Cameron: "Cuts will change our way of life"

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

I usually answer any question I'm asked, no matter how stupid you think it makes me look.

 

Of course you do:

 

Finally. Thank you.

 

 

 

Do we really need to go down this avenue again? I've got much more than 'an idea' of where money should be raised. Besides, it has been expressed many times on this forum, from getting the tax-dodging fuckers to cough up to scrapping Trident and stopping wars - and everything in between. Personally, I favour growth as the best way to reduce a deficit. Then again, I guess victimising families, students and those on benefits, all whilst bankers have 7bn in bonuses and Green shovels 300m overseas, is another way to go.

 

Let me ask you this; would higher education be one of the first places you focused your cuts? Especially considering your party got many of its votes on the back of promises to the people they're now pissing on. You're arguing fairly strongly in defence of the policy, despite it being the opposite of what your party have stood for.

 

 

 

Here is where I said '' In some regards the policy is an improvement, in other regards it isn't'', you should have noticed considering you quoted and replied to that post.

 

 

 

Can you please show me where it improves access to the poorest? We did go over this and, judging by the silence, I just assumed you accepted the point.

 

 

 

You don't half talk some nonsense. You do it all the time. I've picked you up on it at least 10 times. It seems like something you're not going to change or admit to anytime soon, so I'd sooner get to the business of arguing against your blanket statements.

 

 

 

That's just something we're going to have to disagree on. Again. Still, I acknowledge you withdrew the ridiculous comment about the IFS, which I'm grateful for.

 

 

 

I've given you several quotes, charts and graphs, as well as a link to the newest IFS report. I'm clearly not basing it on just the total debt (although, it wouldn't be invalid if I were doing that - it certainly plays part of the picture, so don't discount it).

 

Please, just read through the post with the details and IFS report again, and answer the simple question. Do you take back your statement about it being better in every way - something it clearly isn't according to the IFS - and do you now agree with me about it being some good things and some bad things? A yes or no will do (to the entire post, a one word answer to this question will do).

[Strontium]

would higher education be one of the first places you focused your cuts?

 

 

Not personally, no.

 

Can you please show me where it improves access to the poorest?

 

 

Grants, scholarships, repayments which don't kick in until earning £21k, part-time students now covered when they previously weren't, tuition cheaper for the poorest 30% of graduates. (I know I've said this before)

 

Do you take back your statement about it being better in every way - something it clearly isn't according to the IFS - and do you now agree with me about it being some good things and some bad things? A yes or no will do (to the entire post, a one word answer to this question will do).

 

 

And I know I answered this too.

 

Quite clearly it's not better to graduate with more debt, but I am not measuring the new regime on those grounds. I am measuring it on the following criteria:

 

• Improving access to higher education for the poorest
  
• More progressive tuition fee charges which hit the wealthiest more and the poorest less
  
• Repayments which don't kick in until you are earning a decent wage
  
• More sustainable for the country in the long-term
  

On all of those things I believe the new system to be an improvement.

 

Now if you want to measure it purely on having £10k debt versus having £20k debt, then you will disagree with me. But I think seeing it purely in those terms is simplistic.

[RedinSweden]

Well, it's certainly true that Labour lecturing anyone about broken promises is pretty rich, but I don't think it's especially constructive to employ tu quoque arguments.

 

I'd sooner focus on the weakness of the claims. To choose #3, since it's today's date: "In their manifesto, the Liberal Democrats pledged to pay for an extra 3,000 police on the beat".

 

There are two criticisms I'd make of this. Firstly, policies from one party's manifesto can hardly be called broken when that party is only part of a coalition government. It's never going to be possible for every policy from both parties to be implemented. Secondly, just because the number of officers is predicted to fall, this does not automatically mean there won't be more officers on the beat.

 

So all in all, pretty desperate stuff, and doesn't really divert attention from Ed M's thus far disastrous reign as Labour leader.

 

Handy.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Not personally, no.

 

Then why all that nonsense in response to my question about it being legitimate to complain about cuts in this area.

 

Grants, scholarships, repayments which don't kick in until earning £21k, part-time students now covered when they previously weren't, tuition cheaper for the poorest 30% of graduates. (I know I've said this before)

 

Yes, you've said that before. It doesn't answer the question. I'm asking how it 'improves access'. You're going on about repayments and graduates. That has nothing at all to do with access.

 

And I know I answered this too.

 

So you still believe, despite obviously being untrue, that it is better in every way? Even when you're not willing to judge the policy on total cost to the student - as it's somehow simplistic - I've shown you other things, nuanced or not, from the IFS report. Are you willing to either tell me why these things should be ignored or clearly withdraw your 'better in every way' line.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Handy.

 

Sounds great to me. Everybody run on free University, no tax, millions for every man woman and child, free blowjobs and then enter a coalition, agree to stop all education, 100% tax, take everybody's money and ban oral sex. That's politically legitimate.

[RedinSweden]

I assume what he means is that there is a level of compromise when entering a coalition. However, there is a difference in not being able to carry out a policy due to being in a coalition and going completely against a policy.

[Strontium]

Then why all that nonsense in response to my question about it being legitimate to complain about cuts in this area.

 

 

What nonsense would this be? All I said was that the budget is sorted now, so it's a bit late to do anything about it, and the question is how you spend that budget.

 

Yes, you've said that before. It doesn't answer the question. I'm asking how it 'improves access'. You're going on about repayments and graduates. That has nothing at all to do with access.

 

 

Of course it has everything to do with access, since finance is far and away the biggest barrier to access to higher education.

 

So you still believe, despite obviously being untrue, that it is better in every way? Even when you're not willing to judge the policy on total cost to the student - as it's somehow simplistic - I've shown you other things, nuanced or not, from the IFS report. Are you willing to either tell me why these things should be ignored or clearly withdraw your 'better in every way' line.

 

 

We're clearly not going to agree on whether the new system is better or not. I do consider it a big improvement on all the criteria I would use to judge it, even if it's not perfect.

 

Handy.

 

 

It's not really, is it? It's very unhandy, since people are going to kick us for not being able to deliver everything we wanted to, even though they know full well that we can't.

 

And people wonder why third parties have such a hard time breaking the duopoly.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

What nonsense would this be? All I said was that the budget is sorted now, so it's a bit late to do anything about it, and the question is how you spend that budget.

 

 

The nonsense I'm referring to is where you mentioned the £150b deficit.

 

Of course it has everything to do with access, since finance is far and away the biggest barrier to access to higher education.

 

No, Stronts, how much graduates pay over their lifetime doesn't have anything to do with the ability to access higher education. The ability to access it has stayed the same. Rightly so.

 

Judging by what I've heard and read from prospective students, it's certainly a disincentive.

 

We're clearly not going to agree on whether the new system is better or not. I do consider it a big improvement on all the criteria I would use to judge it, even if it's not perfect.

 

I've no doubt that to be true, but only because the criteria you use to judge it rejects any part of it that is negative. You're clearly not going to withdraw your comment about it being an improvement in every way, so you are just going to have to disagree with the me and the IFS.

 

It's not really, is it? It's very unhandy, since people are going to kick us for not being able to deliver everything we wanted to, even though they know full well that we can't.

 

And people wonder why third parties have such a hard time breaking the duopoly.

 

I think it's going to be even harder now.

[Vim Fuego]

I work for one of the universities in Liverpool and I've seen research carried out by my uni and several others about how the increase in fees will impact them and other universities in their respective areas. The common thread through all of them was that the post 92 establishments are going to really struggle with several going to the wall or having to merge to survive.

You can have the argument that this is a peril of the free market but these uni's are the ones that take on the students from the lower socio economic groups, how this is meant to improve access to HE is beyond me.

[WaltonRed]

I hate the myth uni's are skint.

 

Liverpool uni has fucking loads of shares in weapons manufactures and all sorts!

[dennis tooth]

Are higher tuition fees justified?

 

Are higher tuition fees justified by the cost of providing undergraduate education? Chris Goodall, businessman and author, breaks down the cost of one sought-after degree course, and comes to some controversial conclusions.

 

Many universities are positioning themselves to charge £9,000 a year in tuition fees. The arguments about whether this figure is acceptable will burn for years. But no-one seems to have asked a slightly different question: what does it actually cost to teach an undergraduate? Is a fee of £9,000 justified by the money a university spends on its teaching staff and the other undergraduate facilities? My assessment of the teaching provided to language students at one first-rate university suggests that it is not. In this particular case, the cost to provide a year’s teaching is about £4,500. In other words, there is no justification for charging any more than half the proposed maximum fee.

 

Details of my method of calculating this number follows in the next few paragraphs. The calculations may seem complicated but what I am simply doing is working out how many hours of teaching a student gets and what it costs in salaries and other costs to provide this tuition. It is very simple arithmetic and the results are conclusive.

 

a) I asked a 2nd year student of French and Spanish at University College London to write down the details of teaching she receives this year. She is given nine hours tuition a week in groups that range from 10 to approximately 30. The average class size is about 16.

 

b) She is taught a total of 21 weeks a year. The autumn and spring terms have a week in the middle in which no teaching occurs and there is no tuition at all in the summer term.

 

c) So this undergraduate gets 21 weeks multiplied by 9 teaching hours a year, making 189 contact hours a year. She is asked to write just two short essays a term plus a number of smaller exercises, so the marking load on the teachers is small. (It may be worth noting that she gets very little of teaching of spoken languages. Out of her own pocket she pays a Spanish native working in London to help her with the oral language).

 

d) My calculations then move on to estimating the cost of teaching her these 189 hours. Looking at the financial accounts of UCL, I can work out that the average employee is paid between £35 and £40 thousand. UCL encompasses a huge number of different components, including several hospitals. The average probably disguises a large number of lower paid people and also includes about 300 people who are paid over £100,000. I made the assumption that the average modern languages teacher is paid about £50,000 per year including his or her pension contribution. This figure mixes higher paid professors and young staff who have just joined the department.

 

e) In addition, we need to estimate the cost of administering the subject at UCL and spread this cost over the academic staff teaching modern languages. I have no easy way of calculating this figure but I don’t think it can add more than £10,000 a year to the direct cost of the teachers. It certainly wouldn’t be higher than this in a typical school or college. This means that the cost of staffing for modern language teaching is about £60,000 per teacher.

 

f) Staff costs, including pensions, form about 59% of the total expenses of running UCL. The buildings need maintenance, libraries need to be stocked, computers bought and rooms heated and lit. To get a figure for the full cost of a modern languages teacher, I therefore assumed that the staffing cost also represented 59% of the full cost of this individual, including all the ancillary functions. This takes the total cost of a teacher to slightly more than £100,000 a year.

 

g) I assume that the average modern languages teacher at UCL teaches 12 hours a week during the 21 weeks of student teaching a year.

 

h) He or she will therefore do 252 teaching hours a year. At a full cost of about £100,000, this means that an hour of teaching costs about £404.

 

i) Now consider the person I wrote about above. She gets 189 hours of teaching a year, but typically this is carried out in groups of about 16. If we take the hourly cost of the teacher (£404) and allocate this to our undergraduate, we multiply by the number of hours teaching the student gets but divide it by the number of people with whom she shares the teacher. This results in a total cost of her tuition of about £4,500 a year, one half the proposed maximum.

 

What does this calculation actually mean? It demonstrates that if we make very cautious assumptions, the UCL modern languages undergraduate will be getting very poor value for money if the university increases the fee to £9,000. Based on my estimate that of the full costs of a university teacher teaching 252 hours a year - equivalent to just over seven weeks work for a standard employee in another occupation working for 35 hours a week - the tuition fee should be no more than half this figure.

 

When I have shown this calculation to my friends in university employment, they make the following comments. First, they say that the main job of a university teacher is to do research, not teach undergraduates. Fine, I reply, my calculations assume that the teacher gets 31 weeks a year completely free of teaching. And even during the teaching terms she or he will only be in front of students for 12 hours, or about a third of the typical working week. (This leaves plenty of time for preparation of the seminars and lectures). The upshot is that university staff have plenty of time for active research, although to my mind it is questionable whether undergraduates should be paying through their tuition fee for this activity, however important it is.

 

The second objection is this. I assume that the university is broadly efficient, with a relatively small number of people supporting the teaching activities of, in this case, the modern languages department. Actually, my academic friends say, many universities are full of administrators and non-teaching staff. Once again, if this is true, I can see no reason why undergraduates should pay for this inefficiency. Secondary schools in the UK, which teach pupils for an average of about 25 hours a week over a 39 week year - and have to cope with marking substantial amounts of written work - get paid about £4,800 a year per pupil. Compare this to the UCL undergraduate I interviewed who gets nine hours teaching for little more than half the number of weeks of a school pupil and I think it is arguable that no undergraduate should be asked to pay more than the government’s allowance for secondary schools.

 

We all know what the real truth is. Universities want to do more research (on which their rankings and income strongly depend) and intend to use the higher tuition fees to subsidise this activity. But young people obliged to pay these inflated fees can appropriately question whether their money should be used to pay for the non-teaching activities of their universities. David Willets, minister for universities, might also suggest that an institution in which it costs £404 to provide one hour of teaching should be looking at radical ways of improving the efficiency of its activities.

[dennis tooth]

The Coalition needs to be honest about the Big Society

 

 

David Cameron and others have expended considerable energy attempting to articulate a vision of the Big Society as a response to excessive statism under New Labour. But Children’s Minister Tim Loughton admitted recently that most people, including the “unfortunate ministers who have to articulate it”, still do not understand what the Big Society means. This is somewhat surprising. Although Cameron only introduced the term ‘Big Society’ in November 2009, many of its central themes have been evident in his thinking since becoming Conservative leader in 2005. Both before and after the credit crisis of 2007, Cameron attacked the size and role of the ‘monolithic state’ and significant public sector cuts have for some time been seen as part and parcel of his Big Society vision.

 

It would be unfair to have expected a new government to come into power with a ‘detailed blueprint’ to realise such radical thinking. But it is remarkable, considering its gestation period, how under-developed the Big Society vision is. The potential for Cameron’s team to develop Big Society thinking has been significant but it remains bespoke and partial. It is still uncertain as to how the Big Society will emerge, either in practical policy terms or as an overarching political vision.

 

But whilst the Coalition appears unable or unwilling to outline their vision of the Big Society in a clear and coherent manner, the concept is relatively easy to define. It has two key strands. The first involves the redefining and scaling back of social and economic citizenship rights accrued by British society, particularly in the past century. Though citizens will continue to pay roughly the same level of taxes, they will receive less in return from the state and will be expected to do more themselves. Second, provision of public services will increasingly be founded on a hybrid model whereby the state’s role diminishes and a combination of community and voluntary groups, charities, social enterprises, mutually-owned cooperatives and private businesses will take over.

 

For most people, the norms of citizenship will, in light of the spending cuts, be fundamentally and detrimentally redrawn – life will be more demanding and potentially less rewarding. Therefore, there is a need to tie Big Society ideas to public sector cuts, reform and the retreat of the state as the former is seen to make the latter somewhat more politically and socially palatable. But, as Anna Coote has noted in OurKingdom, the impact of the cuts on civil society and communities will make the Big Society difficult at best to realise. The key challenge for Big Society advocates is to convince citizens of the benefits of social activism without drawing attention to the enforced nature of the transferal of responsibility from the state to individuals and communities. The Big Society has been introduced as a fait accompli without any potential for deliberation or renegotiation. Moreover, the ‘year zero’ approach adopted fails to recognise that citizens are already volunteering in large numbers to provide local services and it also overlooks the time constraints of a citizenry who work some of the longest hours in Europe.

 

The lack of uniformity of expected outcomes of the Big Society raises the potential for significant inequalities of public resources between communities. The Big Society overlooks socio-economic inequalities and assumes that all citizens are able to commit equally. But it is clear that some have more time and resources and will be able to sustain higher levels of citizen-run public services and social capital. Such differences between communities could provoke tensions and lead to protectionism of community-based resources such as libraries, parks and leisure facilities. Emphasis on bespoke solutions could also encourage some ethnic and religious groups to seek the protection of their own communities thus furthering social segregation. Cameron and other Big Society proponents appear to invest considerable faith in the organic renewal of society without acknowledging the significant potential for atomisation of citizenship and isolation of significant numbers of citizens from both state and society.

 

It is questionable whether the enforced nature of the spending cuts will provide stable conditions for strategic planning for public service provision. Though voluntary and charity organisations (VCOs) and community groups might wish to take over some delivery of some services, spending cuts will mean uncertainty about revenue streams and a considerable amount of time spent raising funds rather than helping people. Such groups may be willing but might lack resources and possibly the expertise to respond quickly to the impact of cuts.

 

 

The private sector is however well set to exploit such opportunities and further expand their influence in the public sector. The support of government (and the Conservative party) economic policy by Capita and other outsourcing companies would not appear to be coincidental. But as Mike Kenny has noted on OurKingdom, contract-based provision of services by community groups and VCOs could radically alter the ethos of civil society. Hybrid delivery partnerships are likely to encourage some third sector actors to move away from their founding principles or operational aims in search of funding and this will encourage them to adopt more commercial practices to meet instrumental targets. The encouragement by the Coalition of new relationships between such groups and both the state and private sector is likely to complicate and compromise the values of altruism and community engagement, as market forces and government policy directives take precedence. Partnerships with some private providers whose commercial motivations or interests are perceived as somewhat contentious or instrumental could also have future implications for how the public perceive and are prepared to support VCOs.

 

Francis Maude recently noted that the Big Society will not be measured, as there will be no targets. Moreover, he said, it will not be uniform or tidy, and there will be gaps. This view conveniently sidesteps the need for the Coalition to coherently define the remit of Big Society and its tangible outcomes. Such ambiguity provides scant encouragement for citizens with limited time and many could quickly become weary of extra responsibility in a climate of cuts where the state will become increasingly remote. The Big Society is at present an open-ended aspiration that does not allow citizens to gauge progress or assess the extent to which they have succeeded, or not. Failure to provide such clarity could see some citizens become quickly dispirited and disincentivised. Unless a state of perpetual Big Society revolution is envisaged, there is a need to articulate an ‘end vision’ that clearly defines the rights and responsibilities of citizen and state.

 

Ian Birrell, a former speechwriter to Cameron, has argued that the lack of understanding of the Big Society and the absence of specific outcomes does not matter; it is more important that the public respond to Cameron’s vision. It is unclear, however, why the public should subscribe to a Big Society vision that is clearly a work-in-progress and is at present in danger of meaning everything and nothing. Its application in an ever-growing but disparate range of policy areas is likely to further confuse the public whilst making it ever more difficult to coherently define. The Big Society will quickly become associated with ad-hoc policy-making if the Coalition is unable to provide an honest and coherent framework of post-cuts citizenship and the minimum standards of public services citizens can expect after paying their taxes. Unless government is more honest about the Big Society, it will further provoke resentment amongst a cuts-weary public, before disappearing into the political ether.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Always nice to see the Conservatives showing respect for Northerners.

[dennis tooth]

Don't believe Clegg's mantra of 'progressive' education reform

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Stuart Weir, 9 December 2010

About the author

Stuart Weir is founder of Democratic Audit at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex, and co-founder of Charter 88.

I am utterly sick of hearing Nick Clegg and other Lib Dems reiterating their mantra that the package of proposals surrounding the rise in university tuition fees is progressive because it will hit higher earning graduates more than lower earners, because it is less punitive than the current system, because a few students from poor households may receive scholarships and because, outlandishly, the package will foster social mobility.

 

They don’t get it. Their pledge was to oppose increases in tuition fees and gradually to phase them out. The essence of this pledge was that the balance between state and personal funding of higher education was wrong, and that the state should shoulder a higher proportion of the costs. Furthermore, as Chris Goodall has noted, if we look at the costs of teaching an undergraduate, there appears to be no justification for universities to charge up to £9,000 a year in tuition fees. The students who are protesting, and those of us who support them, do not believe that it is right to shovel a huge debt burden on their generation, and succeeding generations, in order to shoulder what are set to be the most prohibitive Higher Education costs in Western Europe.

 

Moreover, the abolition of educational maintenance allowances will prove a huge blow to any hopes of greater social mobility, as will in my view the general rise in the costs of higher education. I fear that these costs are likely to prove a major deterrent for children from poor and less well-off households who might otherwise have gone to university.

 

By the way, I also think that Labour are behaving like weasels. I doubt that the graduate tax is a genuine alternative to the coalition government's proposals. I trust that they will seek out a way of giving young people an equal and genuine opportunity of going to university that does not cripple them with debt afterwards.

[Dirk]

Always nice to see the Conservatives showing respect for Northerners.

 

The liberal arm of the Tory party will, no doubt, be outraged by this remark.

[Guest The Chimp]

I don't know if it's been covered so apologies in advance. Also, it may seem a truly stupid question but . . . .

 

If it's a coalition, and by this I guess a partnership which implies give and take, why couldn't the Liberals simply have said "No. Look we're happy to work alongside you and we accept that if it's going to work there has to be give and take on either side, but this was a specific part of our manifesto - something which we ran on. Given not only the obvious faith our constituents (shown by voting us in ) but by their support their implied backing for this policy, we simply can't support it." What would have happened then?

 

Again, I try and keep abreast of UK news but it's not so easy being over here - internet or not.

[dennis tooth]

Always nice to see the Conservatives showing respect for Northerners.

 

Care to backdown from portraying Labour as unlikely to be implementing the Browne report though?

Thought you might have a skewed opinion educated by the Guardian, Browne, formerly of BP who provide a significant proportion of it's advertising, that's Browne, so you have a nose through now. I'll just wait here on ignore shall I?

[dennis tooth]

I don't know if it's been covered so apologies in advance. Also, it may seem a truly stupid question but . . . .

 

If it's a coalition, and by this I guess a partnership which implies give and take, why couldn't the Liberals simply have said "No. Look we're happy to work alongside you and we accept that if it's going to work there has to be give and take on either side, but this was a specific part of our manifesto - something which we ran on. Given not only the obvious faith our constituents (shown by voting us in ) but by their support their implied backing for this policy, we simply can't support it." What would have happened then?

 

Again, I try and keep abreast of UK news but it's not so easy being over here - internet or not.

 

Reason?

 

This is grown up politics son.

[Section_31]

I don't know if it's been covered so apologies in advance. Also, it may seem a truly stupid question but . . . .

 

If it's a coalition, and by this I guess a partnership which implies give and take, why couldn't the Liberals simply have said "No. Look we're happy to work alongside you and we accept that if it's going to work there has to be give and take on either side, but this was a specific part of our manifesto - something which we ran on. Given not only the obvious faith our constituents (shown by voting us in ) but by their support their implied backing for this policy, we simply can't support it." What would have happened then?

 

Again, I try and keep abreast of UK news but it's not so easy being over here - internet or not.

 

The reason IMO is that Clegg is a Tory in all but name, he always has been, so the coalition is technically not between the Tories and the Lib Dems, it's between Cameron and Clegg. They're remarkably similar, right down to schooling and background. (I'd like to point out here that I've always thought clegg was a tit, and was called about it many times by SD)

 

The Tories are going along with it because they're getting what they want, there's really no reason for them to agitate, the Lib Dems are going along with it because they're being manipulated by Clegg and because they are by their very nature a timid party.

 

The level of manipulation is easy to see in that party from the top down, right down to Cable's pathetic attempt to slate capitalism in the Lib Dem conference, when it was already known that all speeches were cleared by Downing Street.

 

It's all really patronising shite, and yet to hear Lib Dem activists keep pushing the coalition card is pathetic. If I was a dyed in the wool Lib Dem i'd be setting people on fire.

[Guest The Chimp]

Cheers Mark. To be honest I sort of knew that - or at least suspected as much. The simple answer to me was that they could have said no if they'd really have wanted to. Again, as I'm not in the UK anymore (and indeed have been out for so long now that I've not any real grasp on the subleties) I wanted simply to find out if it was true. I'm genuinely hoping there might be an alternate view put forward as it would be interesting to gauge if I'm doing the Liberals a disservice and that I am actually being a bit naive as Dennis points out. Indeed speaking of Mr. Tooth, he's had me laughing in three seperate threads in the last five minutes. Tried to rep but have to spread.

[dennis tooth]

Wish it was funny mate but Labour are exactly the same as the other two, what's stopping them coming up with a decent populist alternative?

Oh yeah, the Labour party themselves, come on Ed surely you have something in you blood other than a stupid grin and a posh voice? Oh, no, you don't do you?

 

Same old.

 

Bout the only thing you can do is laugh, or we'd be dead inside also...........

 

Where are the sleeping pills?

 

(Victor Meldrew)

[melons]

Always nice to see the Conservatives showing respect for Northerners.

 

The thing is though, did anyone expect anything different from the tories this time around? People slant it and say it's not a tory government but a coalition, in reality it's nothing but a few extra lap dogs at the tory feet.

[WaltonRed]

Its going to go off in 2011 I reckon.

[Whelan]

This is quite funny, considering the recent arguments against free education (you know, non useful degrees)

 

Nick Clegg, Degree – Social Anthropology

David Cameron, Degree – Philosophy, Politics and Economics

Michael Gove, English – Lady Margaret

George Osborne, Modern History

Jeremy Hunt, Degree – Philosophy, Politics and Economics

Danny Alexander, Degree- Philosophy, Politics and Economics

 

At least Vince Cable has a 'useful' degree. If you look at the jobs they all had before Politics, Clegg worked on the Nation with Christopher Hitchens, Cameron Pr.

 

Taken together with the disolution of the EMA, and this mornings notice that the money for underprivilaged pupils will not be targetted at vulnerable areas, and you should ask questions!

 

But Matt won the X Factor, so you know, its not all bad!

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

The liberal arm of the Tory party will, no doubt, be outraged by this remark.

 

I'm sure Clegg has kicked the door to Cameron's office from its hinges.

 

The thing is though, did anyone expect anything different from the tories this time around? People slant it and say it's not a tory government but a coalition, in reality it's nothing but a few extra lap dogs at the tory feet.

 

It seems that these things go in cycles. They got most votes this time around, so somebody must have thought they were alright.