DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived Cleggeron era

Ivor Tiefenbrun

Ah, the founder of Linn? It all makes sense.

The band were called The Red Nile before they signed to Linn.

warsi a disgrace on the question time last night

she is the most transparent other than jez hunt (who at least has the decency to look fucking terrified now and then when being questioned) in her trotting out of signposts to the chosen narrative no matter what question she is asked bending it back around to the same three or four unrelated efforts to reframe the present and associated scary phrases to justify wtfe

Jesus, did anyone see Michael Heseltine with Ken Loach on Newsnight? Scratch beneath surface of even a (supposedly) liberal Tory and you find a foaming-at-the-mouth Neo-Nazi

yep

that's a bit of an overstatement. he said you couldn't tax the rich coz they'd run away. can't remember what else.

Mrs V told me it was great.

I think their Tories send their most idiotic candidates to Scotland in much the same way that the Catholic Church sent its worst paedophile priests to Africa

it did?? I thought it sent them like 5 miles down the road?

nb my uncle is a missionary in africa!

xpost

Called Loach a communist iirbtc

yeah he did. loach seemed offended by that, but, you know, it's kind of true, isn't it? think he used to brand himself as a trotskyist.

Last statement of Loach's I know of for certain he declared himself agin "Stalinism and Social Democracy". So cd well be/have been a Trot I guess, but in Heseltine's usage this is some quaint 80s throwback shit and not a debate about shades of Leftism.

Does Heseltine self-identify as a liberal? I thought he was a proud One Nation type, which doesn't necessarily square with being a liberal even in its current debased "cool with the gays and the windfarms" guise.

xpost

and maybe indicative of a kind of "yay unfinished business" vibe that a lot of less guarded Tories are giving off at the mo?

heseltine said loach was coming out with 'crypto-communist claptrap', which did sound kinda vintage

the context was that loach blamed heseltine and the tories for the present crisis. heseltine said, hang on, labour were in power for the last 13 years. they could have changed things. loach said, yeah well, they were basically tories.

and then he said you bastards (the tories) destroyed british manufacturing.

i guess the question is, in order to protect (eg) the car industry, do you restrict imports and run a command economy, as benn proposed -- and whether that's crypto-communism or not.

shit got heated for real.

my take on a lot of this now is that the Thatch government was an inevitable expression of forces that would've happened anyway i.e. those Dickensian fucks didn't actually create the modern global economy and the nationalised car industry would've failed whatevs and industry would've either moved where the labour was cheap or been undercut by others who did under any government.

Yeah I don't think they destroyed British manufacturing just for shits and giggles, although they would have loved the bi-product of taking down a unionised working class. But it's less about the state propping up declining industries and more about the state doing something proactive to replace those industries and those jobs, and the Tories generally aren't down with that shit.

George Osborne has been making "we need to make things again" noises, or at least he was in the run up to the election, but he's not really very clear on what if anything he intends to do about it.

I think by "things" he means "money"

(slight deja vu there - probably typed that same cheap zing during the election campaign)

not sure that britain/ireland are in a position to 'make' things again. design and patent, yeah sure. then get y'know paraguay or whoever to actually make it.

There was also the issue that the discovery of North Sea oil pushed up the value of the pound and made it more expensive to import from the UK. There was a choice between oil or manufacturing, and manufacturing lost.

david starkey on QT last week (I think) and this week this week has switched it up I'm sure he never used to be quite so openly extreme and mental in his views just emboldened by the coalition I guess

But it's less about the state propping up declining industries and more about the state doing something proactive to replace those industries and those jobs, and the Tories generally aren't down with that shit.

yup. but their new strategy of cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs while also cutting benefits is sure to stimulate the nation's inner entrepreneur.

Here's the Heseltine/Loach skirmish:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/9070679.stm

the context was that loach blamed heseltine and the tories for the present crisis.

Who's being simplistic now? Loach made the cardinal sin of blaming Heseltine personally and the Heseltine ego (which can be seen from space) was not about to put up with that

British aid worker killed in Afghan rescue operation may not have died at the hand of her captors, David Cameron says

Can't believe how much worse the UK's special forces have got under this government. Typical.

lol american special forces

can't believe how much worse another country's special forces have got under this government.

could be worse, could have been Philippines special forces
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11055015

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/oct/11/tuition-fees-graduates-browne-review

"Everybody has to compromise because the truth is that we all want the same thing," Cameron said.

wait what?

Who made the "putting the n into cuts" gag on here last week? Sandi Toksvig used it on Radio 4's News Quiz this week...

Take a bow.

Putting the N into 'cuts' there.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 7 October 2010 08:36 (5 days ago)

Good luck sending your kids to university, everyone

Mad props to New Labour for implementing the exciting pro-market reforms that helped make this all possible.

I kinda like the idea of R4 writers lurking on random messageboards. That's gotta be a depressing job tho.

guardian piece on browne there is pretty dumb.

Based on models prepared by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and the National Union of Students, the total cost of repayment for those in the income group £35,000-£40,000 would be £37,800 assuming a 30-year repayment period; for those earning £100,000, the cost would be £31,849, assuming a repayment of only four years.

virtually no one makes £100,000/year within four years of leaving university, and even then, i don't think a £200/year premium to get an extra 24 years on the borrowing period is all that onerous. not sure how i feel about higher fees generally - if this is about reducing deficit and debt, i genuinely don't know what the advantages/disadvantages of just transferring it into private hands are. but this line of attack is feeble.

It galls me to see people who had countless entitlements as university students beyond freedom from fees just kind of blithely pulling the rug out from under other people's children. Their kids will be fine, of course, because the children of the rich are worth spending money on while everybody else's kids are deprived using the rhetoric of 'fairness'.

Thinking about it, there's no way the Tories will put this through undiluted. They won't want a rift with the LibDems, and after the child benefit furore they'll want a middle class revolt even less. They might just reject it out of hand.

FWIW American tuition fees have more than doubled in 20 years:

http://most-expensive.net/college-tuition-university

Welcome to the awesome future!

Keep in mind that dollar amount is PER YEAR.

It galls me to see people who had countless entitlements as university students beyond freedom from fees just kind of blithely pulling the rug out from under other people's children. Their kids will be fine, of course, because the children of the rich are worth spending money on while everybody else's kids are deprived using the rhetoric of 'fairness'.

― are you robot? (suzy), Tuesday, 12 October 2010 10:16 (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

well that's the thing: we have to cut the deficit, because "we can't burden our children with this debt". but that's exactly what we're doing, just in a different way. otoh, if we didn't have fees, there would be far fewer places in HE and it wouldn't be the children of the rich that missed out.

I don't think HE can realistically carry on the way it is now tho - first degrees are already v. devalued compared to even 20 years ago. One of the problems I think is you have a system for creating graduates that's largely unexamined - there are still vocational degrees, but the idea that the BA is some kind of guarantee that people have a broad set of transferable skills suiting them to a broad range of jobs that can't be done by non-graduates is lying dead somewhere in the mid-70s.

I don't think that the sole value of a degree is in enhanced career prospects - but I don't think that this country as a whole has much of a coherent idea of what the value of a degree is any more.

That true in the United States as well but that hasn't stopped universities from churning out degrees and charging ever higher prices for them; unaffordable fees actually benefit the universities since they get a cut of the interest on student loans. It is a deeply deeply corrupt system and it's coming soon to a quad near you.

Yeah I don't think the pointlessness of a lot of this will make it stop - I guess that this Free Marketising of the system is one kind of response to pointlessness. Make a degree another commodity and sell it accordingly, and like all good commodities the consumer doesn't much have to think about what it's for.

A first degree might be devalued in some senses, but it's also the bare minimum requirement for a huge number of jobs in this country nowadays, which surely wasn't the case in 1990. There are also other benefits to the university system - improving social cohesion, social mobility - that will become eroded the more stratified our HE system becomes (and it's pretty stratified already).

I don't think HE can realistically carry on the way it is now tho - first degrees are already v. devalued compared to even 20 years ago. One of the problems I think is you have a system for creating graduates that's largely unexamined - there are still vocational degrees, but the idea that the BA is some kind of guarantee that people have a broad set of transferable skills suiting them to a broad range of jobs that can't be done by non-graduates is lying dead somewhere in the mid-70s.

I don't think that the sole value of a degree is in enhanced career prospects - but I don't think that this country as a whole has much of a coherent idea of what the value of a degree is any more.

― Sidonia von Bork Bork Bork (Noodle Vague)

Good post, would read again. Over here, a Master's is the equivalent of what a Degree was maybe only 15 years ago.

The increase in jobs requiring a level 5/6 qualification (often obtainable whilst in work rather than as an entry requirement) doesn't necessarily help the old-school 3 years full-time at Uni degree - in many ways I think it's another factor working against it.

I agree that the measure of the value of HE shd not be purely in terms of career - but I don't see many people in positions of influence who are making the case any more. The system as it stands seems to be a mix-up of old school "somewhere to send rich kids after public school", plus 1950s-style "preparing bright middle and working class kids for the civil service", plus an expansion driven by market economics and the lack of proper job opportunities for the under 21s.

I think what's needed is a totally revaluation of what HE is and how it's gonna be delivered and to who. That's never gonna happen, so instead we get what we've got right now. The funding issue is bad and stratifying - it doesn't really touch the underlying problems.

xxp for many jobs a first degree is the minimum requirement for getting a recruitment agent to look at your CV for more than 4 seconds.

noodle dyou reckon that maybe polytechnics etc weren't *that* bad?

otoh, if we didn't have fees, there would be far fewer places in HE and it wouldn't be the children of the rich that missed out.

― joe, Tuesday, October 12, 2010 10:36 AM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark

i sympathize with this, but people don't treat all HE institutions as equal, and im not sure that charging thousands of pounds to get into the good ones is really going to improve the social mix. i would even say it'll make it worse. the rest will be borrowing for a qualification that everyone says will earn them more money, but you have to wonder.

some of us already know