Article in the Daily Telegraph, 18 October 2003 by Tom Utley.

We are putty in the hands of those who can fix things

About a year ago, my sister Catherine's ancient Fiat broke down, for the umpteenth time, and her friendly local garage-man told her that it would cost more to repair than the car was worth. As a special favour, however, he was prepared to tow it away and have it scrapped. For this, he would charge her only £30.

Meekly, my sister handed over the money and said goodbye to her car, expecting never to see it again. But only a couple of weeks later, she did see it again. Indeed, she still sees it almost every day of her life, tootling around her neighbourhood, looking and running better than it ever did during the last few months of her ownership.

Her garage-man had clearly taken one look at her and decided, rightly, that here was a mug if ever he saw one. He could tell that she didn't know the first thing about cars and that he could spin her any line he chose. Once he had pocketed her £30, and the keys to her Fiat, he (or perhaps the car-breaker) had repaired the car and sold it, for a tidy profit, to one of her neighbours.

When I told this tale of woe to a friend who runs a flourishing building company, he said: "But she should get on to her solicitor immediately. She should take that swine of a garage- man to the small claims court. She has a cast- iron case against him."

I pointed out that there were several objections to this. The first was that my sister probably didn't have a solicitor, and finding a cheap one would be a bother. It would be a great nuisance for my sister, too, to have to collect all the evidence and fill in the necessary forms. And what sort of settlement could she hope to get through the court? A couple of hundred pounds at most, I reckoned - not nearly enough, anyway, to justify all the time, trouble and solicitors' fees that she would be put to.

My friend saw the wisdom in what I said, and we agreed that my sister was probably wise just to shrug her shoulders and put the whole wretched episode down to experience. We also agreed that perhaps it served her right for being a gullible, trusting woman who didn't know anything about cars. Nothing like that would ever happen to men of the world like us.

And now precisely the same thing as happened to my sister is about to happen to me.

As I may have mentioned elsewhere, (although I don't wish to sound obsessed), my lousy, stinking, rotten, clanking jalopy of a useless Renault Espace broke down the other day, for about the 10th time this year. The clutch cable had snapped, for the fifth time since I bought the ruddy car, second-hand, about a decade ago. What made it worse was that, only four days earlier, I had spent £219 on having the starter motor replaced.

My wife and I agreed that this was the end. We would never have it repaired again. We would have to buy a new car instead.

My wife went to see the very garage-man (not my sister's) who had fitted the new starter motor only four days earlier, and he told her that, as a special favour, he would tow the car away and get it scrapped, for a fee of only £30.

I knew in my sinking heart that this was what he would say, because the car in its present condition is quite unsaleable. And here is the really savage twist: it is unsaleable, not only because it doesn't go, but because a year ago, this very mechanic accidentally snapped the electric cable that governs the speedometer and mileometer, while he was attempting to repair something else that had gone wrong.

He promised at the time that he would mend it, but somehow he never got round to it. The result is that my last two MoT certificates record exactly the same mileage, as if the car hasn't moved an inch for two years. Nobody in his right mind would buy a car with a dodgy history like that. I refused to pay him to scrap the car, all the same.

Then, the day after he demanded £30 to tow my car away, the mechanic rang me at home. He said that he had good news: a friend of his in the trade was looking for spare parts for a Renault Espace. He might be able to give me a few quid for the car, after all. Just drop in the keys and the documents, including the MoT, he said, and leave the rest to him.

Now, I know that he is ripping me off (why does he want the MoT certificate, if he plans to break the car up for parts?) He knows that I know that he is ripping me off. But he also knows that I am an idiot who knows nothing about cars, and that I am totally at his mercy. I just need to get rid of the car, and I haven't got the time or energy to find somebody who will give me a fair price for it (the petrol in the tank, alone, is worth nearly £60, since I had just filled it up before it conked out; my efforts to siphon off the fuel have failed, as all my attempts to do anything practical always do). And here, at last, is the point of this article: my fantastically expensive education - paid for by my parents and the state - has equipped me perfectly to conjugate the pluperfect passive of the verb amare. I even know that the four strokes of an internal combustion engine are called induction, compression, power and exhaust. But that is a pretty useless thing to know, if you haven't the beginnings of an idea of how to mend a clutch cable.

My education taught me absolutely nothing of the basic skills needed to get through modern life. It has left me completely in the power of plumbers, mechanics, electricians, accountants, insurance salesmen, computer repairers and anybody else who wants to cheat me. They can all see me coming, a mile off.

It seems absolute madness to me that the Government is aiming to put 50 per cent of schoolchildren through higher education, only to emerge like me with useless qualifications such as history degrees.

On Thursday, the shadow education secretary, Damian Green, published a policy document subtitled The Crisis in Skills Education, urging schools to concentrate more on teaching skills that may be useful in life, such as how to mend a clutch cable. Like so much that comes from the Tory party these days, it has passed almost unnoticed in all the din of the infighting over the leadership. And, like so much else from the party, every word of it makes perfect sense.