On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 00:12:00 +0000, Mike Mitchell
wrote:

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 13:16:37 +0000, Andy Hall
wrote:

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:07:00 +0000, Mike Mitchell
wrote:

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 01:05:37 +0000, Andy Hall
wrote:

On Tue, 17 Feb 2004 00:52:59 -0000, "IMM" wrote:




It is. There are only so many midwives. You don't train them overnight.

They can be recruited from overseas just as they are to an extent now.

That is a thoroughly obnoxious suggestion as it is tantamount to
supporting theft.

What a silly idea.

Do you believe, then, that it is morally justified to take advantage
of tax payers in the third world and poach their workers to fulfil our
needs when we have been unable or unwilling (through greed, lack of
planning, lack of investment for the future, and other causes) to
entice enough of our own workforce into such jobs? How come Chinese
migrants can come here all the way from China, earn 11 pence an hour,
get drowned, the local MP warned the Government beforehand, yet all in
authority turn a blind eye and try to pass the buck on to gang
masters?

That's an extrapolated comparison which has little to do with the
original example. Again it depends on perspective. There are, and
always have been sweat shops or their equivalent. The issue is over
where the line lies.
For example, the hours and conditions for a junior hospital doctor
aren't exactly great either, but the NHS views them as legitimate.




The third world, mainly, will have sacrificed a good
deal in order to train nurses presumably for their own needs, and
Britain, that once great colonial paragon, then poaches them!

Quite a bit of training happens in the first and new worlds anyway,
and why should people be prevented from going to work in a different
country?

I am not blaming the people, but this Government. And the previous
Tory Government. And probably the Labour one before Thatcher came to
power. These problems go back decades.


I don't view it as a problem.


This is
fair? No, it bloody well is not! Anyone who suggests this course of
action needs a lesson in removing the beam from his own eye first.

Strange and inapplicable analogy.

Sorry, what I meant was we should fix our own problems instead of
relying on cheap labour from countries that can ill afford to let
their workers leave en masse.
It's one thing for individual workers of
their own volition and in their own time and according to personal
circumstances to make a decision to live and work in a foreign
country. It is quite another for the Government out of desperation to
actively recruit workers abroad in their thousands and persuade them
to come to Britain.

It's still ultimately their choice. They are not being press ganged
and herded onto slave ships.


This is a panic measure, not joined-up Government.
There was a documentary some while ago about two Australian teachers,
a man and a woman, who had been thus persuaded to work in Britain, but
they both left after a short time because they found that British
schoolchildren so lacked discipline it was impossible to teach them.

That can be laid fairly and squarely at the door of creating large,
faceless one size fits all schools.


This is all part of the attitude we have.


The question is why don't people here want to train for this
profession? Working conditions perhaps?

Them, and low wages.

In a fundamentally broken public system.


But also a lack of any will to achieve in the way
we in Britain stumble from one year to the next, from one decade to
the next.

You might, but I certainly don't.

Isolated case. I'm talking about the whole country here! Look how
desperate we were to have won the rugby. Anything we do achieve is
hyped to the heavens because we know there won't be anything else
along to cheer about any time soon.

Media hype. You may need it in order to feel good about yourself. I
don't and tend to avoid it.

No wonder the British went crazy
over Diana when she died.

Media hysteria.

The public *need* to focus on something that
binds them as a nation, they *want* Britain to succeed. So why don't
we? Who stole the blueprints?

I feel pretty successful, don't you?



It's a question of one's
attitude. As soon as collectivist descriptions and notions are
spplied to this type of issue the outcome will be poor, simply because
people then believe that it is the responsibility of the group or
somebody other than them to improve their lot. It isn't.

Well, someone has the responsibility! Or is it just some weird
continental magic which makes other countries work better,

I'm not sure that they do

their
populations more cohesive,

that's desirable?

their prisons emptier, their productivity
higher?

is it?


Maybe it's because we are without any effective leadership and
only nominally have it in the monarchy that we are becoming so
totally directionless and apathetic.

I think you are describing a personal angst that comes from wanting a
collectivist society and system of government that does things for you
and are not finding it.

Personally I don't want it, so I don't have that angst.



We have been stumbling along, almost since the end of World
War II. I think we are a nation which does not like thinking. We are
too content to wallow in an inferior quality of life and make it seem
better by buying lots of booze and drugs.

This is a very defeatist view of life and one which doesn't have to
be. Fundamentally, people are happier with less involvement from the
state in their affairs, yet the state seeks to increase its influence.

The state influence you refer to is prescriptive. I want the Liberal
Democrats in government because they are less prescriptive and more
presumptive.

It's very easy to appear nice (not that I think they are) when you
don't have the responsibility of government and can have the luxury of
pontificating.

But I also want to live in a Britain which doesn't have
to continually hand out anti-social behaviour orders, or send
ministers abroad to preempt soccer hooliganism, or spend a fortune
each and every Friday night policing the streets as the drunken youths
and their girls stumble homewards. A decent society, that's all, as is
evident in many other countries - and, indeed, in some isolated parts
of Britain. You probably think I am exaggerating, don't you?

Yes I do. I've seen the same antisocial behaviour in many other
countries.





We probably don't want to
become midwives, because, well, babies are messy little things, aren't
they? All covered in blood and gore when they pop out! Who wants to do
something useful when it's far easier to work in a call centre or
stack tins of beans in Tesco's? It's our attitude to life that is the
problem. We are without ambition.

Some people are, and as long as the state bails them out will continue
to be.

Other countries are far more generous to their citizens and yet there
is a buzz in the air in those countries. Why is that?


And all the while we have the
"insurance policy" of the third world to call upon to do the jobs
don't want to do, we'll be okay, won't we, won't we...?

That isn't really the point, it is one of attitude and economics.

Well, we can't spend our way out of the problems, else we'd be paying
so much tax, there'd be no take-home pay left. We need to change our
attitude.

MM

..andy

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