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

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

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.

tbf the review does propose part-time students get equivalent financial support to full-time ones, which makes this route a lot more attractive. agree with your broader point: i think eg david willetts is well aware of this, but also aware of how mental the conservative base is about university entrance. suspect i know which will win.

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.

it's not entirely clear how it's going to shake out. there's a chance that £6,000 will just become a fairly standard fee: oxbridge might feel charging more would be politically difficult, and they'll be penalised with clawbacks if they raise it higher anyway. at the same time, apparently arts and humanities funding is basically a thing of the past, so everyone will charge £6,000 for those courses because that's what it costs on average-ish. subsidy for science & engineering courses might just end up being used to keep them more or less the same price as arts courses.

along with that is the removal of the cap on recruitment at an institutional level, which is probably going to create a massive squeeze on a bunch of undifferentiated post-92 institutions, as they have to compete with expansionist rivals with better reputations. since those (not lumping all former polys together but some of them at least) are the ones where the promise of extra earnings is particularly weak, maybe that's no bad thing.

but it's really hard to guess the total impact of these changes, and the water's badly muddied by the govt's deficit reduction plan: once they've raised their fees, unis will still have less money than they do now, and students are going to be asked to pay vastly more for a worse experience. but i'm not convinced that the last government were wrong to choose fees and an expansion of HE places, as long as you recognise that HE doesn't have to mean a three year degree at university.

on second thought, i'm probably wrong about the fees, they're going to charge more than £6,000, the clawbacks aren't very tough.

i suspect that the extra money going into the top universities will translate into nothing more than fatter salaries for overrated globe-trotting academics, so we can 'compete' with the americans for 'talent'

they've seen their professional peers getting equally grotesque pay increases in the last couple of decades, so they can justify it that way

degrees prob shouldn't matter as much as they do, i'm fairly sure if i had no degree it'd have made no difference to my career so far. in fact the bbc scheme i got in on wanted people without degrees as a preference.

A degree is just another way of proving you can get through a system with a basic level of achievement/success, which is about all it proves I think.

surely cheaper to give everyone championship manager

shh don't tell my dad but that's actually what happened, more or less

student of the year, now he's a dick

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.

It won't be just 'the good ones' that charge significantly more. From the BBC site:

The report models an 80% cut in the teaching grant to universities, showing a slight drop in their overall income if all universities charged fees of £6,000, and a slight rise if they all charged £7,000

So all universities will have to pretty much double fees to survive.

Yeah but the market will decide whether or not they can get away with it innit.

"This is a complex and very difficult issue. But everybody wants the same thing - not only sustainable funding for universities in the decades ahead but also a system where the teaching you receive at universities, there's no up front cost for it, it's free at the point of use, that we encourage more students from poorer backgrounds into university than is presently the case. And, crucially, when people pay back for their tuition they only do it when they can afford it and people who earn more pay a bit more back than others."

was wondering how nick clegg was setting himself up for this enormous u-turn. what a load of shit: "free at the point of use" is a staggeringly dishonest way to describe fees and loans. wonder how far the coalition will take that redefinition of the concept with the NHS.

"everybody wants the same thing" is obviously going to be a coalition catchphrase. suppose new labour set the blueprint for pretending to be ideology-free technocrats but even so this is particularly grating.

Well, yeah, so the options are: charge 7k, not enough people are willing to come to your university and pay that, you have to close OR don't charge 7k, whoops you've gone bust, you have to close.

xpost to Matt

i guess it may be that a lot of universities close, which is bad for the people who work in them

otoh, students might be bullied into borrowing money for something that isn't that worthwhile and the universities will keep going -- this seems more likely to me

absolutely amazing use of 'free at the point of use', fucking hell

Joe, is that a direct quote from Clegg? Where did you find it?

Oh, found it myself.

I was being facetious about the market, I don't actually believe it, although I'm sure the govt wouldn't be that arsed to see a few universities going bust and/or closing several departments.

This isn't perfect and it's got some lol spelling mistakes but here's a pretty chilling infographic about the US system:

http://www.collegescholarships.org/research/student-loans.jpg

yeah, emily, it's just from the lib dems site. i was looking for this, RIP lib dems' sole distinctive policy position:

Liberal Democrats are the only party which believes university education should be free and everyone who has the ability should be able to go to university and not be put off by the cost.

Our 6 point timetable for scrapping tuition fees:

1 Scrap fees for final year full-time students
2 Begin regulating part-time fees
3 Part time fees become regulated and fee loans become available to part time students
4 Expand free tuition to all full-time students apart from first year undergraduates
5 Expand free tuition to all part-time students apart from first year undergraduates
6 Scrap tuition fees for all first degree students

"everybody wants the same thing"

ie power.