"We now have several generations of illiterate dunderheads with stupid and pointless "degrees" in media science and tourism & leisure etc etc. BNP Britain is a truly terrifying place. We simply can't live without the immigrants who bring to this country a sense of diligent work and study ethic that it seems "the indigenous" have to a significant extent decided is beneath them."

Growing up during the eighties, I recall well the 'tone' of Thatcherite Britain (if not *precisely* the policies and economics generating that), I recall that there seemed to be a general devaluing of more traditional trades. Everyone was expected to 'better themselves' (whatever that really meant?) and 'aspire' (ditto). It seems to me that there was a major political PR campaign, in which the right wing press were fully complicit, to effectively undermine working peoples personal pride in their traditional trades, and engender a belief that you had to be getting 'somewhere'. In retrospect, that "somewhere" was an utterly vacuous no-where, with it's foundations in nothing of any real substance or essential worth to society.

I don't think that working class folks all just spontaneously decided that traditional trades were somehow 'beneath' them, I think it was a long-term process of brainwashing by Tory media and government, which has left us with a deficit in skilled people to fill those core roles in our society.