The Chancellor, the dominatrix and the phone hacker

by Guest    
August 25, 2011 at 3:57 pm

contribution by Steve B

In amongst last week’s Hackgate revelations, a little snippet about George Osborne’s past has received little comment.

Chancellor George Osborne has always strenuously denied allegations that he took cocaine with former sex-worker Natalie Rowe.

But yet again, the story of youthful friendships and parties have come back to haunt him, this time with a tantalising link to Andy Coulson’s appointment in this report in the Independent.
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Stratospheric post-grad fees are creating a socially exclusive elite

by Guest    
August 25, 2011 at 11:30 am

contribution by Ian Silvera

In 2012, universities will charge undergraduate students £9,000. For many students this extraordinary sum will deter them from attending university. Nonetheless, little attention has been paid to postgraduate students and the tuition fees they must endure.

Already universities demand a terrific amount of money from our country’s postgraduates. For instance, the London School of Economics offers a course in accounting and finance. For nine months of study, postgraduate students are expected to pay £20,496.
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Revealed: Student debt to rise to nearly £200bn; more than predicted

by Martin Williams    
August 25, 2011 at 10:05 am

New figures released by the government have revealed that the rise to university tuition fees will cause a £124bn increase in personal debt.

Total student debt will continue to rise until 2047, when it will peak at an estimated £191bn.

This compares to official predictions made before the fees hike, which showed that debt would peak in 2027 at just £67bn.

A forecast of student debt levels was sent to Liberal Conspiracy following a Freedom of Information request to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills.

The figures also show that, by the year 2032, an average graduate can expect to have £31,000 of debt after leaving university.

The department explained the forecast saying:

Average fee loans are assumed to be just over £7,500 in 2012/13 and both maintenance and fee loans are assumed to increase in line with inflation every year between then and 2050-51.

However, more than a third of English universities are set to charge the maximum of £9,000 and figures from the Office of Fair Access estimate the average fee to be £8,393 – not £7,500. This could mean that the peak total debt could end up being considerably more than even the official estimates suggest.

The National Union of Students told Liberal Conspiracy

It comes as no surprise that the changes in the higher education funding system will plunge a generation into debt. No matter how the repayment system is constructed or how much some might claim that concern about debt and an incredibly complex system are not a deterrent from university, there is still a very real danger that many young people will be put off.

The headline debt figures are hugely worrying and they are coupled with the fact that the amount of financial support going directly into students’ pocket will actually decrease by 2015. The Government are presiding over a mess of their own creation and it is students that are paying the price.

LC exclusive: Student Debt Forecast

—
Some figures from this story were released to the Independent on Sunday earlier. Here, we publish the full details from the FOI request.

Two reasons why Osborne’s tax deal with the Swiss is astonishing

by Richard Murphy    
August 25, 2011 at 8:30 am

The UK – Swiss tax deal, announced yesterday, is astonishing for various reasons. This deal is letting thousands of wealthy tax criminals off the hook – without them ever being held to account or even having to admit to their crimes.

And while the UK government is turning a deliberate blind eye to large scale, organised looting of our tax system, it is pressing charges against more than thirty young people who took part in a peaceful UKuncut demonstration against tax avoidance.
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Could events in Libya mean revolution in Syria is more likely?

by Guest    
August 24, 2011 at 3:43 pm

contribution by Luke Bozier

Back in February I wrote this piece for LeftFootForward arguing that we would look back on the January 14th revolution in Tunisia as the Middle East’s equivalent of a ‘Gdansk moment’ (Gdansk being the Polish city where the downfall of the Soviet Union started in 1988).

I wrote it on the day Mubarak’s regime in Egypt fell. A lot has changed in the preceding six months – one of the most historic six months in the history of the Middle East.
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Can Britain stand a chance against the ‘Asian century’?

by Guest    
August 24, 2011 at 10:55 am

contribution by Laura Chappell

Figures released yesterday by the OECD suggest that the UK is growing more slowly than other “major nations” – with the US, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada expanding more quickly. While this has made headline news, our research, published Monday, suggests that it shouldn’t be all that surprising.

While we may have ridden a property and finance boom which kept our growth rates up in the years before the crash, our analysis suggests that the UK actually has a number of important structural weaknesses that threaten our long term growth. These seem likely to only become more important in an era – ‘The Asian Century’ – of so much change.
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The wrong reasons to ban the English Defence League march

by Sunny Hundal    
August 24, 2011 at 8:46 am

Various Labour councillors and two MPs have signed a letter in the Guardian today, saying the proposed march by the English Defence League in Tower Hamlets should be banned on the basis that it is “a drain on resources that London cannot now afford”.

This is perhaps the worst reason to call for the banning of any march. It sets a precedent for the police to refuse marches or demonstrations in the future simply on the basis of cost. Is that what we want?
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What Tony Blair’s views on riots says about New Labour

by Paul Cotterill    
August 23, 2011 at 4:43 pm

Tony Blair’s Comment is Free article on the reason for the riots brought the inevitable howls of derision. Of the 1986 comments posted to date, the vast majority are either too vicious for the moderator to allow through, or focus on whether Tony Blair’s character and/or war criminal record really make him an authority on moral issues.
  
Relatively few people actually seem to have bothered to digest what he actually says.  
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Do we have a ‘responsibility to protect’ people in foreign countries?

by Guest    
August 23, 2011 at 11:30 am

contribution by Andrew Gibson

In the Commons debate on Libya in March, Ed Miliband justified intervention in terms of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine.

This performance exemplified what is wrong with R2P. To put it one way, the doctrine dresses up utilitarian problems of calculation as deontological principles. To put it another, R2P is a fig-leaf for politicians making it up as they go along.

The R2P doctrine holds there is always a responsibility to halt mass killings, rape and large scale loss of life.
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As EU plans to hand over more power to banks – time to leave?

by Richard Murphy    
August 23, 2011 at 9:10 am

As the Guardian noted yesterday, there appears to be an enormous price attached to the measures needed to stabilise the Eurozone to meet the demands of bankers:

Last week, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, announced that they would push for the creation of a Eurozone economic council to police the austerity measures of governments, to be headed by Herman Van Rompuy, the EU president.

Separately, Germany’s economy minister, Philipp Rösler, has proposed the creation of a new, unelected EU institution, a “stability council” that would impose automatic sanctions on countries that do not adhere to rigid budget discipline and pro-business labour policies.

None of those institutions is any way democratic. That is profoundly worrying.
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