John Cooper is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Dumfries and Galloway.
With school done for the week, I settled down to watch The Tube On Channel 4 when there was a knock on the door.
‘Grab your drum kit – we’re playing tonight.‘
Now my teenage musical career had thus far comprised only of an interminable version of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain – the old Formula 1 theme – and the deceptively tricky backbeat of All Right Now by Free played in a mate’s garage.
With no time for stage fright, let alone rehearsal, stardom – well, a night of Country & Western in the local Masonic hall – beckoned.
I was off down Hank Williams’s Lost Highway, and it proved very lucrative. But it was also hard work, with mentally and physically demanding late-night gigs three, and often four, times a week in pubs, clubs and hotels in which I was way too young to get served.
There was rehearsal too, where we would polish not just a song but perhaps only a tricky passage, repeating it over and over, or a cadence ending that required everyone to stop simultaneously.
It was didactic. I learned the discipline to turn up when required; to hone my craft; to grasp the people skills needed to operate in a small, close-knit team.
It inculcated a self-reliance such that within a decade, I had escaped my first full-time job on local newspapers, founding with a friend a news agency covering court proceedings for ‘the nationals’. The banks wouldn’t touch us, so we tried The Prince’s Trust who provided a sweetheart loan and sage business advice.
Yet today, when hospitality is on its knees, would that grab-your-kit door knock come again? I suspect not, and that’s why I am so passionate about the Conservatives’ Save the Summer Job campaign.
The Milburn Review considered the million or so youngsters who are NEETs – not in employment, education, or training – concluding:
‘It is that the routes into work have narrowed. The clearest examples are the decline of the Saturday job… They provided income, but they also helped young people build confidence, learn the habits of work, and show employers what they could do.’
Amen. Now we need to fit businesses such that they are able to take on youngsters.
So our plan starts with axing chunks of the dreadful Employment Rights Act to reduce the burden on, especially, small firms. Serving on the Business & Trade Select Committee, I pored over this Bill and it was an obvious job-killing stinker, a paean from Labour to their trades union masters wrapped in false piety.
Some put the costs of implementation at £5bn, and I could have wept with fury when a Labour frontbencher declared it was actually only £1bn. A billion out of hard-pressed businesses. Let joy be unconfined!
These people could barely spell business, let alone run one.
The next Conservative Government will introduce a 100pc retail, hospitality and leisure relief which will benefit an estimated 250,000 businesses, and abolish business rates entirely for thousands of high-street businesses.
Our Cheap Power Plan will cut electricity prices by 20 per cent for business. We will repeal employment red tape on companies which restrict the employment of those aged under 16, such as the two-hour time cap on Sunday working, the requirement for a business to hold a child employment permit, and we will extend the window for evening work from 19:00 to 21:00.
Hospitality and retail are the canaries in the coal mine for our economy, and they’re on the cage floor gasping under this unloved and outgoing Labour administration, whose policies have made hiring unaffordable. The Conservatives will change all that.
I didn’t stick with drumming as a career, but I know what ‘second album syndrome‘ is – where a band or artist struggles to follow the success of their debut.
Andy Burnham, marching south after modest opening success as Manchester mayor, faces just that as he takes to the biggest political stage of all in this country, 10 Downing Street.
Labour’s tired old one-note greatest hits will cut it no longer. He would be well advised to give the country a cover version of Save the Summer Job by that amazing band who are again rising in the charts, the Conservatives.
John Cooper is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Dumfries and Galloway.
With school done for the week, I settled down to watch The Tube On Channel 4 when there was a knock on the door.
‘Grab your drum kit – we’re playing tonight.‘
Now my teenage musical career had thus far comprised only of an interminable version of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain – the old Formula 1 theme – and the deceptively tricky backbeat of All Right Now by Free played in a mate’s garage.
With no time for stage fright, let alone rehearsal, stardom – well, a night of Country & Western in the local Masonic hall – beckoned.
I was off down Hank Williams’s Lost Highway, and it proved very lucrative. But it was also hard work, with mentally and physically demanding late-night gigs three, and often four, times a week in pubs, clubs and hotels in which I was way too young to get served.
There was rehearsal too, where we would polish not just a song but perhaps only a tricky passage, repeating it over and over, or a cadence ending that required everyone to stop simultaneously.
It was didactic. I learned the discipline to turn up when required; to hone my craft; to grasp the people skills needed to operate in a small, close-knit team.
It inculcated a self-reliance such that within a decade, I had escaped my first full-time job on local newspapers, founding with a friend a news agency covering court proceedings for ‘the nationals’. The banks wouldn’t touch us, so we tried The Prince’s Trust who provided a sweetheart loan and sage business advice.
Yet today, when hospitality is on its knees, would that grab-your-kit door knock come again? I suspect not, and that’s why I am so passionate about the Conservatives’ Save the Summer Job campaign.
The Milburn Review considered the million or so youngsters who are NEETs – not in employment, education, or training – concluding:
‘It is that the routes into work have narrowed. The clearest examples are the decline of the Saturday job… They provided income, but they also helped young people build confidence, learn the habits of work, and show employers what they could do.’
Amen. Now we need to fit businesses such that they are able to take on youngsters.
So our plan starts with axing chunks of the dreadful Employment Rights Act to reduce the burden on, especially, small firms. Serving on the Business & Trade Select Committee, I pored over this Bill and it was an obvious job-killing stinker, a paean from Labour to their trades union masters wrapped in false piety.
Some put the costs of implementation at £5bn, and I could have wept with fury when a Labour frontbencher declared it was actually only £1bn. A billion out of hard-pressed businesses. Let joy be unconfined!
These people could barely spell business, let alone run one.
The next Conservative Government will introduce a 100pc retail, hospitality and leisure relief which will benefit an estimated 250,000 businesses, and abolish business rates entirely for thousands of high-street businesses.
Our Cheap Power Plan will cut electricity prices by 20 per cent for business. We will repeal employment red tape on companies which restrict the employment of those aged under 16, such as the two-hour time cap on Sunday working, the requirement for a business to hold a child employment permit, and we will extend the window for evening work from 19:00 to 21:00.
Hospitality and retail are the canaries in the coal mine for our economy, and they’re on the cage floor gasping under this unloved and outgoing Labour administration, whose policies have made hiring unaffordable. The Conservatives will change all that.
I didn’t stick with drumming as a career, but I know what ‘second album syndrome‘ is – where a band or artist struggles to follow the success of their debut.
Andy Burnham, marching south after modest opening success as Manchester mayor, faces just that as he takes to the biggest political stage of all in this country, 10 Downing Street.
Labour’s tired old one-note greatest hits will cut it no longer. He would be well advised to give the country a cover version of Save the Summer Job by that amazing band who are again rising in the charts, the Conservatives.