Britannia Radio

December 13, 2010

All Must Have Tuition Fees

Despite all the stürm und drang over the hike in British university tuition fees, a row which is said to be threatening the LibDems with imminent implosion, the policy misses the real point by a mile.

The reason for the hike is that the universities are broke; and the reason they are broke is that they are now processing (educating is definitely not the word to use in this context) vast numbers of young people who should not be at university in the first place; and the reason they are there is that it is considered ‘elitist’ (boo, hiss) to restrict university places to those who are suited to academic higher education, on the grounds that pretty well everyone is entitled to have a degree qualification.

The shoe-horning into the universities of so many patently ill-equipped young people has sent the standard of university education overall into free-fall, causing a ripple effect of ever-lower standards downwards throughout the public examination system and the schools. And for this catastrophe people are now having to pay ever more painfully through the nose.

No-one has the guts to acknowledge that the policy itself is a calamity for the nation. To admit as much is to expose oneself to the charge of ‘discriminating’ against disadvantaged young people by denying them a university education. But the real bar to progress for such young people is the collapse of education standards so that those who depend absolutely upon school to lift them out of disadvantage leave it instead with precious little real knowledge about anything and with even less ability to think for themselves. That has put social mobility into reverse -- and debauched the currency of all university degrees.

No politician will acknowledge this, particularly the Cameroons who have brainwashed themselves into supporting ‘cultural change’, even when that amounts to cultural collapse, simply because they have decided that this is their only passport to power (even though this strategy actually failed to deliver them victory at an election it was impossible to lose). And so the Tories will continue with the de-education of Britain. The only argument is over which poor mugs will be forced to pay, and how much, for the further destruction of their country and its culture.

In the Times (£) Clive Bloom, emeritus professor of English and American Studies at Middlesex University, nails it with a cry of anguish:

The meltdown began in 1992, when the polytechnics were converted to “new” universities. This was a mistake...The problem came when the new universities had to compete with older institutions. The only way forward was apparently to hire vice-chancellors made redundant by the industries they had worked in. Few such people paid anything but lip service to the ideals of a humane education, seeing more profitability in reeling in non-EU students. This new breed lacked any real feeling for the education of their ‘customers’ as they called them.

A vast ocean of money has fuelled the higher management of universities in the last decade and it has resulted in a crisis of confidence, whose only remedy has been the invention of a whole industry of education consultants, human resource officers and quality assurance apparatchiks who invaded the sector and sucked it dry of money and innovation.

Caution and lack of ambition stultified educationists fearful of diktats about equality of opportunity and prizes for all. When students can’t fail, there’s little to aim at.

Prizes for all, indeed. In 1996 I published my book All Must Have Prizes in which I set out the full story of the unfolding collapse of the British education system. The book was excoriated by educationists at the time as ‘exaggerated’ and ‘untrue’ – but everything I wrote there has been amply borne out by what has happened since. Plus ça change, eh.

Harriet Harman’s bizarre proposal

Daily Mail, 13 December 2010

Anyone who needs to know not only why the Labour Party is currently out of power but should remain so for the foreseeable future would be advised to study recent comments by its Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman.

Ms Harman is, of course, famous for her obsessions with equality and man-bashing feminism. But what she told her South London constituents at a meeting last week reveals something rather more fundamental. It demonstrates the total absence in the space between her ears of any grasp of right and wrong.

The meeting was apparently called to find ways to increase the flow of money from Britain to other nations through ‘remittances’ — money sent by people who have settled here to family members who remain in their home countries.

Ms Harman used this event to praise as ‘heroic’ immigrants who send money back home in this way — including those who claim welfare payments in Britain.

She added that the Government should make it easier for them to send the money home and called for tax refunds to encourage more immigrants to follow suit, in particular those who paid for their children to be educated in the Third World.

Many will find it hard to credit that even Ms Harman could have said something so absurd and objectionable.

For there is all the difference in the world between those immigrants who work and send money home to their families, and those who receive welfare benefits.

Those who work, often for low rates of pay and yet still manage to support their families in Africa, Asia or elsewhere in the underdeveloped world, are indeed behaving most commendably in helping to look after their own.

But those receiving welfare are in an entirely different situation. Such payments are intended to relieve their ownpoverty. So if welfare recipients can afford to give some of their income away like this, it might be thought that, far from amounting to no more than breadline subsistence, welfare benefits are rather too generous.

The more fundamental point, however, is that this is money provided for the hardship relief of people who are living in Britain and contributing to its economy. It is emphatically not provided for the relief of those abroad who have nothing whatever to do with Britain — except milk its coffers.

Ms Harman, however, does not appear to grasp the difference between earnings and welfare. Indeed, she praised foreign-born welfare recipients, along with people working for wages, as ‘hidden heroes of development through developing new ­policies on remittances’.

What an extraordinary thing to say! For she is trying to pretend that welfare payments to people living in Britain are in fact a branch of overseas aid.

But they are nothing of the kind. And it is outrageous to extol their diversion to prop up the needy abroad. For this is ­swindling the British taxpayer, who understands that this money is to be used to support the needy at home.

That indeed is what a ‘welfare state’ means. It is a compact between Britain’s government and those who reside in the country. The idea that it is to be used instead as a kind of global poor relief fund is utterly bizarre.

It would mean that people could come to Britain specifically to leech off Britain’s welfare state for the benefit of people who have absolutely no connection with Britain. This is clearly a preposterous negation of social justice.

Yet this is what Ms Harman is suggesting — that immigrants should be encouraged to come to Britain precisely so that they can act as a conduit for British taxpayers’ money to be funnelled to Africa and other Third World countries.

What an insult to the many immigrants who come to Britain to work hard and wouldn’t dream of being a drain on the public purse, let alone cheat the taxpayer (including immigrant taxpayers) in this way.

Yet to Ms Harman, such behaviour is ‘heroic’. What a debasement of the language and an evacuation of morality. True heroes sacrifice themselves out of a sense of duty towards their country. Ms Harman wants people to milk her country by abusing its sense of duty.

A country has an obligation towards those living within its shores over and above its requirement to assist people living elsewhere in the world. But for Ms Harman, this elementary moral code is reversed.

Indeed, the very idea of Britain giving priority to its own people strikes her as wrong. For pledging to fight any proposed reduction in the overseas aid budget, she also derided ‘those who say we should look after our own first’ in the recession.

To which all one can say is heaven help Ms Harman’s husband, children or other relatives, since clearly she sees no reason to give any priority to her own kith and kin over the population of the planet.

Yet isn’t ‘looking after their own’ precisely what the immigrants she so lauds are themselves doing in sending money back home to their relatives? Or is it — as it so often is with the Left — once again a case of believing that the Third World can do no wrong while the West can do no right?

Many will be wondering how any politician can be quite so out to lunch. Of course Ms Harman has always taken positions which are as unjust as they are ridiculous.

Take, for example, her oppressive and destructive equality laws. Or her campaigns against marriage and the entire male sex, which she seems to regard as intrinsically violent and oppressive towards women (one always wondered whether her trade union leader husband Jack Dromey was sufficiently androgynous to meet his wife’s exacting feminist requirements).

Those who dismissed Ms Harman because she cut such an absurd figure were much mistaken — and not just because of her pernicious effect upon business, the traditional family and the male of the species.

For Ms Harman’s extremism is rooted in a wholesale and terrifying denial of justice and reality that characterises the progressive intelligentsia in general.

This is because the whole purpose of its political existence is to create the unattainable utopia of the brotherhood of man. Which is why the Labour Government of which Ms Harman was such an ornament subjected this country to unlimited immigration.

The result has been impossible pressure on the public services, destruction of the country’s identity and character, and widespread resentment.

But Ms Harman and her comrades are too high-minded to care about the little matter of what those whom they expect to vote for them actually think. And those who dare object are branded as racists or xenophobes.

It is typical of Labour politicians that the most privileged — Ms Harman was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and is the niece of Lady Longford — are the most divorced from reality.

Maybe through class guilt, it is the upper-middle-class Lefties who tend to combine fanatical adherence to some bonkers ­ideology or other with stupendous arrogance and contempt for the people, the nation and democracy itself.

With the Coalition Government embarking on a struggle to reduce the number of people on welfare, Ms Harman has shown that Labour is still hopelessly out of touch.

It was, after all, attitudes like this that caused Labour to all but destroy Britain. Ms Harman’s remarks remind us that if ever they were to be re-elected, they may be expected to finish the job.