Camoron was visiting MBUK's training facility at Milton Keynes today. Those young apprentices he was seen with were employed by their dealerships and the training will have been funded by those same dealerships too.

It was also announced today that any over 24 year old who is accepted on an apprentice course will fund his own training through loans similar to those offered to students.

As with YTS and all the other smokescreen programmes before, the only "investment" government will be making is what they'd have paid in unemployment benefit anyway

Although to be fair, when thee and me were nobbut young fresh out of school trainees, our company's paid for our training too, possibly the colleges were more subsidised and thus the fees cheaper, but the company paid.

For five years in the case of the trade I was in, from the age of sixteen to twenty one by which time you were expected to be doing the same job as a fully qualified forty year old or you were out on your ear.

And there was nothing wrong at all with that system, it wasn't in the slightest bit broken and yet someone decided they knew better and decided to tamper with it.

Children never 'just happen'. They are the result of a choice. People choose to have sex and when they choose to do that they know that there is the risk of pregnancy even when using contraception (and absolutely nobody of any age these days has an excuse not to use contraception - it is freely available even to those under 16 and discussed throughout school and just about everywhere else).

It really isn't. Some people do choose to be poor: those who serve in a voluntary capacity for example (sustained by grants or charitable giving) but very few do. And while poverty can be the result of a person's choices - stealing from the till and getting the sack for example - most people are not responsible for their poverty. I would suggest that most people are born into it rather than invite it but that is just a gut belief rather than a belief based upon research. However, people are responsible for the decisions they make whether they are poor, middling or rich.


Mockery doesn't become you. However, Mary was betrothed to Joseph and that counted for something in the culture of the day much as betrothal used to have meaning in English culture. While not ideal, if a woman became pregnant during betrothal then all could be forgiven so long as the marriage went ahead and nobody else got involved with the woman.


Jesus did say some stuff about relationships. He made a point of telling the woman at the well that she'd had a few husbands and to go away and sin no more. Oh, and he didn't say that riches will make it difficult to get into his dad's gaff, only that being rich makes it harder for the rich person to do the necessary in order to get there - ie, put his dad above his possessions in order of priority.

That there is such a dilemma indicates how wrong the system has gone. Our benefits system as originally constructed was for the short term help of the unfortunate and elderly. The original author did not want his system to be a long term commitment because he was very aware of how dependent people would become upon it (read it for yourself). That has indeed happened. How to pull it all back? It's a dilemma because there is the risk of harm to children but that doesn't mean that the issue shouldn't be faced and that something shouldn't be done.

It sounds like a very nice, simple world you live in, can we all come and join you ?

You're already here. It's just that you are over-complicating it.

Of course, such pronouncements came hand in glove with the notion that it was in fact great to give all your money to the Church. Which is essentially a main reason why the Catholic church is about the most obscenely rich organisation on the planet. Funny that. Shouldn't they be skint, having spent every penny on aiding the poor and needy? Or if you stash your billions into a "church" is that a valid get-out?

The thing is, his dad is imaginary, and the amount of money a person has doesn't have any bearing on their capacity to be nice.

Seen the fallout from it?
Lots of the Comrades seem to have walked away.

The various industry training boards were in part government funded, part industry funded through a levy and were also one of the first targets of Thatcher's roll-back of the state: claiming that individual employers would be best to decide who and to what level any training should be given. The upshot was most companies abandoned any training, preferring instead to cherry-pick successfull candidates from those companies who still invested in apprentices.

There were all the usual moans (from industry) about paying some lad to brew tea, sweep up and pass tools to a tradesman, completely ignoring the pittance that most apprentices earned while training and the skills they acquired simply through observation. I remember a mate leaving school and we all though he was mad to sign SEVEN year indentures as an apprentice shipwright. When he finished his apprenticeship he had recognised qualifications in: mechanical, electrical, electronic and marine engineering; plumbing, carpentry, coppersmithy, welding and a whole host of other skills. He was flown all over the world to fix problems, earning top dollar and fully-expensed. These days, companies 'save' money by flying out a team of people, qualified in the individual skills to fix the same problems.

The modern apprenticeship scheme loses all credibility when the likes of B&Q offer places on a scheme to mature candidates, to learn how to "serve" a customer. That's simply a way of avoiding the minimum wage