Lead by Example

Baroness Warsi's so-called "expenses scandal" isn't an indication of a corrupt political elite. It's an example of how disconnected politics is from the world as most people know it. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people who commute on a daily basis to their workplace, typically to London from a place more than twenty or thirty miles away. Their expenses are not paid. They have to pay for their travel from their own salaries and wages because that's the price people pay in order to get a good job. It's reasonable that some of the expenses that Members of Parliament and their staff can claim are reasonable: staffing expenses, telecommunication expenses and a basic salary are all something that is part and parcel of a job that is demanding.

The problem is when we have a system that simply gives politicians an open door to bend the rules according to their will. Politicians have no need of travel expenses, not least of which with a basic salary of around £60,000, more than double the average salary of most men and £35,000 more than the average salary of most women. There is no need to claim for second homes or council tax allowances because they can readily commute from their home. If politicians have a problem with the cost of public transport, use a car or, even better than that, do something about it.

Politicians are out of touch with what most of us experience on a daily basis. We've all got stories of wanting a job but discovering it's in London. If we desperately wanted the job, we'd do everything in our power to get it even if that means contributing more than ten percent of our take-hoame salary on travel. Why is it the case that politicians get special treatment? They're meant to lead by example in the "age of austerity" but everything about their behavior so far is indicative of a bubble that surrounds them, leaving them unable to grasp what most of us are feeling or experiencing as a result of financial cutbacks, tax increases, etc.

This isn't a complaint about austerity. I agree with austerity. The problem is with politicians who take advantage of a system that is deliberately ill-defined in order to allow these abuses to fall through the cracks. It's only when the media hears of a story that we become outraged. What would have happened if the expenses scandal never happened? We'd have a ballooning problem in the United Kingdom where politicians are at arm's length from what the rest of us are doing. In order for politicians to redeem some semblance of respect, they need to take the lead and that starts by cutting their expenses heavily, cutting their basic salaries and making them more accountable in what they spend their money on.

No Time for Celebrating

With the final exam now complete and little more than a graduation ceremony to separate me between the acceptability of being both a student and having a job and becoming another statistic who can't find a job in a market so heavily inundated with graduates that it comes as something of a surprise that people aren't selling themselves on Gumtree and Craigslist as veritable prostitutes of education. As you can readily imagine, I don't feel like celebrating. A lot of people are posting statuses, celebrating their freedom and recognising that their university career, at the very least, is coming to an end and, for some, to fruition. I fear the celebrations will be short-lived. The knowledge that you are little more than another addition to a market that is impossibly difficult to succeed in - graduate jobs - should soon be a somber thought in the minds of all those who haven't secured jobs yet.

That's my situation - twenty one year old male with £24,000 of student debt seeks full-time job in anything above what can be described as diminutive and meaningless work. It sounds like a job advertisement but that's what job seeking for a graduate is like. You attempt to balance the effort between "selling yourself" as a candidate stronger than others but, at the same time, attempting to under-sell yourself in order to not make yourself look like your head is more inflated than a helium balloon without the comic vocal effects. There seems to be one option left to students who haven't managed to find a job - go into post-graduate education. It's another layer of complication, debt and needless qualifications that create a generation of students who have more education than they do experience of the real world.

All too often, you hear employers complain that students come out of university with no "real world" skills or marketable skills, the kind of things that make people want to hire you. There's never anybody in the interview who retorts "If you gave some of them jobs, maybe they'd acquire those skills". You see, employers simply assume that you have gone out of your way in your three years to pursue every reasonable avenue to get work and that, if you haven't done that, you must be an atypical student who gets drunk, celebrates into the sun rises the next morning and then scrapes through exams as if they were nothing - all to the tune of a lovely hangover.

There are quite a few people to blame in this situation but, primarily, it's the Labour government of ten years that pursued the idea that fifty percent of people should be going to university. Did nobody think to point out at the time that having more and more people graduating with degrees would saturate the market and create a situation where everyone has a degree and it's nothing special? That's why I went to university. I wanted to differentiate myself from other people in the job market by having a specialist knowledge of the subject I wanted to teach, study, etc. Now, everyone has a degree and it makes it worthless to all but the student who is loaded with debt that accumulates more and more interest.

There's an amusing pun that I recall from the Big Bang Theory in which the Chairman of the Department enters a room full of Howard, Raj, Leonard and Sheldon. The Chairman addresses each of these in turn as "Doctor [...]" until he gets to Howard when he states "Mister Wolowitz", a reference to his lack of a doctorate. Howard retorts "I have a Masters degree" and the Chairman responds quizzically with the apt statement "Who doesn't?". That's the job market of today. You put your undergraduate degree on your CV, terribly proud of what you've achieved and then you discover it's about as much use as you telling them that, when you were six, you built a bridge out of lolly sticks.

It's not all negative today. Nick Boles MP's personal assistant contacted me today and invited me to a week's work experience in September with Mr Boles at the House of Commons which should be an excellent venture into politics, a career I have long thought I've had the skills for - cynical, provocative, outspoken and altogether wrong on most issues. It's just a shame that my progress in this venture is delayed by individuals who don't seem to be doing all that much to help people get into the matter. It goes back to that old argument - politics is for the rich and the educated. Perhaps, for some, that's how they want to keep it but at least Nick is trying to do something about it.

The Dangers of "Direct Sales Marketing"

As a student who is about to graduate in July, there's a rush of anticipation, depression and outright fear as you realise that you are struggling to find a job in an economy where hundreds of people every day are being laid off. You feel disused and discarded by the education system for failing to equip you with the ability to find a job and you blame the economy, yourself or even others for its failure to provide you with a job. When that happens, when you reach your lowest point, there's a temptation to go for direct sales marketing. Hundreds of jobs are posted on recruitment websites, graduate job sites, etc. that offer hundreds of pounds a week, excellent training, career progression schemes. Think of a combination of words relating to careers and these companies will likely use it somewhere.

I applied for three of these jobs and, like a good prospective employee, I did my research on these companies. I'm not about to pretend that I have to protect my identity and I'll name them: Capital One Promotions; TC World Ltd; WIT International Ltd. When I did the research, I noticed an odd feature about all of their websites. All of them discussed a "business development scheme" using the exact same terms, language and diagram to demonstrate progression. When I delved deeper, I noticed that whole pages were copied and extrapolated onto each others' websites. I was suspicious even at this point but then a friend of a friend told me that I should avoid Capital One Promotions, that their work was commission-based and their company was of "ill repute".

When someone tells you that, alarm bells start ringing. When I typed the company's name into Google, one of the related search terms was Capital One Promotions scam. I thought this was related to a credit card company that operated under the name of Capital One but, curious, I clicked. Lo and behold, the first result is an article in the Daily Mirror (http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2010/08/cobra-group-makes-a-mint-while.html) about an organisation called Appco Group who were linked and affiliated with Capital One Promotions. When I read the article, I discovered that Appco Group manipulated and used graduate students and the unemployed as self-employed promoters of their business, taking half of their commission, not paying taxes on earnings and having a workplace ill-fitting for a company that talks so much about career progression.

Reading the comments gave an indication that a lot of people have suffered at the hands of this organisation but I hoped that, given it was dated from 2010, the organisation would've changed its practises but I wasn't so naive and continued reading the comments. Someone posted a link to a thread on another website from 2012, listing all the problems with the organisation. Suffice to say, the arguments were extremely convincing. I write this to warn fellow graduate students, people out of work, whoever you may be, do not be lulled into a false sense of security by the promise of high earnings if you "work hard". It is nothing more than a smokescreen for bad company practises, deception of the worst kind and outright abuse of a struggling economy.

Do not think that things will improve. Do not lower yourself to this job because you feel you have to. The accounts of people's lives speak for themselves, the fifty-hour weeks, the low wages, the "career progression". It's all a sign of a company that is using people for their own gain and giving nothing back in return. If you see the title "Media Sales Executive" or "Graduate Sales Administrator" or any title that looks like it's a mash-up of words found in every con artist's dictionary, be cautious. Do your research, find out about the company and always see if you know anyone who has worked there.

I had an interview for tomorrow with Capital One Promotions. Following the research I did, I'm not going. I won't even touch them with a ten-foot pole. I'll be calling them tomorrow to tell them about the research I did and how it illuminated an organisation that preys on the unfortunate. You might see people who claim the organisation is great, that if you work hard, you earn plenty and that people who fail and complain are just "lazy and can't sell". That's not an excuse for the pittance in earnings, the accounts of deception and fraud committed by higher authorities and a general stench of deprivation and disgrace by these companies.

Meeting with Nick Boles MP

I had a meeting this morning with Nick Boles, the MP for Grantham and Stamford, after I wrote him an e-mail about the sense of exclusivity in certain industries, in particular media and politics. What was interesting was that the day before the meeting, Michael Gove said much the same thing to a group of independent headmasters so I'm pleased to know that I'm not alone in the thinking. I was apprehensive about meeting Nick, in part because I didn't know what to expect or how he was going to help and in another sense because he could be seen as part of the existing establishment in politics - educated at Oxford, Director of Policy Exchange.

What was so great about Nick was the fact that he recognised the problems I faced and offered tangible solutions to the problems I faced. People all too often argued that politicians do nothing for their local constituents but that's not the experience I've had with MPs. When I wrote to Douglas Hogg when he was an MP for Sleaford and North Hykeham about the increasing cost of fees for the Bar examination, he wrote to the colleges concerned and sent me their responses along with his thoughts on the matter. With Nick, there was that same sense of concern for his local constituents and aiming to help them.

His first suggestion was that I start a blog and so that's what I've decided to do here. He was conscious to note that I shouldn't try to be like "traditional media" columnists since that part of media is failing and it's something I agree with. We all have to be individual in our approach to new media because there's no rigid definition about what is appropriate and what is not. Social media has allowed us to be more personal in communicating with people on the Internet. That's part of the problem I think I had with the previous blogs, that I was trying too hard to fit into the "old media" school of thought when it's clear it's no longer appropriate.

We discussed a lot of different career options and the reasons why it was so difficult for people from different or unique backgrounds to break into politics. I admitted that I had considered different career options, e.g. media, publishing, but we both came to the conclusion that the job market was in such a state that there was an "exploitation of the market" going on with these companies who use internships as a means of free labour. It's difficult for someone like myself, someone from a working class/lower middle class background, to be able to afford unpaid internships when most are located in London and only cover expenses on the London Underground. It seems as though we are now London-centric and people just assume we will all relocate there for jobs.

Nick did have one great suggestion - that more people from Conservative backgrounds need to have held public sector jobs. One of the best lines of our conversation was that the Conservative Party had enough "QCs and lawyers". Teaching, Nick said, was one of the best public sector careers to go into since it's a form of politics in itself - public speaking, communication, writing. I recognise what Nick is saying and, if the PGCE weren't such an expensive course like the Bar exams, I would've considered it further.

He has, however, offered me a short internship in Westminster with him when a slot opens up which I think is great and very kind of him to do so. He has no obligation to me to offer me that but I think we are of a similar mindset and it'll be great to get some experience with an up-and-coming politician. He's also put me in touch with the local Conservative Association so I can start to get involved with local politics so, again, he's doing a lot for me and shows that he is prepared to help out his local constituents.

I've seen a lot of criticism from Labour about Nick Boles and his performance as an MP for Grantham and Stamford but meeting him today seems to disregard all that criticism. People only tend to criticise when they haven't met the person. I expected someone completely different to the person I met and I'm glad he's my MP. He's got fresh ideas and he's in touch with people like me who don't come from the privileged background that so many of our politicians seem to do.