The Daily Star and DIY product manufacture Screwfix have teamed up to find Britain’s tradesman of the year. I like the name Screwfix, as it sums up the nature of Cruel Britannia rather well: Everything is a fix, we all get screwed, and then remain stuck to a Wall of Indifference forever.

The thing is, does the honour of being Britain’s best tradesmen mean anything to the lucky recipient? The Star says this:

‘Last year’s winner Michael Cairns, 28, from Edinburgh says: “It has been a great endorsement for the business.” Last year’s winner Michael Cairns, 28, from Edinburgh says: “It has been a great endorsement for the business and for myself.”‘

Yes, the Screwfix tradesman of the year, so great he said it twice. But let’s take a bit less of the piss here, because some things about this little Star idea are not half bad. Polly Shaw, for example, had a career in forensics until she retrained as an electrician. She says: “I fancied a change and so took redundancy two years ago during the budget cuts. I’ve always been handy and wanted to do something different so I took the plunge. Women are underrepresented in the trade and I felt there was a gap in the market.”

Very true, but the main gap in the UK market is for people who can DO stuff and get apid realy money, rather than be unemployed with a media studies degree or working for some awful City millowner for nothing. The New Labour get-a-degree bollocks after 2007 did enormous harm to the UK economy, and dramatically upped our welfare costs….while all over Britain, people couldn’t get a plumber, chippy or sparks for love nor money.

Figures for skilled tradesmen plummeted by 7% in the last year alone after being badly hit by the economic downturn and depressed housing market. But the trend away from “a trade” began well before that…and even if building is on the decline, there is more than enough repair work to go round whether houses are being built and sold or not. Independent plumber numbers have seen a 25% drop since 2009.

As usual, the pragmatic gender is leading the charge to reverse the madness: female-run businesses are on the rise, with the proportion of female-led bricklaying businesses up 16%, window cleaning businesses run by women up 10 per cent, building businesses by 8% and painter and decorator businesses up 5%. The cleaning trade is prospering, up by 33 per cent since 2009, and female chimney sweeps have doubled while that sector rose just 4% since 2010. Vote Tory, get more chimney sweeps: you know it makes sense.

What we’re seeing here is the rise and rise of sole traders with practical skills. They’re reacting to a deregulated corporate life that offered them no safety, too much stress, and zero job satisfaction. It is, in my view, the first sign of the communitarian capitalism The Slog has been predicting that will, in the end, wipe out globalism and return most humans to some form of life balance and local mutuality. But it won’t get much further until large banks and centrally thieving governments stop starving this sector of cash and trying to embezzle their savings. And as those governments are in the pay of the globalist multinationals, things will get nastier before they get better.

In the small community I inhabit at the moment, every bakery, restaurant, gift shop, hardware store, bar and tabac is family-owned. All of them are friendly, flexible people engaged with the community and earning a decent living based on sound ethics and customer care. The one exception is the chain supermarket off the main square, where the staff are rude, the product range awful, and the fresh product quality ghastly. It is full of notices congratulating the company on its price cuts and success in fighting inflation. There are no notices in the other shops and businesses: just good service and honest dealings.

I’d like to bring the entire US Congress, EC staff and UK Commons membership here, help them off the bus and say, “Take a look around. Now do you get it?”

I’d like to but I won’t, because they wouldn’t even begin to get it.

Earlier at The Slog: Lloyds Bank & Treasury spin-bollocks at warp-factor levels