The ladder to fulltime employment needs a bottom rung

I know it’s wrong to take John Prescott seriously, but his attack on the government’s work experience programme epitomises a sneering attitude that is quite widespread. It was most egregiously displayed by the BBC Today Programme in its flagship 8.10am report about those who volunteered to steward the Jubilee celebrations — except the BBC report never once used the word ‘volunteer’. There’s going to be a lot more of these work experience offers, thank God, and we can expect the government’s critics to ask if the labour market is ‘receding into the 19th Century’ with ‘Dickensian’ tactics (to use the BBC’s disgraceful language). Rather, this is a 21st century solution to 21st century poverty — a type that the BBC does not seem to recognise. I look at this in my Telegraph column today.

When the Today Programme’s John Humphrys returned to Cardiff for his excellent documentary about welfare in Britain, he observed that when he grew up everyone worked and there would be a stigma on people who didn’t.