TK's Blog

Clegg.

No.

Just no.

I'd be down with a freeze in the education budget, which would be a cut in real terms. I get it. The recession is bad. The deficit is ginormous, and it needs to be dealt with. I'm cool with that, really, I understand that I need to take the hit. My own place of education is facing a £400 000 cut in its budget. It's not pleasant, but thems the breaks, and sometimes you have to grin and bear it for the greater good, even if it's not your fault.

But the simple fact, Nicky, is that in a world where tertiary education is pretty much essential to get a good job you don't cut university funding by 80%. You just don't do it.

Also, you definitely don't do that by foisting the cost onto students so that people are £30 000 in debt as soon as they graduate, and have to factor the types of bursaries they can get into their decisions when choosing which universities to apply to.

Now, see if Clegg had said "OK, so we promised we'd scrap tuition fees, but the finances are fucked. So, Dave, how about we raise fees to £9000 a year for the next three years, but legislate that after 2014 when we're going to have eliminated the deficit we have to take steps to reduce them, and for graduates in those years we'll provide some sort of compensation when the economy's better" I'd have first said "Fuck, £27k is a lot of money," and then I'd have said "But... *grumble*... I guess that's how it goes,"
Even if he'd tried to say something like this and gotten overridden, it would have been nice. (To be fair, we don't know that he didn't, as he might be bound by the whole collective responsibility thing.)

But this...no.

Fuck no.

Also, the protest. In short, I Was Not Amused by the random vandalism and violence perpetrated by a minority (I've heard 0.3% of attendees) which snatched up all the airtime on the news. I suppose my thoughts on it can be condensed down to: "er, sorry, aren't you supposed to be a brainy type, being at uni and all? Get it the fuck together and start acting like you deserve higher education, capische?"

Ahem. I realise that smashing up the Tory HQ, in theory, is a motherfucking dream. But you don't go and do it, no matter how angry you are, or how twattish they're being.

People fought, sweated and died for the freedom to protest. There's no excuse for abusing it.

P.S. Never thought I'd say it, but the Met actually had just the right attitude, as far as I saw anyway. YMMV and all, but I'm not upset with them in the slightest; the few people I'm annoyed were protesters. Clearly, people, we are in the Twilight Zone.

P.P.S. Clegg's argument that actually graduates won't be paying all that much is actually horse manure. I ran the numbers he gave (Double and triple checked tyvm), and what it amounts to is that graduates on relatively low incomes (20-25k pa) will be paying around 15% of their salaries every year to pay for their degrees. Gross.

P.P.P.S. Gavin Shuker, PPS to Shadow SOS for Justice. I predict he'll go far. Just you wait, I said it first.