According to my mother in one of her ‘life lesson’ discussions, we as students expect to have the world handed to us on a plate. We are an ungrateful generation of kids who have been given every computer game, iPod and DVD, every hand out and every hand up we could ask for and expect that life will continue on for us when adulthood finally hits us in the face once we graduate. Not meaning to be rude about her rationality, but this is the last thing I or anyone else needs to hear. It feels like we youths are being told this message more and more every day. Government propaganda states that unemployment in its reality doesn’t seem to exist, but sheer laziness does and if we work hard we will be employed, but  if we don’t it is our own fault.

My parents do not owe me a living, the world at large, whatever that may mean, does not owe me a living. However our Government seems to have distorted this notion, and we are now the ones to take the burden of unemployment. The coalition Government has taken themselves on as ‘the world’, not responsible for any specific problem, merely an observer. However this is not the case; we democratically elected this Government and we placed them in care of our financial and social institutions – they certainly owe us more of a living than we are now facing. A living doesn’t even necessitate a life, when speaking about employment, a career is simply one aspect of a life, and if we are not being provided with this basic security then our state is failing us. This does not, as the Daily Mail would have you believe, mean we are a nation of slackers or a nation of finger pointers who can’t accept responsibility for our own affairs.

The fact of the matter is: people are looking for jobs; people want work. Application figures show that more than ever. The number of job applicants to a newly opened Costa Coffee in Nottingham was 1,700 for just 8 positions, almost half of which were turned away for being over qualified. With the increasing of student fees, students should be in an even better position to find employment. After all, a £27,000 debt should be met with a job to get you out of it at the end. This will clearly not be the case, with salary reductions of graduate jobs by 40% and student debt 60% higher than 10 years ago. The more debt we allow ourselves to be in without an infrastructure to harbour us out of it, the harder it will be to resurface from the abyss of the recession, and stimulate employment as a result. The Government may think they do not owe us a living, but they certainly owe us a chance at one.