I’ve just spotted this article in the ‘New Satesman’, a lengthy and thoughtful piece about youth unemployment and the state of Brownhills. Please read it.  Note the amusing error about the market days, and our MP, Richard Shepherd, commenting on the lack of young people visiting his surgeries. It might help if he actually held some here, instead of pandering solely to those in Aldridge who safely return him to parliament term-on-term. It’s quite clear from the piece that the research didn’t stray too far from the MP and his supporters.

New Statesman – No work for the lost generation.

As you walk into Brownhills, a small town outside Walsall, not far from Wolverhampton, you pass a 30-foot steel statue of a miner in a hard hat and overalls, holding a pickaxe and a lantern. He rises from the middle of a roundabout: you can see him from afar. He’s known locally as Jigger – named after a miner, Jack “Jigger” Taylor, who died when the roof collapsed at the Walsall Wood pit in 1951. It is a monument to a distant time when Brownhills was a thriving mining town, before it was a steel town and before it became what it is now: a town in an area with one of the highest rates of unemployment among young people in Britain…

Read more at ‘The New Statesman’ website…