The UK is a depressing place - no, really it is.

Al Aynsley-Green has got it right. There is a crisis at the heart of our society. The children's commissioner was responding to the publication yesterday of Unicef's report on the well-being of children and adolescents in wealthy countries. Its results are devastating. Overall, this country ranks last, making it the worst place to grow up in the developed world.

After the long, long dark years of Thatcherism and then after her ousting the following years of sleaze and corruption of a decaying Tory party (then still packed full of insanely greedy party members)- there came **new** improved Labour. Promising much and delivering very little - it was really just more Thatcherite-style Tory policies in disguise. A leader so unsure of himself and his position in the world he willingly let himself become a lap-dog to one of the most stupid, most vain-glorious, misguided, mis-directed, clueless, disconnected American Presidents the world has ever seen.

Nowadays we're seeing the Labour party starting to repeatedly target, blame and demonize a lot of the same helpless victims the old Tory party used to... the long term unemployed, the long term sick and disabled, the single parent, the immigrant. Blaming them for what are really the failures of government policy, of industry, of businesses, of educational institutions, of local governments and local communities.

And of course they keep dodging the real issue at the heart of this whole sorry mess - the plain and simple fact that there are far more people than there are jobs... heck, there's a lot of a certain type of jobs which because of globalisation keep moving to China, to India, etc.

There's one simple thing which would really going some way to help this but no one even considers because of the controversy (among industry) it would cause - is to strictly limit the working hours people are legally allowed to work down to something like four or even three days a week. Y'know something that would really address the life-work balance head on. Something that would actually help generate more jobs as the extra leisure time will need more employees in related sectors. But nah, something like that will never be considered, because we're so wedded (read: brainwashed) into the whole puritan work ethic thing. No matter how miserable and dysfunctional it's actually making most of society. (Consider the prescription for Prozac and it's similar drugs) If you aren't in paid employment -you're scum. And we're going to punish you for it. That's Hutton's real message. It might win him a few Daily mail/Daily Telegraph readers (that'll be people in good jobs and low on empathy, and good sense, but high on intolerance and mean-spiritness) approval - but it does precious little to address any of the real long term standing problems in UK society. That's far more of a up-hill struggle than lazy politicians with their eye on the next election are ever going to dare take on.