Clegg fails to defuse angry students
Nick Clegg has pleaded with students to “listen and look” before they join today’s protests over the Government’s plans to allow universities to charge up to £9,000 a year.
The Liberal Democrat leader admitted the proposal was “not my party’s policy” as he sought to justify his dramatic U-turn after pledging to phase out fees at the May general election. He said the Coalition’s policy was fairer than the graduate tax favoured by the National Union of Students (NUS).
He urged protesters: “Listen and look before you march and shout. Our plans will mean that many of the lowest income graduates will repay less than they do under the current system.”
Giving the Hugo Young lecture in London last night, the Deputy Prime Minister claimed the Government’s plans would make higher education “open to everyone” because universities that wanted to charge more than £6,000 a year would face “real sanctions” if they did not open their doors to the many.
He admitted he was “angry” about the small number of children from poor backgrounds getting into top universities.
How Labour could regain the initiative again on immigration
contribution by Matt Cavanagh
Back in May and June immigration – along with Iraq – quickly became the most popular answer to the question of Where Labour Went Wrong.
The sudden shift led some to dismiss this as a cynical ploy, but it isn’t: immigration has been a top five issue for a decade, and years before Gordon Brown’s encounter with Gillian Duffy it was clear that our credibility on it had broken down.
The leadership contenders and others who have called for the party to debate our approach to immigration are right, and the collection of essays published today by ippr is a good place to start.
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Irish bankers: a modest proposal
It is a melancholy object to those, who walk through Dublin, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabbin-doors crowded with hedge fund managers, followed by three, four, or six forex dealers, all in rags, and importuning every passing European Union bureaucrat and International Monetary Fund official for an alms.
Bank bosses instead of being able to work for their honest livelihood, are forced to employ all their time in stroling to beg sustenance for their helpless recent recruits who, as they grow up, either turn thieves for want of work, or leave their dear native country, to fight for the ever-diminishing number of job openings in the UK’s ailing financial services sector, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes or other various offshore tax havens in the West Indies.
Is Nick Clegg ditching his own principles on inequality?
Nick Clegg’s article in today’s Guardian is an important moment in the coalition government’s abandonment of the goal of reducing inequality.
The article addresses other important issues – party politics, the scope for progressive governments in an age of austerity – but I want to concentrate on what he says about inequality.
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E-Miliband: keep unions in Labour leadership
Ed Miliband is not going to listen to critics who say the unions should be disenfranchised from the Labour leadership election.
The Guardian today reports these comments:
What I don’t think is that it would be right to disenfranchise those union levy payers. There were hundreds of thousands of people who voted in that leadership election and were engaging with the party. It wasn’t about union barons. It was union levy payers.
The new taskforce looking at how Labour structures need an overhaul will be headed by Ed Miliband loyalist Peter Hain.
It will also look at how individual trade union members could be better involved in the leadership election.
They are not “seeking to drive unions out of the leadership process”, reports the Guardian. But:
At its most limited, following a report by Hain to next year’s conference, the party is likely to agree that members of the electoral college should only be able to vote once. Union levy payers who are also party members would not, as a result, have two votes.
Similarily, MPs might be prevented from voting as individual party members.
If some Blairites want one-member-one-vote, why not go all the way and give MPs just one vote too?
Students occupy three universities in protests
Students protesting against raising tuition fees are staging occupations in London, Bristol and Manchester.
Occupations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, UWE Bristol and Manchester Metropolitan University are ahead of this week’s national protests.
The protests and walk outs, set for Wednesday, have been backed by a statement signed by the president of the National Union of Teachers.
The statement says young people will be the “victims” of education cuts.
The organisers of this week’s protests say that an “unprecedented wave of student revolt is unfolding” – and they invoke the spirit of student protests of 1968.
Guess what? Ireland drank neo-liberal magic potion and it failed
This is what Duncan Weldon predicted yesterday morning:
But first, it is worth dealing with one central point: this bail out will not work. Without strong medium near (and preferably near term) growth, there will be no solution to Ireland’s problems and such growth will not emerge against a back drop of severe fiscal tightening, The medicine prescribed by the Irish government, and urged by the UK, will kill the patient.
Guess what? That’s exactly what had transpired by yesterday evening.
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Cameron in European pickle as leader leaves
[T]here was embarrassment for Mr Cameron as the leader of the right-wing alliance in the Strasbourg Parliament, which includes Tory MEPs, quit his party in Poland because he said it was too extreme.
Michal Kaminski, the leader of the European Conservative and Reformists (ECR) – formed when Mr Cameron snubbed the mainstream centre-right parties of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy – said the Tories’ main partner, Poland’s Law and Justice Party, was “being taken over by the far right”.
Senior Tories fear the ECR could break apart if Mr Kaminsky tries to remain its leader. If his former Polish party were to pull out, the group could collapse. Even if it survives, Tory MEPs would be in partnership with a party condemned as extremist by one of its former leaders.
Before the election, Nick Clegg condemned the Tories’ allies as “nutters, anti-Semites and homophobes” and the latest controversy has called into question Mr Cameron’s decision to pull out of the mainstream European People’s Party (EPP). Yet any attempt to rejoin the EPP would anger Eurosceptic Tories, whose hackles have been raised by the Irish bailout.
Another IDS blunder: cuts hit 1.35m families
Iain Duncan Smith’s plans for a ‘Universal Credit’ aim to simplify the benefits system and make sure that people are better off in work. The principle is admirable, but we already know that IDS and his team aren’t very good at the detail of how to implement their ideas.
So it is no surprise to discover that a new report by Family Action estimates that Under the Universal Credit the financial benefits of progressing in work, through increased hours or pay, would be cut for many working families – from allowing them to keep 30p for each additional £1 they earn, to around 24p for each additional pound earned.
Family Action also estimates that as many as 1.35 million households could see work progression incentives cut under the Universal Credit, and that more tax paying, working households in receipt of means tested benefits could lose rather than gain work progression incentives under the new system.
Once childcare costs and council tax benefit are included, Family Action find that under some of the models proposed in the White Paper, calculations suggest that Marginal Deduction Rates could effectively exceed 100% for some families, (meaning claimants would lose money if they worked longer hours).
So despite claims that no one will be worse off as a result of the introduction of Universal Credit, it turns out the government are planning to spend more than £2 billion on setting up a Universal Credit which will actually increase tax rates and decrease incentives to progress in work for more than 1.3 million working families. What an utter fiasco.
Stopping VAT abuse alone could save our school sport
Michael Gove is planning, for all practical purposes,to end sport in UK schools. As the Observer noted: yesterday
A battle is raging at the heart of government over a decision by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to slash £162m of sports funding in English schools as the country prepares for the 2012 Olympics and bids for the 2018 World Cup.
So for the sake of £162 million all but the richest children in the UK are to be denied access to competitive sport. But let’s ignore the political incompetence in Gove’s plan and instead ponder the alternatives he might have considered.
continue reading… »
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» Revealed: govt to restrict abortion counselling despite Nadine Dorries vote
» Would raising the tax threshold actually help the poorest?
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» Have Labour realised the election is more than three years away?
» Violence in the office
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» The world is entering the third phase of the crisis, warns ILO
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