Ed and the Shammers

WHILE eating a late breakfast of boiled eggs I looked up at the television and saw Edward Miliband goggling and grinning.
I turned the sound on, reluctantly. Dermot Murnaghan of Sky news was asking the Labour Party leader about youth unemployment.
‘It’s a disgrace,’ Miliband said in that nutter-on-the-bus voice of his. He started on about a lost generation and the need for ‘more investment’ and all that political class rhetoric that you know so well you could do ten minutes of it yourself on TV.
Murnaghan prodded Miliband a bit, saying if it was a lost generation then generations take some time to get going, therefore surely the last Labour government had some hand in the present situation.
Of course, Miliband wasn’t having that. And so it went on, as it does. I looked down at my eggs and they goggled up at me just like Ed.
Murnaghan could have discomfited Miliband quite easily it seemed to me, or at least have wiped the goggliness off his face.
He could have asked the leader of the Labour Party why the last government engineered a population rise of about five million though immigration, many of whom do the sort of jobs that Miliband’s lost generation could be doing while they await work as management consultants, abortion co-ordinators and equality data officers to become available.
Edward Miliband will know something of this because his brother David more or less wrote the manifestos of the new Labour era. And of course, instead of gaining experience of how the country actually works Edward spent those years as a ‘special adviser’ to Harriet Harman and Gordon Brown, in other words a civil servant well paid by us to advise those two how to burn our money, sorry I meant implement social justice.
When standing in the long queues to buy, say, overpriced coffee from eastern European baristas, I often hear political class rhetoric about unemployment in Britain ringing in my ears.
To use a clichéd bit of that rhetoric, it is the elephant in the room. Various simple solutions to this seem blindingly obvious but you will never hear them entertained by the powers that be or their shadows. Nor will the media so much as suggest it.
This is because nobody in Westminster wants to solve the problem. Perish the thought. All interested parties are gaining something from the status quo: Big business, liberals, the Left. Besides, questioning mass immigration plays badly with the yummy mummy vote, or so the political marketing men say.
This led me to another massive pachyderm pacing round in front of the telly: the difference between the rise in accommodation costs and wages.
From my own research (recollecting my hourly rate and my monthly rent) I have established that wages for non-skilled jobs have risen about 33 per cent in the past 15 years while rent has risen between 200 and 250 per cent.
This again is directly linked to a huge influx of foreign workers and students: excess manpower and a lack of living space.
But I have never heard a politician say this on television. I have never heard a thrusting, truth-seeking BBC journalist say this on Panorama. It is the great unsaid thing.
Meanwhile, generations get lost.
Murnaghan finished his interview with Miliband. Two highly paid men going about their business, which happens to be largely a sham.
I finished my goggling eggs and went to work.