IT was very worrying to read about the graduate on benefits made to work for them as a shelf-stacker in Poundland.

Cait Reilly asked the High Court to declare the Government’s programme intended to get people back to work as unlawful and said the scheme amounted to “forced labour.”

Worrying? Well, yes. Not because the 23 year-old was treated in this brutal fashion, actually made to work or lose her £53.45 a week, but that she considered the job done by thousands of ordinary people every week as so demeaning.

Predictably, she’s banging on about her “human rights” when the phrase that kept popping into my mind was “get over yourself and grow up.”

The programme is intended to help 250,000 young people over the next two years get training and unpaid experience in a variety of sectors, presumably including placements in stores like Poundland.

Young people are regularly in the Catch 22 position of not having any experience of jobs and not being able to get any because they haven’t got any experience of jobs etc etc.

It is a great pity that the number of graduates forced to take jobs like cleaners, labourers, shelf-stackers and rubbish collectors has almost doubled in five years. But it also makes you wonder how many of them leave university actually equipped for ANY job.

As it happens, higher university fees are likely to sort out this one, but all those graduates who’ve just spent three years studying football, existentialism in a free society or medieval knitting surely didn’t expect to walk into a well-paid job in their “field” as soon as they left uni?

In the past, many students took on these exact same “menial” jobs in order to finance their studies. Even then, by no means all got the jobs they’d hoped for, either straight away or at all.

These days, the jobs’ market is a lottery without many winners. It’s a terrible situation that so many young people are out of work and feel without hope. The fact that they are without experience is even more worrying, and anyone who isn’t prepared to do something to help themselves and ultimately get off benefit to my mind shouldn’t be given it anyway. After all, this same benefit is provided by millions of working people, many of whom go to those so-called menial jobs every single working day.