Angry baby boomer to "students": Macdonalds is hiring.

Guilty? For what "my generation did" to the "students" who are breaking up my country's capital, along with their Hard Left and foreign Black Bloc anarchist friends?

Er, no.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I will tell you a story. Let me take you back to The Olden Days, when I got a grant to go to university.

The average income back then was £1,750 per annum, gross. My year's grant was £325. It was enough to cover tuition and nothing more. My parents, who both worked and earned less than average, were assessed as having sufficient means to pay for my accommodation, food, clothes, travel, books & study materials, field trips, and social life - whatever that might mean. (It meant beer, to a large extent, and membership of various clubs.)

If I didn't already suspect (I did) that my parents did not have the means to support me before the letter came telling them what they were supposed to pay, I knew it the moment I saw my mother go pale and my father put his head in his hands after reading it.

But - I did have a gap year. I had to. I needed it, to earn some serious money before I started studying so, no, I didn't go travelling the world. I worked, stashing away every penny I could and getting as much overtime as I could. I worked wherever I could find someone to take me on, in shops and bars (useful later for running the student bar) and all sorts of offices in all sorts of industries among all sorts of people. It was hugely instructive, a real eye-opener. It felt good to be earning, to be independent, to take the strain off my parents.

I was presentable, having been taught decent manners by my parents and at my grammar school in the poor district where we lived. I had good 'literacy and numeracy skills' which rather went without saying for an A Level student then, though it doesn't now. I had been taught to speak clearly and fluently. I was untrained in anything special but I was willing to learn and therefore employable. I manned phones, soothed customers, filled in forms, wrote letters and worked with figures (no computers). I made tea and coffee and sandwiches - and friends. I packed stuff. I delivered stuff. I swept floors and emptied bins. I took orders and complaints. I got to work on time and worked hard, five and half days a week, week after week, month after month. I learned about bookkeeping (very useful) and sales and service (even more useful). I got a few promotions to higher pay despite being only a 'temp'. My employers trusted me. Later, after university, a couple of my vacation job bosses offered me permanent jobs, one of which I took while I worked out 'what I really wanted to do'. It proved a superb gateway, as it turned out.

I made friends that year, fell in love twice, and had a ball. (I could write a book...) And I earned enough not to have to ask my parents for a single penny. Ever.

Like 90 per cent of my student friends and contemporaries, I fully expected to work as soon as I left school, on top of studying, and that I would pay my own way through university. It was normal. It was what you did. Actually, even the rich kids worked in the vacs, mostly. Their parents didn't allow them to idle their lives away. It's just how people were.

And so, on the first Monday of every vacation, I looked for and got a temp job. Apart from a few long weekends and one deliciously unforgettable three weeks (mind your own business) those four years were spent working hard and studying hard. Oh, yes - there were some student riots back then... I seem to remember... couple of blokes called Straw... Trevor Phillips?... but I was too busy and the rioters and their friends were arseholes. Still are.

And today's students? Do me a favour: please don't tell me there are no jobs for them.

There are about three million jobs of precisely the sort that paid my way through university. They are currently filled by foreigners because British 'students' are one or more of the following:

(a) unemployable

(b) too fucking lazy

(c) too fucking grand and 'entitled' to do them

(d) swanning around the damned globe on their gap years (another new 'entitlement' since my student days).

And since my university days? No, I did not become a banker. Neither am I rich, in anybody's terms. I have supported myself and my dependants by working (in the productive, not the state sector) at stuff which, thanks to my school and university education, and my hard work, pays somewhat (not vastly) above average. I have paid my taxes and paid off the mortgage on a modest house which I bought before the insane politician-engineered boom. I have stashed away as much as possible in pension funds which are invested in the markets and so support productive industry and will, assuming all goes according to plan and the selfish, the ignorant and the self-indulgently anarchic don't tear the state down, ensure that I am not a drain on the young in my declining years.

Sympathy my arse. Guilty? No.

If you are lucky enough to have the chance of an education, be grateful. It's not a natural entitlement. This is not the Garden of bloody Eden and there are no fairies at the bottom of it.

Education is available to you, you lucky lucky bastards, because of people like me and my parents and those whose memorials you're merrily pissing on and smashing up, on your shouty, innit-fun away-days when you should be working.

And there is a a price-tag on it. You have to pay. And you have to work in order to earn the money so that you can pay. That's the deal. You pay. Either before and during as I did, or after, as in the present offer: £7 a week. To pay back the poor suckers in Macdonalds who are paying for you at the moment.

So enough with the paint balls and the iron bars and off you jolly well bugger and get a fucking job. Macdonalds is hiring.