The great thing about the Brains Trust in the saloon bar of the Frog & Bucket public house is that, after about eleven pints of Spitfire Ale, we begin to see the solutions to the great issues facing the world in the 21st Century with a certain blinding clarity.

Fresh on the heels of another welcome revelation this week, i.e. that the average fifty-something is far fitter than the average twenty five year old in terms of attention to diet and lifestyle choices, we had barely consumed two pints and our order of “Cornish pasties and chips all round, please love!” before - as has happened every day for the past six years - we reached a consensus that our esteemed political masters lost the plot a long time ago.

Take education or – as Tony Blair memorably promised, listing his priorities before coming to power in 1997, “education, education, education.” The New Labour government soon announced a drive to open up universities and create a new generation of graduates ready to take Britain to ever-greater heights of achievement in everything.

To do this – say the detractors – they then had to introduce a programme of dumbing down all school exams to the point where nobody failed anything … and employers soon began complaining about the poor standards of literacy & numeracy in both school-leavers & graduates. Elite schools began abandoning the new ‘discredited’ state exams and looking around for alternative, more stringent, versions that would separate the wheat from the chaff and allow able students to demonstrate their true quality.

So. Under New Labour lots more youngsters – including (to be fair) many who perhaps might not have had the opportunity to do this in previous generations - have been passing all their exams and, instead of launching themselves onto the jobs market straight from school, going on to university instead. It has been alleged that university academic standards have also had to be lowered … simply so that this new (less able) intake can relate to their courses at all, let alone excel in them.

Now we have news that – as a direct result of the recession - the UK graduates’ job market has shrunk by 20% in the past twelve months. One in ten graduates remains unemployed six months after leaving university. These are the figures before another 80,000 graduates hit the job market this summer.

Apparently the government’s response is now to encourage graduates to go on a taxpayer-funded ‘gap year’. Some cynics say this is a naked attempt to keep them off the ever-rising unemployment register. Those of us in the Frog & Bucket yesterday suspect that the entire New Labour education reform programme since 1997 was designed with this in mind. These days tens of thousands of ill-educated Britons are going straight on the dole at twenty one or twenty two, instead of at eighteen or even younger as was previously the case. Depending upon the way you look at it, I suppose that’s progress.

I don’t know why I’m worrying. Currently - like the rest of the boys - I’m trawling through the files on my computer and in my cupboard by the television, trying to remember my own educational qualifications. We’re all going to apply for one of these graduate taxpayer-funded ‘gap years’ on Monday – looking at the brochure, personally I’m thinking the Canaries, South Africa, or perhaps one of those South Pacific islands with sandy beaches with a hut and a dusky handmaiden bringing you rum cocktails on the hour, every hour.

Of course, if they turn us down because we’re too old to qualify, we’ll sue them for ageism under the new Age Discrimination legislation and/or the Human Rights Act. We’re just as much a part of the New Labour generation as any of these spotty ‘graduates’ - plus we don’t get as many sexually-transmitted diseases.