When stuff is made to last forever, you’ll need an army of highly trained people to keep them maintained and repaired which would solve sustainability, unemployment and poverty.
So writes Gordon Ferguson, a keen community activist who has been coming to our events for several years and contends that although the headline figures for apprenticeships in general and manufacturing in particular may appear to look good, the facts look rather trivial when compared with the multi-year in-depth training that our apprentices would have previously expected or even Germany’s current training statistics.
Wanting to know when and how it all went wrong, Gordon asked a couple of retired steel industry Sheffielders with the good fortune to receive proper apprenticeships straight from school at 16. Much to his surprise, rather than the stock leftist answer of ‘when Thatcher came to power’, they replied ‘when they introduced six month training schemes’.
