You may remember this famous saying from Jimmy ‘Yosser’ Hughes portrayed by Bernard Hill in ‘The Boys from the Black Stuff’ written by my friend Alan Bleasdale back in 1982.

But the thing is, there are well over a million people of all ages echoing this sentiment right now.

I’ve written about this many times before. So many people in the UK are looking for work and not finding any, even though there is work or ‘employment’ available, but not much which people in the UK seem to want to do.

The real issue today is – people aren’t looking for a ‘job’ – they are looking for an income.

During education, we were taught plan A, which is very simple: Get an education, get qualifications, get a job (in other words employment) get married, have children, retire, and die.

This worked well for a few decades in the 20th century when the timescale was about 75 years, but now IT DOESN’T WORK and the timescale is more like 100 years.

The jobs available have radically changed and a lot of the qualifications people are working towards are inappropriate to the 21st century. It’s a different age or era.

We’ve moved out of the industrial or commercial to the communications age, and all the paradigms we had set for the 1900s, just don’t work anymore.

Society is fragmenting, and the way we survive in it is changing. The concept of a ‘job for life’ is long gone and the need for ‘qualifications’ is questionable.

Not that people don’t need to be qualified, it’s just how they come to this state and what is it they are qualified in and our understanding of what ‘qualified’ means.

Now it’s more often about ‘certified’.

But by whom? And what for? And how is the ‘certifier’ qualified to certify?

Many students are now questioning the value of a university education, especially in the view of the costs involved, which are far, far greater than the additional lifetime earnings a university qualified person is likely to receive compared with someone who hasn’t been through the university process.

Remember, perhaps, some of the most successful people in the UK and elsewhere have no appreciable formal qualifications, Alan Sugar and Richard Branson spring to mind, and even, dare I say it, Donald Trump.

Back in the day, before the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, ‘employment’, other than as a ‘servant’, was something of an exception.

The economy was different, and although it wasn’t seen this way, most people had their own ‘business’. The general population would work at what they did, something agricultural or something more industrial, like being a blacksmith, finding customers for their skills or produce locally.

Everyone in the village knew who did what and where to go for it.

This is very much of an over- simplification, of course, as there were many different levels, but the people were responsible for their own survival, supported by themselves and their families.

The government of the country was not responsible for supporting the people who had no concept of such a thing.

Now it’s different, and with an understanding of history you and I know how it arose and what problems it has created.

My thesis is, we look back to a time when people were fully responsible for their own income, for their own means to survive and thrive, and my answer is everyone should have or create their own business, operation, or whatever they want to call it to create the income needed to be able to do what they want in life instead of what someone else wants them to do.

My view, again, is because of over-communication and miscommunication the ‘general population’ have come to believe the ‘government’ in some way ‘owes them a living’ and has the obligation to support them (at the expense of everyone else) so they don’t have to do anything for themselves.

This is probably a bit harsh but again we should look back to when people who were unable to fend for themselves in any way were looked after by their family, local community or ‘tribe’ and not some distant impersonal ‘government’.