Change of topic!

When it comes to education we don’t always get our priorities right. Over the past few years, the benchmark of success by any government has been to raise the numbers of pupils getting into University above all else.

Yes, it was important to make the path easier for those from different communities to enter that level of education.

Yes we need the degrees and the brains that go along with all of the high-level occupations, but you don’t need a degree to work in a supermarket or Just Eat where unfortunately so many ex-students with degrees end up.

This country has become a low-productivity country because we have lost the technical skills we once had and need desperately to regain.

Today I read about a young man who desperately wanted to be a cabinet maker but was pushed into University by his family and teachers, today, with degrees he works in a supermarket! So many years lost, so much pressure, so much unhappiness. Getting a degree does not always put you up the social ladder if that was the motive for it.

What our country needs is people who can not only use their brains but also their hands. The makers, the fixers.

2 yrs ago I bought a well known make of lift away Hoover, the other week the brushes stopped working, I know what the problem is, but here’s the thing I can’t get in to fix it and what’s even more disturbing is, there is no one in Glasgow can fix it either!

We have become a thow away society, if it’s broke chuck it!

It is Technical skills that keep a country moving, it is cooking skills that keep a country eating, it is farming skills that produce the food we eat.

Cheap imports made in sweatshops do not enrich our country.

Many small towns in Scotland have become but a shadow of their former selves because cheap imports have replaced the finest of materials.

Materials that lasted years, not months!

This country has the ability to become self sufficient but lacks the political will not because there are no profits in such goods but because the profits are not high enough for investors.

It is corporate greed that has destroyed this country, not the workers, the grafters who kept it going.

The difference between levels of skills does not equate to the number of brain cells but how you choose to apply them. A mechanic is as gifted as someone who works on the floor of the Stock Exchange they just use their gifts differently.

Each to their own but it should never be seen as one class above the other!