Our kids must get a taste for Pret

HALF our immigration problem is caused by the fact that employers don’t want to hire British youngsters, preferring migrants. And British youngsters don’t want their jobs.

Take this astonishing figure revealed last week. The coffee and sandwich chain Pret A Manger revealed that only one person in 50 who applies for a job there is British. They’re worried that when we leave the EU, they won’t be able to find anyone to work for them.

I know one of that small British minority, who gained a lot from his time at Pret, a good employer which gives a lot of benefits in return for hard work and self-discipline. But he was lucky enough to go to one of our minority of old-fashioned schools.

Pret’s employment boss, Andrea Wareham, says the problem is not in selecting British staff, but in getting them to apply in the first place. How is it these jobs are filled with people from Barcelona, Warsaw or Sofia, but not by their equivalents from this country?

My theory is simple. Our continental neighbours have not trashed their school systems as we have done. They have not subsidised family breakdown as we have done. They accept that sometimes you have to be told what to do, that you have to start at the bottom and that nobody owes you anything. And so their youngsters happily do what British school-leavers once did and do no longer in the age of the comprehensive school – they seek out hard, sweaty, exhausting, menial jobs. And they come out on the other side of them better and happier people.

Until our school system is producing leavers who want to work at Pret A Manger, and who Pret wants to employ, it won’t be any good. Meanwhile, Pret had better start thinking about recruiting pensioners if it wants to stay in business post-independence. They all went to proper schools and know how to work, and with interest rates still near zero, most of them have to.