The Ivory Towers of Power

I've never been to New York. I have no idea what Wall Street looks like to a ground-dweller. But I have been to London. I have seen the towering offices of the financial companies, from which those who ran the whole sorry story of this current debacle gazed out over the minions from whom they borrowed money to play their games. I have never been in those towers myself, so I don't know quite how detached such a lofty perspective might give the beholder, but let's assume it does detach one from reality. I'm sure that plain old-fashioned greed wasn't the only explanation for the loss of billions. Perhaps being removed from the normal world affected their sense of perspective.

Likewise, I am beginning to suspect that New Labour have spent too much time in their offices and conferences, and have also lost their sense of perspective. Their minds have drifted into Ivory-Tower mode. Take., for example, Gordon Brown's reaction to the strikes over the use of Italian workers on a Lincolnshire contract, (as reported by the BBC news website).

Speaking from the World Economic Forum in Switzerland (An ivory tower in the land of ivory peaks -SC), Mr Brown said instead of spontaneous strike action, "what we've got to do over time, as I've always said, is that where there are jobs in this country, we need people with the skills, developed in this country".

He then went on to say that his government was using the apprenticeship scheme to ensure that enough people would be available with the right skills to take advantage of the upturn.

The problem is, those wildcat strikers we saw were not teenagers just out of school worried about their future, but middle aged people who are unlikely to qualify for the apprenticeships.

Are the older working generation going to be condemned to pushing long trains of trolleys around the supermarket car-parks?

Footnote:

There is a problem with seeing the world through the web; it changes almost as quickly as I blinked. I read the news article on the BBC site just after 9 am, wrote this post an hour later, came back to the news article to copy out the relevant passage, and found it had been revised. The quote about the apprenticeships had been removed. Someone had obviously decided it didn't belong in such close proximity to Gordon's quote from Davos. I wonder who that could have been?