AFTER the Second World War there seemed to have been more than enough jobs to go round and that we were glad to accept people from the commonwealth who came to fill the vacancies.

Since that time, most of the repetitive tasks in engineering, farming, printing and the office are done by automation; even design has largely been computerised. It seems that only the entertainment and medical industries have flourished.

I began to wonder what was to replace these run of the mill jobs and couldn’t think of anything. Perhaps Tony Blair thought that providing free higher education would increase the number of scientists and engineers but from what I’ve seen, far too many decided on the arts etc.

A society advances by its inventiveness, but the numbers of original thinkers are few, however, it’s these people that industrial leaders seek out because they know that even minor changes are enough to move a product forward, and that people like the words new and improved.

If a firm falls heavily behind its competitors it’s common practice to invest heavily, even if it means going into debt but, If a firm can see no way forward and goes into liquidation a whole area is likely to suffer.

I sometimes think governments are a bit like businesses. Although they don’t make anything they rely on people working to get their income, whether directly or indirectly. Governments are big employers and if they drastically cut spending, then it’s not just a town that suffers but the whole country.

I was always under the impression that, when a recession strikes the normal practice is to bring forward as much work on the infrastructure as possible, as they seem to have done in the USA, to get the economy and money moving again .

To my mind, Gordon Brown was doing the right thing by spending on the replacement of worn out schools, although I thought he could have spent more.

During the last election David Cameron had a habit of answering a question by saying ‘it’s all the fault of the last Government’, although he knew that had the Conservatives been in power at the time the banks created the recession, then they would have been in the same boat.

All one hopes is that not too many people believed Cameron, whose answers became an unpleasant tic by the end of the election.

DERRICK HOLT
Fortnam Close
Headington
Oxford