Thursday, January 22, 2009

After the axe

Real people are losing their jobs. The Independent noticed.

The two issues are related. And yesterday Simon Jenkins in the Guardian hit it it right on the head: "For every word written and spoken about the real economy, a thousand are written about banks". The articles and reports from the City world are there in tons. But you rarely hear about the stories of the tens of thousands (approaching 2m now) of people who've lost their job. Depressing stories don't sell, this is one of the fundamentals in the news factory.

Today's Independent is a welcome exception. A piece titled 'After the axe: What it's really like to lose your job' is a poignant look into the lives of the victims of this crisis. At all levels, from shop assistants and lorry drivers, to architects and financial consultants.
In the meantime, the £37bn the taxpayer gave the banks three months ago turned out to be not enough. So let's chuck another £50bn at them, shall we?

4 comments:

claude said...

Excellent Brian Reade -in The Mirror- on Fred Goodwin, Gordon Brown's mate, former RBS chairman who left the bank in a mess, enforced a policy of low pay and redundancies at RBS, and then walked away with millions in bonuses and pensions.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/columnists/reade/2009/01/22/fred-goodwin-scandal-shows-labour-s-cred-has-been-torn-to-shreds-115875-21059955/

Helen Highwater said...

Claude, can you chuck £9.30 my way? You still owe us library fines! ;D

claude said...

From which year and which library? :-)

Helen Highwater said...

Probably the Main Library....