I know I'm given to the occasional hyperbole, but today I learnt that we are well and truly buggered. Britain will not be the same again. Today I learnt that the government has cut ALL arts and humanity funding for universities from 2012. And the cap imposed means that the University of Manchester, for example, can't afford to continue teaching humanities courses because there isn't enough money to cover the costs.
Modernity was caused by the establishment of social sciences - the intellectual and cultural movements - allowing us to better understand each other and our history. We learn politics and history because it helps us avoid conflict in the future. We learn geography and geology to understand how we impact the land around us. Psychology helps us to understand ourselves and tackle mental health.
Instead, by very definition, the state will only pay for the education of people because it is connected to science and industry. Learning for learning's sake, for the sake of knowledge and understanding has been deleted from our society. Only the wealthy will be able to afford to become educated social workers. Our TV, film, computer games industries are buggered because there will be no-one around to teach anyone about beauty.
I always knew the Conservatives thought less people should go to university, but will achieve it by cynically closing almost half of university courses. Going to university will no longer be the norm. I know the rise in Tuition Fees will grab the headlines, but in three years we will wish we focussed on the real damage done behind the headlines. Heck, even the VC of Oxford is angry. and if the dean of the pinnacle of privilege is angry, then something is seriously wrong!
Wednesday 3 November 2010
Tuesday 19 October 2010
This is the last night of our generation
Tomorrow, Everything Changes.
Tomorrow will be the final proof that a new generation of decision-makers are in charge, and that an entirely different generation has to adapt to the lonely land of frustration of opposition.
Tomorrow will be proof that opposition isn't worth it.
Tomorrow we will be reminded of our sacrifices. The struggle of our internal conflict between how we might wish the world to be and what we know we are capable of making it into. The energy we placed into believing that we could win the argument because people believed our argument. We delivered leaflets and speeches, oiled the machinery of politics with our commitment and passion. Made friends. Made enemies. Made lives with loved ones, while a shared experience enveloped us.
It was the shared experience of being part of something important but, crucially, also something that could make changes, make decisions - say something and make it happen. And we did it all with a sense of responsibility.
And tomorrow we will be cruelly reminded that responsibility lies with someone else.
We told them tomorrow would come. We told them that there was an insidious under belly to the Conservatives. That they were pretending to be reasonable, fronted by a reasonable guy - but the reason they claimed so many times to have had "a clause 4 moment" was because they never actually challenged and changed themselves in the same way we had.
Ideologies mean competing non-compatible ideas. That's why tomorrow everything will change. Institutions, assumptions, traditions - all torn down in the name of the new ideology. Tomorrow we have to start again.
Validity of public services - start again
Value of higher education to the wider populace - start again
Value of helping your neighbour because they are poorer than you - start again
Value of investing in our communities and localities - start again
The country will pay the price of this new ideology - 250,000 jobs. 250,000 people will know the pain of unemployment, insecurity, broken marriages and mortgage foreclosure.
Tomorrow consensus leaves us. Tomorrow we will enter a new world, and we must learn to win the argument again. The task seems horrendous and momentous, intimidating even. But we must. We have a responsibility.
SH
Tomorrow will be the final proof that a new generation of decision-makers are in charge, and that an entirely different generation has to adapt to the lonely land of frustration of opposition.
Tomorrow will be proof that opposition isn't worth it.
Tomorrow we will be reminded of our sacrifices. The struggle of our internal conflict between how we might wish the world to be and what we know we are capable of making it into. The energy we placed into believing that we could win the argument because people believed our argument. We delivered leaflets and speeches, oiled the machinery of politics with our commitment and passion. Made friends. Made enemies. Made lives with loved ones, while a shared experience enveloped us.
It was the shared experience of being part of something important but, crucially, also something that could make changes, make decisions - say something and make it happen. And we did it all with a sense of responsibility.
And tomorrow we will be cruelly reminded that responsibility lies with someone else.
We told them tomorrow would come. We told them that there was an insidious under belly to the Conservatives. That they were pretending to be reasonable, fronted by a reasonable guy - but the reason they claimed so many times to have had "a clause 4 moment" was because they never actually challenged and changed themselves in the same way we had.
Today I was told by a trade union official that the people have forgotten how to demonstrate. I think they have forgotten how to vote.
Our generation believed we had triangulated out conflict, triangulated in cohesion and consensus. Blair and Clinton seemed to be the end of ideological headbutting. Then came Bush, now Cameron - and the result? Demonstrations and millions of people who regret the way they voted.
They bought into the consensus; that we are all of-the-centre; that no-one in a position of power would introduce massive change just for ideological reasons.
Ideologies mean competing non-compatible ideas. That's why tomorrow everything will change. Institutions, assumptions, traditions - all torn down in the name of the new ideology. Tomorrow we have to start again.
Validity of public services - start again
Value of higher education to the wider populace - start again
Value of helping your neighbour because they are poorer than you - start again
Value of investing in our communities and localities - start again
The country will pay the price of this new ideology - 250,000 jobs. 250,000 people will know the pain of unemployment, insecurity, broken marriages and mortgage foreclosure.
Tomorrow consensus leaves us. Tomorrow we will enter a new world, and we must learn to win the argument again. The task seems horrendous and momentous, intimidating even. But we must. We have a responsibility.
SH
Tuesday 7 September 2010
Life. Better.
I am moved to finally talk about Better Off Ted - an amazing sitcom airing on FX. It's set inside a massive global US coporation - Veridian Dynamics - that half the time doesn't know what it's doing.
It's already been cancelled in the States, but if you have the time, it is definitely worth watching the first two series.
Quote:
"The company loves its money. If they could, they'd go to strip clubs and throw naked women at money."
And this second video is definitely NOT Safe For Work
It's already been cancelled in the States, but if you have the time, it is definitely worth watching the first two series.
Quote:
"The company loves its money. If they could, they'd go to strip clubs and throw naked women at money."
And this second video is definitely NOT Safe For Work
Wednesday 19 May 2010
A lesson in futility
Listening to radio4 today and the news comes on.....
9:01 - impressed by Cleggs proposals for reform, including the ability to petition against laws that infringe my civil liberties
9:02 - decide to petition against Theresa May's new law to allow the police to take me directly to court, for infringing my civil liberties.
SH
Wednesday 20 January 2010
Good, good, news!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8469648.stm
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Monday 18 January 2010
Was indepence worth 21.6 billion dollars?
The history of Haiti is interesting and a fact I discovered today is
mind blowing when you consider the disaster and the costs of sending
aid.
Haiti, a French colony, was only granted independence as long as the
new country recompensed their colonial masters for the loss of
plantations and slaves.
It took them over a hundred years to achieve and the value of what
they repaid (which included the interest, natch) was, at 2004 prices,
$21,685,135,571.
And for the record - the cruise ships >>should<< have operated
normally (as per their contract) and arrived at the island. Haiti has
suffered a terrible tragedy - don't wish their economy away as well
out of some petty left-wing sense of envy-politics.
SH
Social Mobility takes centre stage
My god Ed Balls is getting better - a fine interview on the Politics Show yesterday, when he got onto the topic of today's social mobility announcements.
It's a very welcome development that Gordon Brown and Alan Milburn can come together to discuss this topic, because I think Milburn's research last year, went a long way to describing the problem of how quality well paid jobs are increasingly being filled by those from privileged backgrounds, and the more typical working class weren't working their way into them.
On this, I think Ed Balls missed the trick against Suchet. Suchet's point was that Social Mobility has hardly moved after 13 years of a Labour Government.
But in truth, these things take generations before you even know if you are making progress.
To be able to measure whether more working class people are successful lawyers, requires at least 4-6 years while they go through education (and only because Labour have put half of all 18 year olds into uni at all) and then we have to watch them struggle through early years of work.
Aspiration is, of course, still a huge issue about whether an individual decides to apply themselves to making it in the professions, and we still have work to do on that level and with mentors.
But it did occur to me that David Cameron's claim to be 'brazenly elitist' in his new plans for teachers, will encourage more upper class kids to become teachers, opening up opportunity in the other professions.
No, I don't believe it will happen either…
SH
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Why this isn't 1997 - part 115.3
Gordon Brown's activities today are putting election attention (Elention? Attection? Anyone?) on the middle classes.
Meanwhile in the blogosphere, there have been a number of right-wing bloggers attacking trade unions, and their raison d'être.
The right-wing argument goes that we don't live in a world of mass workplace exploitation anymore, because we are zipping along in our own self-employed consultant flexible-working paradises (Paradisii?).
In many ways they might be right. There are trends for future working patterns which will lead people to be much more in control over their own destiny and able to make choices about working patters etc. (much introduced as legislation by this labour government), and they are also right that higher-level skills has also led to improvements.
However, let's not be ignorant of the fact that a great deal of people still work in situations where they are being exploited. The need for Trade Unions is still great in this modern age as in those before it.
And yet the modern Conservative will bang away instead at the need to tear them down because it is inconceivable to him that there could be any other answer else - "you mean the private sector, can be 'gasp' nasty to people??!?"
Cameron's Conservatives are one-view people. In 1997 Tony Blair and Gordon, and the New Labour project took seriously the importance of looking through the prism to identify the myriad different lives that Britain lives.
Cameron doesn't do that - and on election day his lack of total support will reflect that.
SH
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Tuesday 12 January 2010
Wednesday 6 January 2010
Think Politics Doesn't Affect You?
I only wish that last night the hundreds of cars that I was stuck with crawling into Liverpool with all understood that politics failed them last night.
Sometimes we have to appreciate that politics isn't about high falluting ideas and principles.
Sometimes it's about whether we have enough grit. Salt mined in Cheshire and transported 15 miles away to Liverpool.
And last night that didn't happen. Everybody in every pub, in every newsagent knows that Liverpool City Council, through incompetence, ran out of grit yesterday.
We should do well to remember that voters expect services to be well run - and they'll punish those that can't. Just like they'll punish the Lib Dems later this year.
SH
Sometimes we have to appreciate that politics isn't about high falluting ideas and principles.
Sometimes it's about whether we have enough grit. Salt mined in Cheshire and transported 15 miles away to Liverpool.
And last night that didn't happen. Everybody in every pub, in every newsagent knows that Liverpool City Council, through incompetence, ran out of grit yesterday.
We should do well to remember that voters expect services to be well run - and they'll punish those that can't. Just like they'll punish the Lib Dems later this year.
SH
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