However did we cope?

How did we cope as a society before all these State hand-outs were put in place to "buy" the loyalty of their recipients to a Labour government as the sole provider of these benefits?

The latest political football is of course the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), described by Guido as "dole for teenagers". As with all such new-style benefits, they aren't their to produce a "benefit" to society, only to the Labour party. After all, we coped perfectly well before they existed, and the world hasn't changed all that much since those times. Yes, it's entirely artificial, and the EMA can certainly go, especially as it was based around now out-of-date criteria anyway.

Whether or not it should be replaced by something else that is better attuned to the perceived needs of today is a good question. I suspect that it shouldn't be replaced at all; however real-world politics undoubtedly requires an in-between stage before (I hope) scrapping the idea completely. Why should we subsidise tomorrow's high earners in any way?

If they have any strength of character they'll find their own way to cope, which will set them up well to deal with the real world they'll have to face in the future anyway. If they can't hack it now, what is the point of wasting University places on them when there is plenty of better-equipped material out there?

Comment of the day - 13 Dec 2010

From Biased-BBC, on the student protest/riot and similar events, a comment by someone posting under the name 'London Calling':

"Every photo you look at a good proportion of the people in the pictures are photographers. At the time of G20 riots I recall there was one masked anarchist smashing a bank window surrounded by a circle of twenty or more photographers snapping away.

These are not run of the mill landscape or wedding portrait photographers doing a little diversifying. There is an industry of freelancers who specialise in urban disorder, who come from the same squat-ridden parts of East London. Pushing cameras into policemen's faces from within the rioting crowd for that 'attacked by the police' angle of view.

The media picture editors are a ready market for this, in the same way some solicitors attack the police through "lawfare", representing little Johnny who was hit on the head with a truncheon.

I'm not sure how much longer I can stomach anarchist rioters doing criminal-damage being described by lazy incompetent or malicious copy editors as 'tuition fees protestors'."

Those photographers and their buddies elsewhere in the big media are all complicit in the fraud that is this whole 'protest', which is being driven by self-confessed Communist outfits such as Workers Power and REVOLUTION Socialist Youth Movement. Those organisations' websites publicly show their true nature, which anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together will realise is society-wrecking Communist throughout. Like near-enough all the political left, it is entirely corrupt and seek to put its own agenda above the interests and well-being of anyone and everyone else.

It is high time something were done about all these subversives, decisively and permanently. They are the biggest threat to our country, which will never be safe until that is done. Freedom of speech and action is all very well, up to a point; but not when it gets in the way of others' equally-valuable freedoms!

Tweet of the day - 12 Dec 2010

From Guido, on the to-be-scrapped Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA):

"Have only just discovered what EMA is, effectively dole for teenagers. Presumably it was one of Gordon's crackpot ideas."

Quite a good assessment in a way, but not so much crackpot as yet another way to get a whole sector of British accustomed to State hand-outs and at least partial dependency upon them. It was simply a way to 'buy' future votes for Labour at your and my expense from general taxation.

Wanted for questioning

These are fourteen people police want to speak to in connection with the violence at the most recent tuition fees protest. They include those thought to be responsible for the attack on the Prince of Wales's car.

Inevitably the Sunday Mirror is trying to divert attention for partisan ends, blaming David Cameron for the riots we've been having - but that's standard fare for that kind of rag. If any individual is to blame for the tuition fees situation, it is Blair & Brown and their Labour cabinet colleagues at the time - no-one else is responsible for our even having tuition fees and top-ups, let alone putting the country into such a financial state that they cannot be scrapped or left as they are, and won't be for years.

Of course, all that is ignored by those using the issue as a political weapon, as had always been intended by corrupt Labour.

Tuition fees vote

It was passed, but by a slightly narrower majority than I had calculated - 323 for and 302 against, so just 21 majority for the Ayes. I had thought it would be nearer thirty.

Meanwhile, the protesters have been on the streets again (hardly surprising, today) and violent once more. Yet at no time have any students even lobbied the MPs who were planning to vote for this, though one student group booked an appointment in Pendle, but then didn't bother to turn up.

It has all been party political throughout, of course, as I have written before. It has been fairly obvious to anyone who has been around the block a few times, and Labour's alternative - the so-called graduate tax - would be far more expensive, being a tax for life rather than being time-limited come what may. In fact just about everything about the new scheme is better than either what exists at present or has been proposed by others. Therefore this is a good result, despite what some are still claiming.

There is a very good assessment of the topic and some of its history (most notably the Browne review) at PoliticsHome, which hasn't done this sort of thing all that well in the past. I suspect it's the recent arrival of the excellent Paul Waugh (who wrote the linked article) behind such changes for the better.

Can't come

Environment Secretary Chris Huhne is at an international climate change summit (yes I know, I know!) in Cancun, Mexico, so can't come to the tuition fees Commons vote tomorrow. There's another Lib Dem MP out there with Huhne, apparently, who also won't be flying back for tomorrow's vote, despite what some have been reporting.

The numbers for the vote still look good enough to win, despite Lib Dem and Tory rebels, and a majority for the Ayes to the right of somewhere around thirty seems to be the likely outcome of tomorrow's vote.

Facts on fees

There are a lot of myths about the tuition fees issue floating around, generated by the left from Labour party HQ via the media to the NUS.

Here is a website explaining the facts, in writing. It should now be much clearer what the reality is and why, and what impact it will have in one's own specific circumstances.

It has to be said that, whatever the merits or otherwise of university students paying (back, one day) even some of their costs, if the country had been in even a half-decent state financially after Labour's thirteen years it is unlikely that tuition fees would have been needed at all, and perhaps they could have been scrapped. After all, they were introduced by Labour, as were the top-ups, and it would have been good to scrap them altogether.

Hopefully, by implementing the Coalition's proposed measures now, that will become a very real possibility with in a few years, once Britain is back on its feet and England in particular. It could never have been so under Labour, and that is a vitally important fact. Labour were always introducing new and increased taxes, dozens if not hundreds of them, including inventing prescription charges (why? don't we already pay for the NHS via National Insurance?) and that is where the fault really lies, despite the attempts of their dishonest supporters to divert attention away from the real culprits.

For now, we'll have to live with this - and at least it's a lot better than what it replaces! Even the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), which rarely offers ringing endorsements of the Coalition Government's position, has today stated that the proposals are "more progressive" (yuk! I hate that word!) than either Labour's original scheme or even Lord Browne's proposals after his (former Labour government-commissioned) review.

Indeed, with only forty out 80,000 of the poorest students having gone to the dozens of Oxbridge colleges in recent years, and (as Baroness Warsi reminded us on today's BBC Daily Politics) no black folk at all last year, it's time to get some real social mobility and aspiration for all into our nation's students - and that will now include part-time and mature students in many cases. Part-time undergraduate-level students make up around forty percent of the total, so it is right to include them in any new policy.

Meanwhile, Alan Johnson has changed his tune and now appears to be in favour of the graduate tax that Ed Miliband supports, after all! Note that this could well mean a total bill of some £54,000 over the years, at around £100 per month repayment - far more than the Coalition's £6,000 or so (max £9,000) at barely £40 per month repayment rate.

Incidentally, not all students have been taken in by the (Labour member Aaron Porter) NUS president's spin: there is even a Facebook group in support of the Coalition's reforms, currently with well over a thousand "likers", as proof.