Leaked NUS memo calls HE reforms ‘progressive’
The Times tonight has published extracts of a memo leaked from the National Union of Students that will cast an even deeper shadow over its embattled leader Aaron Porter.
The newspaper reports (paywall) that the memo, circulated to NUS officers, appears to contradict its own stance of opposing the government’s Higher Education reforms.
Curiously however, the Times has not posted the full memo online.
The article states:
A memo from the National Union of Students (NUS), seen by The Times, advises its elected student officers that campaigning against high fees could backfire and that they should hold talks with their universities instead.
The NUS has publicly opposed any rise in tuition fees but the briefing note appears to contradict that stance, calling the Government’s higher education reforms “progressive”. It also admits that funding cuts are not as drastic as the union has claimed.
The five-page briefing note was aimed at NUS officers on campuses and focused on discussions on increasing fees.
The article goes on to say:
Aimed particularly at universities in the Russell Group and the 1994 Group of smaller research universities, it cautions NUS officers against trying to stop universities setting the maximum fee. It says that “simply campaigning for a low fee might not generate the results you require (especially inside the Russell and 1994 Group)”.
On the reforms of student finance, with a high repayment threshold and payments spread over 30 years, the note says that “the vastly increased numbers of graduates that will never pay the loan off are in fact what makes the system relatively progressive”.
Bizarrely enough, Porter himself has been highlighting in the news that most universities will end up charging the maximum £9000 amount.
In the Times article, Porter defends the memo’s advice saying he only called the loan repayments system “a small progressive element within a deeply regressive package”.
There is no official statement by the NUS however.
It also points out that many radical student groups have decided to back Essex university graduate Mark Bergfeld to challenge Aaron Porter at the NUS elections in April.
This Saturday: where does politics online go from here?
contribution by Sian Berry
This Saturday, at the Progressive London conference hosted by Ken Livingstone, I’ll be chairing a discussion on politics and new media, so I’ve been reflecting on how quickly things can change.
It’s been nearly three years since the first Blog Nation, organised by Sunny Hundal and the Guardian (pictures here). It was pretty much a crisis meeting: where the main question seemed to be (I paraphrase) ‘Why the hell is the political web so dominated by right wingers?’, with ‘and men!‘ as a strong additional current of complaint.
A lot has changed since then, including the rise of social networks. At last, I think, the progressive left has caught up online.
continue reading… »
Daily Mail asks us to stop quoting an article
Have had a very interesting email from the Daily Mail today.
It said:
Dear Sir/Madam,
It appears that you have reproduced parts of an article from our website (link below).
We have received a complaint from the Press Complaints Commission about this article and have as a result removed it from our websites and agreed to request that you do the same.
We would therefore ask that you remove this material and confirm removal.
Yours sincerely,
Deputy Managing Editor
MailOnline
The blogpost in question criticised the Daily Mail article for the way it portrayed the death of young model murdered by her ex-boyfriend. According to the Daily Mail she was “killed by a tawdry dream”.
Out of respect for the family of the bereaved, I’ve taken the article off. Turns out DailyQuail and Claude Carpentierie also received the same email on the same topic.
It’s interesting that the PCC is forcing the Daily Mail to hunt down websites where the article has been quoted and requesting them to take it off too.
Credit where credit is due, I guess? This might prove tedious for the Daily Mail soon enough though, give how many retractions they have to issue all the time.
Daily Quail has asked for clarification of why PCC is asking for removal of blog content and why Mail is asking on their behalf.
Thilo Sarrazin: what limit to ‘no platform’?
Few current figures in public life are so widely execrated that Jewish groups and opponents of Islamophobia alike would seek to deny him the chance to address a public meeting at a London campus. But former Bundesbank executive Thilo Sarrazin manages to make the cut.
The German Society at the London School of Economics invited Sarrazin to participate in a panel discussion, due to take place on Monday night. The title was ‘Europe’s Future: the Decline of the West’.
continue reading… »
Ed Miliband’s article for The Sun – reading between the lines
Ed Miliband wrote his first article for the Sun newspaper yesterday, which I thought was fairly significant for what it indicated.
Some will say, with good reason, that Labour should have nothing further to do with News International. But if the UK’s biggest tabloid invites you to attack the government, you are unlikely to turn it down.
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Tory MP Nadine Dorries’ aide quits; blames blogger for “smears”
Only a little over a week ago, blogger Tim Ireland published two blog posts raising legitimate questions about Dorries’ financial relationship with Lynn Elson and her company, Marketing Management (Midlands) Ltd.
Both articles did little more than aggregate information from public sources. Now Elson has started putting out allegations of harassment against Tim and calling it “spiteful and fabricated tittle-tattle”, while saying nothing of the issues involved.
continue reading… »
Schools search for poor pupils to boost budgets
Schools fearing budget squeezes are trawling classrooms for poorer pupils to boost funding. They are urging parents in households earning less than £16,190 a year to sign up their children for free school meals – even if they don’t eat them.
The government, which is cutting public spending by billions of pounds to slash the national debt, plans in part to base future funding on the number of low income pupils on the register. A primary way of measuring this is the number of students having free meals.
…
A county council spokesman said: “Funding has not been cut. However, schools will have to manage various budget pressures arising from changes in pupil numbers, inflation, etc. The pupil premium is a new government grant aimed at supporting disadvantaged children.
“It will be allocated on the basis of free school meal eligibility, so it is important that parents who are on a low income register, so that schools receive the new grant to support pupils.”
How Cameron’s new modernising advisor sees the Conservative party
Andrew Cooper is to become Downing Street director of strategy, having been head of the pollster Populus.
There was a nervous reaction from Tim Montgomerie, the influential editor of ConservativeHome, who quickly tweeted:
Andrew Cooper once described the Tory grassroots as “vile” to me. And now he’s head of strategy for David Cameron.
There is good evidence that they have substantive reasons to be nervous.
The new director of strategy certainly takes a pretty much diametrically opposed view of why the Tories fell short at the last election to that offered in the ConservativeHome post-election inquest.
Cooper strongly supports the thesis that the Conservatives fell short because voters did not feel that they had changed enough – which does indeed cast the Tory party as much more the problem than the solution.
Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the evidence that Cameron is no longer seen as more centrist than his party by the public. But Cooper will probably fear the truth in Ed Miliband’s observation that “we are seeing the recontamination of the Tory brand“.
This was how I reported Andrew Cooper’s critique of the Tory election campaign for the New Statesman.
He said last night that the strategic weakness of the Tory campaign was always to respond with an “unremittingly negative” attack on Gordon Brown, which failed to take on board how far the decisive electoral question remained voters’ doubts about the Conservatives. This meant that they failed to secure enough support – most notably in Scotland, in London (particularly among non-white voters), and among public-sector workers and the less well-off, where those who agreed it was time for a change remained repelled by the risk of the “same old Tories”.
As the Tory leadership realised this, they began to make “much more detailed preparations for a hung parliament than anybody realised”, Cooper said.
Cooper was, in effect, voicing a significant criticism of George Osborne’s approach to electoral and campaign strategy. Osborne was the voice of the “relentlessly negative” messaging which, on Cooper’s analysis, simply poured energy and resources into an argument the Tories had already won.
After the 2005 election, Cooper produced a presentation which emphasised that 79% of Tory voters felt the party was “on the right track to get into power before too long” but only 28% of non-Tories agreed.
Cooper and Michael Gove offered a route-map, according to Tim Bale’s book, for the Cameroons.
1. Always try to see ourselves through the voters’ eyes.
2. Talk about the issues that matter most to voters (not the issues that we’re most at home with).
3. Use the language of people, not the language of politicians.
4. “Tell people what we stand for – not (just) what is wrong with Labour. Unless we give voters new reasons to support us they won’t.
5. Remember Tim Bell’s rule: ‘if they haven’t heard it, you haven’t said it’ – so repetition is vital.
6. Respect modern Britain. If we seem not to like Britain today, the feeling will surely be reciprocated.
7. Don’t be shrill or strident – that’s not how normal civilised people behave.
8. Remember that whatever we are talking about, the most important message is what we are saying about ourselves.
9. Face the fact that we lost people’s trust because of how we behave (and sound) as well as what we say”.
10. Focus on the voters we have to win, don’t preach to the converted.
11. Be disciplined and consistent.
The focus on turning the Tories into ‘normal civilised people’ does suggest a particular view of the party as mainly containing idiosyncratic, swivel-eyed ideologues.
What is also striking now is just how strongly the emphasis is on etiquette and behaviour, and just how little there is on political content.
Perhaps one of the lessons of David Cameron’s incomplete and shallow modernisation of his party is that good manners are important, but not a substitute for a political strategy.
—
A longer version of this article is at Next Left
Claudia Aderotimi was the victim of something more universal than ‘hip-hop culture’
British student Claudia Aderotimi died in America last week, the result of botched plastic surgery intended to give her a bigger bottom
Some commentators say that Claudia was a victim of “hip hop” culture. She was actually a victim of something much more universal.
continue reading… »
The Chinese economic miracle could still come crashing down
contribution by Ranjit Sidhu
With China overtaking Japan as the second biggest economy, economists are falling over themselves to tell us that in 10 years China will be bigger than the USA.
These were the same economists who were so confidently claiming in the 1980s that Japan was going to take over the USA in, yep, ten years. Lets take a step back. The state of the Chinese economy right now is flux.
continue reading… »
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