HAD any trouble getting a good tradesman recently?

The answer is likely to be yes. Indeed, one new report says that we will have to import painters and decorators from abroad by 2020 if trends continue.

Qualified plumbers, joiners and electricians may also be in similar short supply - but there'll be no shortage of media studies graduates, though quite what we're going to do with them all we are at a loss to discover. There's only so much demand for opinions on the Mirror's attitude to the Gulf War or the hidden meaning behind Ken Russell's films.

Britain has always had a sniffy attitude towards craftsmen. It persists today as the emphasis is increasingly on getting our youngsters to a university (the Government wants 50 per cent of all under-30s to have been to university by the end of the decade).

Throwing degrees around like confetti does not raise overall standards, it just devalues the currency of the qualification.

Just because the Government banned the word polytechnic and called them universities does not mean their standards have miraculously risen to a higher level. Alas only five out of every 1,000 youngsters quizzed in the report mentioned above wants to become a bricklayer, or plumber or follow any traditional skilled job.

Instead most want to work as a computer operator - the modern equivalent of working on a production line. Countless young people seem to be pushed into academic qualifications which have little benefit to them and even less to the community at large.

The canny ones will be those who take a traditional vocational skill, a craftsman. Then they will be able to charge all those media studies graduates a fortune to mend a broken pipe.