Just caught this little gem from David Willetts, Conservative Shadow Higher Education Secretary, who has been furrowing his brow about the problem of marriage and the working classes.
Of course, he thinks, young men need to become apprentices to help them attract women! Willetts explained that apprenticeships should be 'part of a far bigger ambition to produce more marriageable working-class men, more stable families and less crime.'
'Women,' he claimed are: 'not feeling that they need to marry men because men are not earning enough to support them.'
I could take this apart (the sexism, the patronising class attitude) but the fword does it so much better.
Suffice to say that this is another example of how the Today programme exists in a temporal bubble all of its own. Someone from the 1950s could tune in to the programme and (apart from a few references to mobile phones) would feel perfectly at ease with it all. The chancellor gets interviewed, there is a feature on bird song, something about a social issue inspired by a story in The Archers and a debate over whether modern classical music is any good.
It's not hard to do contemporary and intelligent: Newsnight manages that on a daily basis.
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