Julian Sturdy asked the Prime Minister a question at PMQs on 29th March 2017: "Improving vocational and technical education is vital in closing our productivity gap, so can the Prime Minister assure me that vocational education will enjoy equal status with academic education, so that as we leave the EU our young people can be equipped to build the high-skilled economy of the future?" (HERE).
This has always been slightly perplexing to me. We have had a productivity gap for years and years (HERE) lagging 35% behind Germany and 30% behind the USA and France and the gap between us and the average of the G7 has grown to 18%. But it is a mystery why we have had to wait to leave the EU in order to equip young people to "build the high-skilled economy of the future?" Why does Mr Sturdy think we can do something in 2019 that we couldn't do in 2010? It is mystifying. Was there some EU regulation that stopped us? Think about it. What Julian Sturdy is saying is that after seven years of a Conservative government (his government) we have failed to equip our young people properly.
I think it shouldn't be too difficult to write a letter to the press something like this:
Julian Sturdy admitted in parliament in March that his government has for the last seven years failed to provide our children with a proper education to close the productivity gap and asked the PM for assurances “that as we leave the EU our young people can be equipped to build the high-skilled economy of the future” (Hansard Col 244).
One is bound to ask what have they been doing? Why is it necessary to leave the EU in order to close the 35% productivity gap with Germany, a country that was a founding member of and is still inside the EU? Which Directive prevented us from doing it? And what faith can anyone have that a new Conservative government can do in two years what our own MP has admitted the last one failed to do in seven, now with even less money and mired in Brexit negotiations?
And we shouldn't forget that we joined the EU in 1973 as a way of halting our economic decline.
"Britain joined because joining the European project was perceived to be a way to stop its relative economic decline. In 1950, UK’s per capita GDP was almost a third larger than the EU6 average; in 1973, it was about 10% below; it has been comparatively stable ever since. On this basis, joining the EU worked – it helped to halt Britain’s relative economic decline vis-à-vis the EU6". Nauro Campos
Professor of Economics, Brunel University London, (HERE)
