North-South divide - or is it more complex than that?

This Guardian report http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/feb/10/essex-jaywick-youth-unemployment-hotspot is a thoughtful and thought-provoking piece about the growing problem of unemployment for young people. The 'twist' in this story, if there is one, is the location of this, the Country's youth-unemployment 'high-spot', in percentage terms at least. It's not in the north of England or in the inner part of one of our core cities. No, it's in an area of Clacton-on-Sea in Essex. To a degree though, the location is immaterial. Stories like this can be as common in rural market towns as they are in larger population centres.


The article concentrates in an understated way on the experience of being workless and not in education, having little focus for each day, being geographically, economically and socially isolated, and so on. The article also touches on the long-term effects youth unemployment between 16-24 has on the level of wages young people can expect to receive later in life. The impact is far from negligible, so even when employment can be secured, the rewards can be lower across many years. 


This dreadful waste of talent and energy when allied to, or as a consequence of, the rapid and incoherent scrapping of essential public/vol/com programmes and projects, will take a generation to address. It seems though that this is not the generation in which that will take place in a concerted and consistent manner. 


I cannot be alone in spotting yet another apparent attention-diversion to this real and deep problem in society, when today the Coalition announced that bonuses in the public sector are to be thoroughly investigated. I have little time for bonuses being paid to public servants, but evidence suggests that in a number of cases, mainly in the civil service and not local government for instance, they were instigated to make up for low pay rises and to avoid long-term costs being consolidated into salaries and thus pension entitlements. Those agreements, we can be sure, will be an inconvenient truth during this investigation. As inconvenient a truth as the bonuses paid to bankers in the publicly owned banks - or maybe this is the Trojan horse to finally nail the bonuses of those 'public servants'!