MY NIECE, THE LAP DANCER

According to a study by Leeds University one in four young women working in the lap dancing industry are university graduates. Their average take home pay is 48,000 pounds a year after paying commission to the club where they work – I guess the cost of hiring their pole. I suspect the costume is not a major expense!

Unemployed new graduates are also dancing because they cannot find graduate jobs. They work as strippers because the pay is better than bar work and the hours mean they can attend interviews, training days or take further education courses during the day.

Fair enough!

Regular readers will know that my niece graduated in January with an honours degree in two ologies. I should stress that as far as I am aware she is not a pole dancer – but if she was, so what?

I felt a great sense of pride when she graduated – for her because it was due reward for several years hard work and dedication – also for the family because she is the first of our number to go to university.

Myself? I am a student of the University of Life and have some years yet before I graduate. Also rest easy in your beds because I couldn’t climb up onto the lap dancing podium let alone boogie round the pole.

When I sat through the graduation ceremony I clapped loudly when my niece received her degree. Yet I found the event held with due pomp and ceremony in a theatre auditorium largely depressing because I realized I was watching pass along the stage not a new set of graduates but by and large our new unemployed.

Tony Blair lectured us it was all about – education, education, education. As in so many things he was wrong because it was also about jobs, jobs, jobs. There is no point in sending off our young people with all levels of degrees if there are not the graduate employment openings for them.

So his policy of education, education, education has brought us the best educated burger bar servers, pub staff and supermarket check out employees money can buy.

Oh yes, and lap top dancers too.

HER CRIME? SHE’S POOR!

I have written widely in recent weeks about the crisis that is looming across the border from Gibraltar in the town of La Línea where at least 10,000 people are jobless and many receive no benefits whatsoever.

This situation recently took a chilling turn when the social services stepped in to take into immediate care the three children of Rosana Bautista Vázquez. She is jobless and homeless so has lived with her youngsters at the home of her mother. The children’s grandmother complained to the social welfare service in La Línea that she did not have the resources to care for them all – so instead of stepping in to help – the children were taken away.

On Saturday some of the 640 people signed a petition in the family’s support that was taken round the town in the morning by friends and neighbours supported by Prodeni Campo de Gibraltar – an NGO that protects the rights of children – and “Los Parados” the local unemployed action group. The petition calls on the Andalucía Ombudsman, José Chamizo, to intervene in this family’s plight.

What has angered local residents is that no sooner did the grandmother make her situation known than the 4, 8 and 10 year olds were rushed in to care in Chiclana – around 100 kms away. There was no attempt to see what help could be given locally in terms of social worker assistance, food aid, housing or other measures. The town hall is strapped for cash so with indecent haste the three mites were bundled off to the Andalucía Government who have put them in a home far away from their family and friends. Even if Rosana could afford to travel to see them there are bureaucratic obstacles put in her way.

Rosana has documentation from the regional government after an investigation in to her case. She is said to care dearly for her children, they are in good health, there is no evidence of domestic violence, they had not been abandoned – her one crime is she is poor.

Prodeni is demanding to know why the dreadful situation Rosana finds herself in could not have been settled locally in La Línea by the town hall. More worrying still there are thousands of families in the border town in the same plight. The parents are on the dole and facing the same crisis as Rosana without money, housing, food and dependent on their children’s grandparents. So will they too have their children snatched from them? Prodeni warns that future generations will speak of “Los niños de la crisis del 2010” –another unwanted black spot in Spain’s social history.