Apprenticeships are not the short term answer

From the coverage of Gordon Brown's announcement in Derby yesterday you would think that getting 35,000 young people learn skills is the answer to recession.

Wrong-The government does not recognise or maybe refuses to recognise what has driven the economy in the last 10 years.

It is not skill based investment as in previous decades but blatant consumerism and borrowing.

Until it finds the answer to this which is the restoration of both the money supply and confidence,then we are heading for a long recession.

I came across this post earlier

Time was when an apprenticeship meant training to be an electrician, plumber, shipyard worker or brickie. True, leaving school at 15 to take one up was an admission that a kid was ‘not academically inclined’, as we used to say back then.
But that didn’t mean to say they were thick. These are real skills, and in the words of millions of working class fathers - my own included - ‘learn a trade, son, you’ll never want for work’.

Now we are faced with the awful fact that we have McDonald's apprenticeships and as the author says

THE ONE-TIME workshop of the world has transformed into a country content to leave provision of key job skills for young people in the hands of franchisee burger-flippers; McDonald’s will shortly become Britain’s largest provider of apprenticeships. You can almost hear the mocking laughter emanating from Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie HQ this side of the North Sea.