The tail needs to start wagging the dog

"Social mobility is the key to a successful future job market."

"We need to have social mobility to make sure people from lower-class backgrounds can gain promotion and rise through society's ranks more easily."

These are the types of phrases repeated each week by politicians throughout the EU. I wish they would back their words with deeds. The problem, as I see it, is not one to do with class, but more to do with qualification and talent, and that has just as much to do with the kind of values we pass to the younger generation. What do we consider to be more important: the ousting of an incompetent government, or the continuation of a favourite contestant on a TV talent show?

We live in a society that has unprecedented access to education. But we have also allowed a whole generation to become fascinated in the stardom of sports personalities, singers and actors. When I was younger, if I had said to my father I wanted to be a singer, he would have told me to run along and think about getting a *real* job. Nowadays, this seems to be the bar we set, rather than the exception to the career-rule. So many parents seem to try and push their children into modelling, singing or sports, with the goal of becoming famous, and more importantly, rich. When their children fail, the disappointment is so great for the parents that their child has been "rejected". And the children themselves are so utterly traumatised, nothing will be the same again for them.

What an awful thing for any child to suffer. Pushy parents.

Pushy parents are not always required in the age of social mobility. Offspring of famous people are making their own way up the greasy pole without having to do much. Just look at anyone whose name contains Geldof.

Who is to blame here? The media, for allowing TV shows like X-Factor and The Only Way Is Essex to proliferate, but also parents for succumbing to the pressures of their children who want to be accepted by their peers. How many parents take their kids to Paris to view the contents of the Louvre? And how many go to Paris to trace the Da Vinci Code? Or to Disneyland Paris? How many parents take their children to London to view the Cabinet War Rooms, compared to the O2 to see a concert? Giving in to children's mealtime demands (chips instead of broccoli, burger instead of lamb cutlets), has extended itself to education.

Social mobility is a good idea in theory, but in practice, this is no longer viable in the 21st century. In the 1940s and 1950s, my father - who left school very young - was able to negotiate four or five jobs of varying requirements and skills very easily. Admittedly, the Second World War helped in this, as there was a severe shortage of staff, but still, the moral of the story back then was "if you have the talent, we'll hire you", whereas today, it is hard for anyone to come out of school, college or university and walk into the job they trained for. I know some recent Cambridge graduates who, not even finding work in call centres, have turned to gaining further qualifications in a bid to out-qualify their competition. That is fine for those with the money, but the vast majority of people simply cannot afford this luxury.

The problem is now that employers have the world at their feet: they can choose the most highly-qualified candidate, or they can choose a less qualified, but more enthusiastic candidate for the position. They can hire and fire at will, because the market has moved away from hiring permanent members of staff to taking on contractual agents who stay in the job for anything from a week to a couple of years before they are thrown back onto the pile of bodies mounting up outside the Job Centres of the Western world.

All you need to do to get a job these days is:

A. Be the cheapest (less qualified, more enthusiastic)

B. Accept that you might be living with your parents way into your thirties

C. Keep your thoughts and opinions to yourself

D. Accept that very, very few people really do enjoy social mobility, and you are not one of them.

Social mobility is a myth. And it will remain a myth until employers are made to be more ethical. And the chances of that happening are quite remote at the present time, whilst there are such rich pickings, and employees are competing with one another to keep their positions.

Another astonishingly blatant lie dressed up as truth is the ability to change career direction. The days are long past where the system is flexible enough to sustain a change of career path. It is of course not impossible, especially in countries like the UK or the USA, but in Europe, I cannot see a person who trained to be a translator, who has a fascination with plants and flowers, being permitted to go into the horticultural business without three or four years' course first, rather than on-the-spot guidance or apprenticeship like used to happen. And there are very important reasons for this. In my father's day, the proportion of take-home pay was far higher to the amount of household bills and acquisitions. This meant a drop in pay in any subsequent job did not make so much of a difference, so people could go off and do something else without fearing too deep a cut in pay. Nowadays, a weekly food bill alone may cancel out any savings. We need to get back to this basic state, but whilst most people's minds have been fixed on "Panem et Circenses", there is is no way this silent majority will change anything. Especially if people consider owning one or more cars per household as a given and not a luxury.

While the dog is definitely in control of its tail, not many with a wish for self-improvement will have enough support to change the mentality of hundreds of thousands of people who are indifferent to the type of information they pass onto their own children, and the kind of food they feed them.

What an extraordinary week for journalism

Two very different events, almost polar opposites of each other, took place at each end of last weekend. The outstanding scenes of cheering people, flag-waving and joyous celebrations were beamed all around the world. At both of these happenings. Although one of them has left a nasty taste in the mouth.

London, Friday 29th April, 2011, will be forever known as the day the British Monarchy gained a whole set of new admirers for the 21st century and kept the republicans at bay. I would go so far as to say that even in some wavering republican hearts in Australia, there has been a warming to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, who come across as a couple who have a deep respect for one another, and seem very comfortable in each other's company.

I, along with two billion other people worldwide, watched in awe of the occasion, unable to take my eyes off the screen to even run to the fridge for a drink, and found much of it hilarious, like when Prince Harry took a peek at the bride coming up the aisle and turned to his brother to say "wait till you see what she's got on!" I loved Boris Johnson's pre-wedding interview with the BBC, I thought the tone of the broadcast spot on, and the reaction from the world's press and media utterly dumbstriking.

What other group of people on this planet could even command such attention? None. And for that reason alone, the British Royal Family is, worth so much more than any president or prime minister. Having a constitutional monarchy is the ultimate symbol of stability for a country. It adds extra power and meaning to state visits and trade missions. The fact that so many foreign people came for the wedding is a sign of the enduring love we have for true majesty. The BBC interviewed many people who had come from Spain, which has its own monarchy, and yet. And yet. They came to see Prince William and his wife Catherine. It means, in a roundabout way, that London can truly call itself the capital of the world. If it was like that for just one day, imagine what it will be like come the Olympic Games next year. I cannot wait.

And then there was the flipside of this weekend:
On Monday morning, 2nd May, the world awoke to discover that the West's most notorious criminal, Osama Bin Laden, had been killed by US Seals. My immediate reaction was "good", but I had not yet known the full story. However, when I did, I could not feel much vindication any more. The way it was dealt with smacked of the typical American gung-ho shoot-before-asking-questions attitude most civilised people deplore and I would have preferred That Man to have been put on trial, his right to forego a trial due to ill health waived, and imprisoned for life, a far more demeaning and embarrassing end to his days, which would have probably had a far greater impact on the extremist Muslims' demise than shooting him at point blank range like some safari hunters in the jungle blasting the head off the last harmless dodo on the island.

By imprisoning him, allowing him to live, you avoid the martyrdom which is sure to come now.

But what angered me the most was the kneejerk reaction of the crowds who gathered outside the White House and in Times Square to celebrate the death of Bin Laden. I understood, when people celebrated the end of World War 2. It was not the death of Hitler the throngs were cheering; it was the fact that no more bombs were going to drop on us. Nobody jumped for joy on hearing of Hiroshima. Nobody hung up bunting to fête the sinking of the warship Belgrano in the Falklands War. Civilised people do not do that. I could also understand the euphoria of the crowds who sang and danced as the years of communism evaporated. Romanians killed their communist leader, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, but they celebrated the end of communism, not the deaths of their hated rulers.

So I see the crowds who hooted their horns or painted US flags on their faces, or waved placards with gloating messages on them upon hearing of the death of the mastermind of 9/11 as nothing more than a band of witchhunters, a baying, bloodthirsty mob of leftovers from the puritans, either undereducated or underinformed about civilised behaviour in Western society. Gloaters are fine at football matches or at pub quizzes, but not on the front of international newspapers or top of the TV news hour.

I think Osama Bin Laden was a truly evil man, a man who corrupted, even poisoned the minds of those around him to do his bidding and hit a Western nation hard, to put freedom as we knew it to the sword and change the very meaning of our civilisation. He made intelligence services around the Western world the most important military wing of any government, he changed the way we travel, he gave governments a very, very good excuse to roll in our civil liberties and invest in powerful spying technology in the name of national security, and as a spin-off, he made rail travel in Europe much more appealing as it avoids having to sacrifice everything liquid and runny at the airline check-in desk. He has also inadvertently contributed to the current parlous situation of the Western economy, as less money and fewer resources would have been spent on the US military during Bush Jr's term in office and on invading Iraq and Afghanistan and the banks may have caused a blip in the economy rather than its demise and China's rise.

I also think Osama Bin Laden died far too easily, far too quickly and far too painlessly. I am not advocating torture here, but I think his soul could have done with a large dose of his own guilt being pricked. I think the families of the victims of 9/11 should have had the right to confront this man (from behind reinforced glass) and I think he should have been used more skilfully as a way of bringing to an end this sorry, sorry period in our history.

OK, he has no tomb where extremists can go to worship at his grave, that's a plus point, and killing him immediately means if there were a trial, there would be no rioting in the streets, but a dead Osama may prove to be as dangerous, if not more, than an alive one.

But what can I say? They got their man. And there's a guy sitting at home in Crawford, Texas, saying "damn, that should have been my finest hour." As it happens, it may turn out to be Obama's turning point. He may gain a huge wave of support from US voters taking him back to the White House next year as the Man Who Got Osama, or it may backfire on him as the truth of Bin Laden's demise becomes known.