Local issues deserve local journalists holding the powers that be to account. With local news in decline, knowing what is going on in our communities is more essential than ever. We can only exist because some of our readers are willing to support our work. If you value what we do, please consider becoming a paid supporter to ensure we can keep doing it. Free subscribers will only get the first part of this piece.
Indeed, so low is my IQ that were I, as the old saying has it, to order that number from a takeaway menu I’d end up with a particularly unambitious starter dish.
That’s why I have to rely on my betters, such as national politicians, former national politicians and people appointed by national politicians for special tasks if I am to have any chance of understanding important things. I find it so much easier to have others do my thinking for me.
This was once again borne home to me only the other day when I read about a new official report. It concerns the alarming number of young people who are not in work, training or education and who in many cases suffer from dreadful, consciousness-blighting anxiety, depression and other mental health issues. In addition, youth unemployment is at its highest level for more than a decade.
The report was apparently put together at the behest of the Government by a former politician, and as Governments and former politicians are clearly far cleverer than the likes of me, I was most anxious to learn what the causes of this dreadful, shattering malaise among our young people might be.
I was stunned to learn that the root causes of the problem are mobile phones and social media, and especially staying up until all hours scrolling through messages and content. The fact that I was stunned, of course, only goes to show just how utterly dim I am; that I am so dense that a great big bowl of farmhouse chunky vegetable soup would be positively insubstantial in comparison, even if one left it on an outside windowsill for several hours in the current heatwave so most of the fluid evaporated and left only the lumps.
You see, for several years now I’ve been labouring under a set of dreadful misapprehensions about what might be the true causes of mass misery among our young people – a misery so dire that a million or more can’t face the prospect of working, training or securing the educational qualifications they need to do either.
For example, I thought that one of the reasons why so many people are unwilling to go to university is that they know doing so will mean they may well end up spending the next 20, 30 or more years struggling under a mountain of debt, one so heavy that even after paying off the original cost of their education they’ll likely find themselves owing more than that original sum thanks to disgusting, rapacious interest rates.
I thought that countless of our young people, not having the luxury of coming from the sort of fortunate family who could pay for their post-18 education in its entirety, were horrified and terrified in equal measure at the prospect of never being free of that cost – a cost which, incidentally, until two generations or so ago, was absorbed entirely by the state in the form of grant aid.
Something else I thought – erroneously, of course – was that every Government of every party elected since the current system was put in place had the power to lift that burden of debt and the terror of debt from the shoulders of our youth, and treat them with the respect due to those who will inevitably end up having to look after the health and wellbeing of the current adult generations and deal with the state of the society we create.
But no, I was wrong. The problem is nothing to do with any of that. It’s mobile phones and social media.
