on £70k a year+) who have had the highest tax burden in 70 years under the Tories and no better under Labour whilst the other 90% had tax cuts.

It is going to be hard for the Labour Government now it has given the state sector pay rises it did and with its clamp down on employers who create jobs and wealth to have funds for spending it wants to increase.

Certainly for women my age (mortgage paid off last year) I simply work less when tax rates are so high. The same goes for many a young female doctor with small children facing 63% (72% if you add student loan) marginal tax rates when she loses her personal tax allowance, does not get the 20 free term time hours for 9 month year olds + (just the 15 free term time hours for 3 year olds plus, which asylum seekers also get) and may well be paying £24k per baby for full time care - often about £50k to £60k a year childcare costs in London for 2 babies from out of after tax earnings. One thing is clear Labour and the Tories do not like higher earner women particularly with children. They don't even get child benefit these days. Our hard working doctor might well be someone considering private school too but Labour are about to slap on £10k a year (2 children average day school places) extra tax - VAT on that too. If you try hard and do well the state hates you. Not only has the hand that feeds been bitten but now the state is in the jugular and making them bleed out.

The state seems to want low productivity and people not working many hours.

That shouldn't happen̈. If you haven't got maths and English gcse you should be doing functional skills alongside the apprenticeship. You may have to start lower, so a Level 2 instead, where you only need a grade D or E, but as you are learning something completely new that shouldn't be an issue.

@MikeRafone you still don’t understand, I’m not sure what else to say. I said it was hard for young people to save for a deposit & pay rent, you said it’s not an issue because more young people live at home. Oh & im a millennial 😆

Yes. We all need to pay more or accept that the state will provide much much less. There is no reason for the state to provide free bus passes/ elder care/ health care/ dentistry/ out of work benefits. It's just what we have become used to. But with the taxes we are paying, we can't afford it. We need to pay more. All of us. Not just the wealthy.

They're not set for life.
Pay in those sectors is less than it was 20 years ago.
It's one of those sayings much like I've paid my tax and NI so I've paid enough.

Poster don't half talk some drivel on this forum.

Without office jobs the pay divide will increase. My son is at college and only a handful of girls do trades. Most girls don't want to work on a building site with a load of lads.

Digital nomad baker? Digital nomad farmer? Doctor? Teacher? Musician? Not every child is aspiring to dick around with their laptop all their lives. The novelty wears off after a while, you know.

True and these people, who pay proportionally far more tax than others, including the extremely wealthy, are getting fed up and leaving the UK.

It's not like in the 50's everyone when from being fit and well to dying. They also had period of increasing illness before dieing. But I think this is where assisted dying is important. We have spend a lot of money keeping people who don't want to be alive alive suffering because we can.

i hear ya, but you cannot blame the 'demise of the UK' on a few poor sods who risked their lives crossing the canal in a dingy, please don't tell me you believe that...

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