In my recent contacts with young people, I was impressed by how deeply they resent the way the Prime Minister is dealing with the various incidents of sleaze plaguing his administration at present. Suddenly, such examples of bad governance are seen as being of great relevance to young people who generally are not very interested in what goes on in the political life of the country.

The Prime Minister has chosen a dangerous strategy trying to resolve the rot in his Cabinet by minimising the serious implications of what his ministers have been up to in the past few years. Decent ordinary people, including thousands of young men and women, feel betrayed by a system that rewards those who condone lack of political accountability to protect their cronies.

The great majority of young people want the government to understand their concerns so that they are given a good chance to make a success of their lives. The exorbitant prices young couples have to pay to buy their first house should take up much more of our ministers time and energy, than finding ways of getting their canvassers convicted of heinous corruption by our courts to have a soft landing back in civil life.

The 43 per cent of our young people who, according to Eurostat records have, under the present administration, gone through our educational system without achieving the minimum level of education needed to qualify for employment, prefer that our ministers come up with an emergency plan to remedy this great injustice they have suffered.

It is all too easy to blame parents for such a tragic state of affairs. But very often such parents get caught up in the vicious circle of poverty where they have to struggle to provide for their families by working long hours in dead end jobs, and find little time to monitor the progress of their children in the critical first years of their education.

The recent spate of redundancies have mainly affected young married men and women who have been dumped on life’s scrap heap with little or no prospects of being given another chance to live a normal life. Our ministers will be much more useful if, rather than hide the corruption that has invaded their ministries, they come up with concrete plans on how to retrain these young people to a level where they can find new employment.

Young families sending their children to private or State schools have to spend considerable sums of money to ensure that they provide the best educational tools for their children to have a good chance of success in later years. These people pay their taxes promptly, only to feel utterly betrayed by the government when cases of corruption involving public officials, paid with taxpayers’ money, are handled with hesitation and lack of political will.

This Nationalist administration caters for the needs of the few young people who are high achievers and can thrive in almost any circumstances. This in itself is not a bad thing at all. But the reality is that there are many more thousands of young people who are genuinely interested and capable of moving ahead but need to find some encouragement and the right environment to make the breakthrough in their lives that will guarantee them success in their careers.

A new Labour administration will cater for the needs of all young people who are prepared to commit themselves to achieve success. We honestly believe that every young person deserves to be given a chance to make a success of his or her life. The priorities of our Labour ministers will be to create opportunities for all young people, and not just for those few who can fly without much help.

Our young people’s concerns will be our concerns because they have a right to being served by the political class and not exploited for political gain just a few weeks before an election.

Dr Mangion is deputy leader of the Opposition.

cmangion@keyworld,net

www.mangioncharles.com