Young people are lazy, illiterate, untidy, useless and have an ‘attitude problem’, one of the most highly-paid people in the country revealed yesterday to a conference of supermarket executives. Lucy Neville-Rolf, who earned £1.6 million last year in her job as an executive director of Tesco, blames the ‘education system’ for its failings to create a perfect society of conformist minimum wage robot clones, in a speech which rolled out just about every clichéd anti-youth prejudice in the book. I mean, it is about time these pesky young folk were brought into line and started showing some fucking gratitude for their shitty minimum wage temp contracts, isn’t it?
Well, Lucy agrees, adding into her anti-youth tirade that ‘a society where people don’t feel the need to work to gain material possessions will not be a stable or successful society.’

Undoubtedly, Neville-Rolf hinted in her speech at serious issues in our education system, in her claims that  school-leavers “Cannot do reading. They cannot do arithmetic. They cannot do writing.”. There are tens of thousands of young people every year slipping through the system and leaving school lacking basic numeracy and literacy skills -- but the only reason this concerns Tesco is that it’s affecting their profit margins, not because they actually give a shit about the state of education in this country. If they really do care that much, maybe they could consider not going to such extreme lengths to avoid paying their taxes here…?
Tesco already employees 40,000 people under the age of 19, and seemingly want to see the whole school-system re-oriented to be a rolling production line of cheap labour to suit their own interests. In all their moaning about the state of education, something they’ve done in the past too, they seem to miss the point that education is important for education’s sake. This sentiment the education system purely acts to ready people for a live of wage slavery is pretty worrying at a time when schools and colleges are facing massive budget cuts from central government.

Lucy Neville-Rolf says that young people seem to think that the ‘world owes them a living’. Why the hell shouldn’t it? Everyone has the right to a job with decent pay and conditions, and  just because the bosses at Tesco would rather we lived in a corporate paradise of low-taxes and the conditions of cheap labour (ie. mass unemployment), doesn’t mean it’s suddenly acceptable to start shitting all over young people. After all, do you think Lucy Neville-Rolf would go into her work smiling, happy and looking forward to a fun day of shelf-stacking if she was on £5.86 an hour? I doubt it.

BONUS: TESCO INVADES DENMARK!!

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