THERE was a sobering statistic for anyone who thought we were over the worst of the recession last week.
Over 1,000 people applied for minimum wage work at a cinema that was advertising for 25 staff members.
Admittedly this was in the South, but you don’t need to look too far from home to see how we are still in the grasp of the recession.
My own brother hasn’t worked since Christmas and has applied for every job going, it just isn’t happening.
He’s one of thousands of people who are in the same boat. I’ve another brother who has spent his whole life adhering to the philosophy of working hard at school, study and knuckle down to get qualifications.
He emerged with a degree, having sacrificed countless periods of his youth to achieve this.
The end result is that he came out of university only to find that this degree meant very little.
He immediately became a statistic. Another single digit in the spiralling numbers of the unemployed.
Now he’s talking about going to Australia to find work.
If we’re not careful we could have a lost generation on our hands.
I remember my father telling me about leaving home at the age of 16 and sending back half his wages to his parents every week.
It seemed like a foreign concept to his lazy, privileged sons, something from the dark ages.
Instead it’s looking like it could be an all too scary reality for some of us. Just turn on the television and look at the riots in Greece over the measures taken by their government to deal with the debt.
It’s been predicted that we’ll see similar images outside our windows rather than on foreign news reports.
Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, himself warned that whoever won the recent British election would be unelectable afterwards because of the cuts they would have to introduce.
It’s getting to the stage that I’m grateful just to have a job and my own roof over my head, it’s more than some people can even dream of right now.