Middle-class snobbery about trades is why you can't get a painter: Bird Lovegod

This is why business can be powerfully used for good, and also for bad. Businesses manifest the personality traits of the people running them. A good honest person will be unable to run a crooked business. Equally, a crooked person can never run a straight business. The business may be a separate legal entity, but it is an extension and expression of the people running it, be they good, bad, or ugly.

If we stop thinking of business as a way to make money, and instead see it as a way to make preferred change happen, it opens up our thinking to a wider range of possibilities, potentials, purposes, and outcomes.

In the UK today we desperately need more tradespeople, more painters, more plumbers, more builders, and right-hearted sound-minded people could do a lot worse than to train in trade skills and from there begin working for themselves or as part of a team, learning the trade and the business.

If I could do my Fine Art degree again, I’d spend a year of it just on domestic painting and decorating, and leave with the ability to always have work when I wanted it. I’d tell the tutors it’s conceptual irony and they’d probably give me a first.

I strikes me that it’s very easy to find work as a painter, and if you do a good job, charge a fair price, and focus on the quality of the work, it’s a good living, and if you decide to expand and build a multi-employee business from it, it’s a career and company and you can grow and take as far as you like

Trades are undervalued in our society. It’s all about going to university, which is considered to be the expected and natural step in a successful education.

There’s a class mentality in this, even and perhaps especially in the ‘liberal and arts’ degrees, those teaching diversity and inclusion, gender studies, fine art, all the degrees that would talk about equality are actually ingraining the idea of education as moral improvement, and simultaneously considering trades as less valuable, somehow ignorant, unenlightened, and intellectually and morally inferior.

I think we need more painters, more plumbers, more guys who can fit a gutter or mend a roof, and if that means less people graduating with degrees then fine. Why should a degree be considered inherently valuable?

It sounds heretical doesn’t it, that higher education may not be as valuable as learning a trade. But consider what skills must be learned to be a painter, or plumber, or electrician. And consider the soft skills involved, marketing, accountancy, human engagement. And consider the skills required to scale such a business, or to specialise, in drainage engineering, or high altitude painting, or industrial electrical work. Compared to a few hours a week lectures on Gender Normative Socialism.

It’s actually about class, and the supposed inherent value of University education.

Trades are more than respectable, they’re vital, meaningful, creative, practical, and our collective middle class unappreciation of them as a career is why you can’t get a painter these days.

Bird Lovegod is MD of Ethical Much