Not chucking printers at someone = being exceptionally close to them

A friend sent me this article by Richard Grayson.

Basically, Grayson, former Lib Dem director of policy, argues that the Lib Dems should start thinking about a coalition with Labour. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but along the way he makes some fairly startling assertions.

• Grayson suggests that Lib Dems disillusioned over tuition fees could find a home in the Labour party. This is absurd. Labour introduced tuition fees, top-up fees and commissioned the Browne report. Does anybody seriously think if they had won the election they wouldn’t have introduced a similar system – and indeed probably one that was less fair?
• Labour haven’t put any concrete alternative on the table. Their leader and Shadow Chancellor can barely agree on a policy. And the one Ed M proposes was specifically rejected and ruled out by Labour in government.
• ‘Liberal Democrat leadership exceptionally close to the Conservative leadership’ – what a remarkably silly assertion. Does Dr Grayson not understand the concept of coalition government? Our leadership (and of course our membership too at the Birmingham Special Conference) and Tory leadership have agreed the coalition programme and are delivering it. This means they have to work together in a constructive fashion in the best interests of the country – hardly unreasonable. But I suppose after three years of a bloke whose definition of 'working together constructively' involved chucking printers around the office, civil co-operation probably will get mistaken for being 'exceptionally close'.  And after 13 years of the Blair-Brown saga the idea of people from the same party working together is pretty novel, let alone people from different parties. 
• ‘Liberal Democrat members have more in common with Labour and Green members than we do with our own leadership.’ Really? I certainly don’t have very much at all in common than Labour members - the vast majority of whom supported the Labour whilst it went to war in Iraq, introduced ID cards, tried to introduced 90 days detention without trial, massively increased the use of PFI, flunked the chance to scrap the House of Lords and introduce PR, locked up immigrant kids and dumbed down the education system.  And I couldn’t be further from the type of people who ran Labour’s campaign in Oldham at the last General Election and the many (although I accept not all) Labour MPs and members that have defended him. If Dr Grayson feel he has more in common with them than Vince Cable, Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg that’s his choice – but I fear that says more about him than it does about our leadership.  
• Dr Grayson then goes on to argue that Ed M is a pluralist politician. Again, I think the three years of Gordon Brown have really lowered the bar for what you have to do to be considered pluralist.  He must have missed Ed’s expressed desire to make the Liberal Democrats ‘extinct’ and conveniently forgotten that Ed M appointed Phil Woolas to his front bench team – as Immigration Minister no less – despite his appalling campaign against the Liberal Democrats in Oldham. He has consistently attacked the Liberal Democrats at every turn. That is his right, but it is hardly the action of a pluralist politician. 
• And Dr Grayson’s main piece of evidence that Ed is indeed a pluralist? The fact that he is supporting AV. OH MY GOD – a Labour politician supporting a policy that was in the manifesto he personally wrote counts as radical pluralism, words fail me. 
• For Dr Grayson to attack Nick Clegg for quoting JS Mill too much is rather odd as well. JS Mill’s ‘On Liberty’ is the text passed from President to President of our party for good reason – it is the defining text of Liberalism.  Dr Grayson also has a rather alarming lack of understanding of Mill. Mill himself wasn’t a man stuck in ‘1850s liberalism,’ he looks well beyond the traditional liberalism of his day, especially in his later years. He was campaigning for women to have the votes against socialists and trade unionists who wanted to keep women quiet in the home. Not only that, but I can think of no intellectual whose views I would rather have determining policy at the moment. A dose of Millite liberalism is what this country sorely needs after 13 years of social and economic authoritarianism from Labour.   I would suggest Dr Grayson might benefit from reading Richard Reeve’s rather excellent biography of the great man.  
• There is nothing wrong with us engaging with the Labour party in principle. But we are an independent political party, not merely Labour’s little brother. And if they want to co-operate with us then should start by apologising for all their deeply illiberal measures they took in government - and developing some policies that are a bit more liberal.

Pollytoynbeeism and the National Secular Society

Great article here on Liberal England about 'pollytoynbeeism' - the idea that 'anyone who wished to see public spending cuts must be a supporter of the Tea Party agenda' and that 'anyone who suggests it might be necessary or desirable to move on from the policies pursued by the last Labour government must be a crazed right-winger.' As I have argued before, not only is this bonkers, it is also profoundly contradictory as Toynbee herself has argued on many occasions that money doesn't make you happy.

I would like to nominate another example of pollytoynbeeism. I was listening to a programme about religious charities on Radio 4 at the weekend. They got Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society on to criticise these charities. So far, fair enough. Then he said this:

'it [the religious charity] is conspiring with this government and the previous government to dismantle the welfare state, to make people dependent on charity.'

This is wrong on so many levels it is really quite absurd, but at the heart of it is pollytoynbeeism - cut anything and the world collapses. Of course the particularly ridiculous thing about this is that it is a secularist arguing for more state intervention - in a country that has an established church! I am an atheist, and as an atheist I think the first task of any self-proclaimed secular society should be to argue against the state backing and financing of religion. But that just shows you how far the rot has set in. Even secularists - who should know better than anyone how pernicious and unfair state intervention can be - even they have bought into the idea that only the state can do good, only good things are done by the state, and these good things are achieved by spending money. Baffling. Utterly, utterly, baffling.

I can't defend violence, but...

Very odd Guardian article here by Grace Dent.

Firstly, I love the title:

The government's cuts might drive me into the streets.

This is exactly the sort of thing my year 8s say to me: It wasn't my fault, he made me do it!  I didn't want to hit him over the head 17 times with dog-eared maths textbook, he made me do it! If you ask me to pick up a pen, I might have to use the pen to stab the kid sitting next to me! You asking me to work might make me hit someone!

And from that promising start, the resemblances between Ms Dent and a stroppy teenager just get more pronounced.  There is this:

Obviously, I can't condone chucking fire extinguishers off buildings, although I do feel growingly, stinkingly cross these days.

Then this:

Obviously I can't condone picking up a rock and throwing it at Millbank over legal aid, but what boils my innards is that there will not be a single member of the cabinet or the royal family who doesn't have the number of a "family lawyer" in their address book.

It seems to me that someone whose innards boil at the contents of other people's address books is perhaps not the most stable. Then:

Obviously I can't condone violence, you'll never find me in the path of galloping police horses holding a pipebomb – in fact the closest I get to a scuffle is the Topshop post-Christmas sale. But come summer 2011, with the royal wedding hoopla and council cuts in full glorious swing, will I have crossed the line?

I don't know. I would suggest that Grace Dent would be the one to answer that, although given her complete lack of belief in personal agency, maybe even she doesn't.  She is a mere machine, reacting only to what the government do. And then just in case we haven't got the message threat: 

Say police and officials come to remove a poor family from my street for non-payment of rent and disperse them somewhere less expensive? What will I do?... Obviously, I can't condone how a riot might break out in these circumstances, but I can see how it might occur.

Well that's all all right then.  Let's all go and squat in a nice Islington mansion tomorrow, safe in the knowledge that when we get evicted, Grace Dent will be there 'not condoning' violence, but not doing very much at all to stop it either.

More Labour reactionaries

So one post on Labour list says the goverment is:

 a reactionary coalition government 

And then the next post, a summary of PMQs.  Douglas Alexander says don't cut public sector jobs, John Healey says don't reform the NHS, Ed Balls says don't let police retire, Andy Burnham says don't touch school sport.

As I have been saying in all my posts on here, more Labour reactionaries. Except that now they've got the cheek to call the government reactionary.

Just a few definitions here for you:


Reactionary (also reactionist) refers to any political or social movement or ideology that seeks a return to a previous state (the status quo ante).


One who is opposed to change.

That would be this Labour government then, with its big beasts like Balls, Burnham and Alexander longing for a return to the halcyon days of New Labour.

Polly Toynbee on EMA...sigh

Here we go again.  EMA gets shoehorned in here as part of a wider argument that GDP isn't that important - it's all about happiness:

Because the likes of Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Layard and many others found all the evidence showed that a doubled GDP in 30 years hadn't made people in developed countries any happier.

Then, later on in the article is the massive contradiction:

The poorest teenagers are about to lose the educational maintenance allowance that paid their travel to college and gave them a little money of their own. 

I don't see how you can advocate EMA in the same breath as denouncing the value of GDP growth. Essentially, the whole point about New Labour and some of its classic programmes such as EMA were that they were entirely dependent on economic growth. New Labour's answer to most social problems was to chuck money at them.  Some Labour MPs are honest about this - Jon Cruddas accepts that 'The Blair-Brown period – its central characteristic was growth: 15 years, 60 quarters of growth.' Even Sunny Hundal accepts that 'The second problem is that a significant portion of tax revenues prior to the crash came from the banking sector. Those revenues are unlikely to recover to similar levels as the financial merry-go-round has stopped.'

Polly Toynbee and most of Labour are still squealing when any of this money is cut.  If you want to be a leftwing reactionary and try and preserve as much of what New Labour did, then you bloody well need to hope that GDP doubles in the next thirty years as it did in the last, because unless it does you are really not going to be able to afford to give away half a billion quid to 17 year olds. Millions of poor teenagers went to college, went to university, built careers for themselves and I would guess were quite happy in the decades before it was ever introduced - I am one of them.  EMA was introduced in 2004, at the peak of the boom in the midst of the growth we thought would never end.  If the growth really had never ended, it would still be wasteful but I suppose you could argue we could afford it. As it is, it is completely indefensible. Essentially, that was the New Labour compact - encourage unsustainable, frivolous and socially useless speculation and spend the proceeds on unsustainable, frivolous and socially useless government programmes.

Ultimately, Toynbee's article is founded on a massive contradiction common to many in Labour at the moment - money doesn't make you any happier, but if you cut the money of any government programme whatsoever, it results in massive unhappiness.

Katharine Birbalsingh, Fiona Millar and Toby Young in internet row.

One thing that distracted me from all the protests last week and provided a slight bit of comic relief was this internet spat between the aforementioned.

It started with Fiona Millar attacking Katharine Birbalsingh, the state school teacher who spoke about poor behaviour at the Tory conference, mentioned the names of pupils she taught and then left the school. Fiona Millar rather patronisingly suggested that no one would be listening to Katharine Birbalisingh if she were middle-aged and white.  She also suggested that Birbalsingh had been hired by Michael Gove. Birbalsingh reacted angrily in her blog, asserting that she had not been paid at all by Michael Gove.  Then, Toby Young weighed in on Birbalsingh's side with a list of five questions for Fiona Millar. Over on one of Fiona Millar's comprehensive-advocacy websites, there is a ding-dong battle going on in the forums between Millar and Young.

On balance, I think I am on Birbalsingh's and Young's side. I am undecided about the merits of free schools versus comps, but I think Fiona Millar damages her argument by not listening to any of the real criticisms of state schools that Katharine Birbalsingh raises.  It's not enough to say that the majority of comps are great and the only reason why they're not great is because they're not genuinely comprehensive.  The fact is, there are real problems in a lot of our comprehensives.  This is not to put down the hard work and dedication of an awful lot of state school teachers. Indeed, most of the state school teachers I know are the most trenchant critics of their schools, at least in private.  Like I say, I am not sure that free schools are the answer but I think Fiona Millar has to do more than argue for more of the same, in the standard left-wing reactionary pose that is so common amongst the Labour party at the moment.

I love Toby Young's questions, in particular this one:  

Private Eye ran a story a few years ago saying that your son, who went to William Ellis, was given a sum of money by the school from a fund intended to help children from low income families with the cost of attending university when he won a place at Oxford. This was during your tenure as Chair of the Board of Governors and, according to the Eye, it was the Governors who doled out the money. Can you confirm if this is true? And, if it is, can you explain how your son met the eligibility criteria? 

I remember reading about this in Private Eye a few years ago and thinking it couldn't possibly be true. Would love to hear Millar's response to that!

More Victorian Nonsense - workhouses and slave labour

So, there is a post up on Labour List suggesting that IDS's policies will drive the poor 'back to the workhouse'. I thought first of all that mentioning workhouses in the headline was an absurd rhetorical trope, but no, the author really does seem convinced that workhouses are going to be built because he says in the body of the article that the new policies are 'driving the undeserving poor into the workhouse.' Apparently they are 'nothing short of wicked.' The author has just enough self-awareness to say that 'To describe it as ‘slave labour’ sounds an absurd exaggeration' but then thoroughly ruins it by saying 'yet how exactly is it going to differ?' Er, in that they're not slaves, maybe?

I wonder, will any of these people apologise when workhouses aren't built and when chained gangs of slaves don't appear on our streets?

Higher education protests

I will blog at length about this later, but for now I have been utterly appalled by the student protests and the media reaction to them.  We've had Johann Hari follow Bridget Phillipson and Andy Burnham into denying his own intelligence and hard work.  We've had an academic on Comment is Free suggesting that the government are being undemocratic in not listening to the yells of 50,000 people. We've had the spectacle of some of the brightest, most privileged and most fortunate people in the UK - no, in the world - angrily try to destroy the society and values that gave them such privilege.  And we've seen a host of alleged progressives angrily denounce a highly progressive plan for funding higher education. All in all, a fairly depressing week.

Katharine Birbalsingh again - how Labour have a monopoly on morality

The Left think people on the Right are twisted and mean – even if they spend their lives helping the poor – Telegraph Blogs

Katharine Birbalsingh gets it right again.  This is the sort of attitude I come up against again and again and again.  Several of my friends are like Birbalsingh's - wealthy, middle-class, well-educated, doing well-paid jobs either in the private sector or the cushy part of the public sector. When I explain to them what it is like teaching in an inner city school, you can see that they are itching to make excuses for the kids, to justify their bad behaviour in terms of poverty or lack of resources.  When I suggest that the money that has been poured into state schools in the form of new buildings and expensive ICT equipment has had absolutely no impact on the kids' behaviour or attainment, they look shocked and assume you are evil. The fact that I, like Birbalsingh and Theodore Dalrymple, who she quotes, spend every day of my working life dealing with these kids doesn't seem to matter to them.  I say something that Tories once said, ergo I am evil. I suggest that chucking money at social problems has been tried for 13 years and has failed, ergo I am evil. I suggest that cutting money won't have a negative impact and might possibly have a positive one, ergo I am evil.  Never mind I spend my days and too many of my nights worrying about why my kids aren't learning, I am evil.  And evil really isn't too strong a word - well obviously it is too strong a word, that's my point, but it is the sort of word that Polly Toynbee, CIF commentators, Guardian editorial writers, Labour MPs and assorted bloggers and twitterers do use

What's happened is that the Labour party have got a monopoly on morality. Take Iain Duncan Smith, for example. I might disagree with aspects of his welfare to work plan. But I do not believe for a second he is motivated by 'evil' or by a desire to do down the poor.  Actually, I don't believe many politicians are - after all, the flip side of 'they're all as bad as each other' is 'they're all as good as each other' and on the whole, most people in Parliament could probably have had an easier life and more money outside politics. What I believe is that on the whole, when politicians get stuff wrong, it's because they're misguided. They think that something will help the poor, and then it turns out not to. On balance, most parties are subject to this kind of misguidedness, and it can be compounded by stubbornness.  But being misguided and stubborn isn't being evil.  Thus, Ed Balls, a man I loathe, is not evil - he just has the two aforementioned qualities in spades. It did result in pupils and teachers suffering but I really don't believe that was his intention.

People seem happy to believe in this view of things when you are talking about Labour politicians. So, even when Labour cheerleaders do admit to flaws in their plans, they will attribute it to being misguided and assert that their heart is in the right place. This was frequently a defence of Gordon Brown - he might be a psychopath, he might be dangerously unhinged, he might have just increased tax for the poorest people, but he's in politics for the right reasons.

But when it comes to pretty much anyone from the Tories - and now from the Lib Dems too - the default assumption is that they want to kick the poor. I simply do not believe this.  Iain Duncan Smith has set up his own think tank and spent six years doing detailed investigation into the lives of the poor.  He has come up with ideas that he thinks will help the poor. He may be wrong about them - I certainly have my questions about some aspects. But there is no way he is motivated by hatred, in the same way that I am not motivated by hatred when I suggest it would be a good idea for the pupils I teach to stop making excuses and do their homework. And he has a far greater understanding of the problem than very many of his adversaries, just as Theodore Dalrymple has a far greater understanding of the problems of inner city Britain than many of the assorted bloggers and media types queuing up to call him evil on Twitter.

Yet more utter misrepresentations of coalition policy and Victorian Britain

I did a lot of Victorian Literature as part of my degree, and it really really annoys me when people utterly misunderstand the Victorians. So we have had Tristram Hunt telling us that cuts to housing benefit will bring back the Victorian workhouse.  And now we have the Guardian telling us that the Browne review will send us back to the days of Jude Fawley.  Utterly unbelievable. Have any of these people actually read any of these texts or studied the Victorians? Let's point out some of the differences between modern Britain and Victorian Britain.

1. The principle of 'less eligibility' in Victorian times meant workhouses had to semi-starve people: the principle of less eligibility now means living in Putney not Westminster.

2. The Victorians had workhouses. We don't and aren't bringing them back.

3. Jude Fawley couldn't go to university because there was no funding for poor people and no access to loans at all.  If Jude had been offered a university education on Browne's terms, HE WOULD HAVE JUMPED AT IT. If any university today were offered a working-class student of Jude's ability and motivation, THEY WOULD CHUCK SCHOLARSHIPS AT HIM. How many working-class kids now do you know who spend their pocket money on Greek and Latin classics and stay up all night teaching themselves Greek and Latin?

4. In Victorian times, poverty did have an impact on people's educational outcomes because they had to work full time from a very young age and they didn't have money for the most important educational resource - books. Everyone in this country gets a guaranteed free 11 years education, and a free two extra years if they meet some basic standards. Everyone also has access to free public libraries.  So modern poverty, such as it is, is completely different in its nature and effects from Victorian poverty.

5. Tristram Hunt refers to Betty Higden in Our Mutual Friend being petrified of the workhouse. I prefer Hardy's less sentimental, more ironic take on workhouses.  Perhaps we should bring them back...

Sensible Guardian article on Lib Dems shock

Ten tips for the Liberal Democrats | Julian Glover | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

This is about the only sensible commentary on the Lib Dems I have seen in the Guardian over the last week or so. Everything else from them and Labour has been a hate-filled fact-free rant. Where is Labour’s anger coming from? When the Lib Dems went into coalition, I expected Labour to whinge. But this depth of hatred and anger is really quite baffling.Where is Labour’s anger coming from? When the Lib Dems went into coalition, I expected Labour to whinge. But this depth of hatred and anger is really quite baffling. For implementing a policy that Labour advocated in their election manifesto, the Lib Dems have been branded Nazis, social cleansers, advocates of Victorian workhouses and ginger rodents. For winning liberal concessions from a majority Conservative government, Polly Toynbee, Marina Hyde, Johann Hari, Harriet Harman, Tristram Hunt and co have lined up to denounce Lib Dems as traitors.

Part of it is just politics. But part of it goes deeper, I think, and is psychological. Forget the Miliband saga, for a good 20 years the Lib Dems have been seen by Labour as their little brother. And as we know, no-one likes it when their little brother ends up doing better than them. Labour’s current sulk is just a wider institutional version of David Miliband’s. They both need to grow up. For despite the very real differences between the Lib Dems and Labour, the two parties do share a lot in common. If electoral reform does happen, Labour need people like me to give them second preference votes. Even if it doesn’t, the growing pluralism of the British system suggests that there may be more hung parliaments in future. Either way, the sort of vicious tribalism we’ve been seeing over the last couple of days really won’t be good for the Labour party’s long term prospects.

Another Labour whinger

Scrapping EMA is another broken promise from morally broken PM | LabourList.org 2.0.2 | LabourList.org

Yet another Labour whinger going on about EMA. I will say it again, how do they think poor people managed to go to college before 2004? How do they account for the fact that social mobility and educational disadvantage have got worse over the past thirty years? Do you really think that everyone on EMA would drop out of college if they didn't get it? If you accept, as I think all the statistics (not the dodgy NUS ones) show, that many pupils who currently get EMA would stay on without it, then you have to acknowledge that much of that money is being wasted. It would be far less wasteful to establish a pot of money that could go towards helping genuine hardship cases who genuinely benefit from college. If this form of mass subsidy is such an important priority for so many in the Labour party, can any of them tell us what they would cut?

One final point - Robertson quotes a comment from the Save EMA website that really touched him:

Cassie Campbell - “I need EMA my mum is on benefits and I am a full-time student at college without EMA I can’t go to college I will have to drop out and I don’t want to do that”

Call me a callous bastard but should someone who doesn't understand how to write a proper sentence be going to college?

Bridget Phillipson and EMA

Like me, Bridget Phillipson was also eligible for the pilot EMA scheme. Unlike me, she took it up, and in this video claims that without it, whether she would have become an MP 'remains to be seen'.  

This is an incredible claim, and deserves further investigation.  Bridget Phillipson is one of the youngest MPs – not just in this Parliament but ever. She has clearly not achieved this without being extremely hard working, dedicated and intelligent.  According to her website, she joined the Labour party at age 15, well before she had ever heard of EMA.  She must have got exceptionally good results at GCSE, again before she would have been eligible for EMA.  She must have got very good A-level results because she then went to Oxford to study Modern History, so she must have had a lot of innate talent and drive even on top of the EMA. And she is seriously trying to claim that all this talent, all this dedication, all this hard work, could possibly have been cancelled out by the absence of a £20 a week subsidy for two years at age 16? If she hadn’t got that subsidy, she’d have dropped out, waited tables and stopped attending Labour party meetings in order to smoke crack at the local drug den? Utter, utter rubbish. She would have succeeded with or without it, there's no 'remaining to be seen' at all and if she thinks about it I think she knows that too. She’s insulting herself by suggesting her success is mechanistically dependent upon a government programme. She’s insulting her parents – I don’t believe however poor they were that they’d have let her drop out of college for the sake of £20 a week. And she’s insulting all those brave people – from the north east and elsewhere – who struggled successfully against far greater poverty and inequality than she has ever had to confront.

Worse than these insulting implications, however, is the damage this idea does to society.  It suggests that if you don’t succeed in life, it is entirely down to the fact that the state didn’t give you enough money when you were young. This is exactly the attitude I see again and again in the classroom.  Teachers across the country try and give their kids a ‘no excuses’ attitude to get them to overcome petty and sometimes more serious difficulties.  Nothing worthwhile was ever achieved without effort, we say.  We do all this because for very many of our kids, they will use any excuse whatsoever to try and hide the fact that they can’t be bothered.

 But what’s the point in us struggling to get our kids to work hard when the message coming from politicians is: if you fail or drop out, it’s not your fault. It’s the fault of the nasty government for not giving you enough money. If you doubt that the attitudes of politicians and intellectuals influence kids, take a look at the EMA website where a whole gaggle of pupils essentially restate Bridget Phillipson’s argument – if you don’t give me this money, I will be a failure and it will all be your fault. Ever since I started teaching, I became more and more aware of how out-of-touch most politicians are with what actually happens in the public services.  Bridget Phillipson, of course, would never have let the absence of this subsidy deter her from getting a good education. But the idea that she and others like her spread - that their success is down to the munificent bounty of the generous state, and not their own ability - is genuinely believed by many kids out there, those I teach and those all over the EMA website. 

As well as this, the whole thing just reinforces the belief that Labour got us into this mess with ill-judged government giveaways, and are now completely refusing to even consider abolishing any of them. As one of their saner members said, 'we look like we want to die in the ditch for every last Sea Harrier, millionaire’s child benefit payment and pint of student snakebite.' Well quite. The religion of socialism was once the language of priorities, and I can’t imagine any of the 1945 cabinet prioritising giving semi-literate 17 year olds beer money and Apple Macs. 

Educational Maintenance Allowance - EMA

I first heard of EMA when I was in the 6^th form. They were piloting it in the London borough where I lived and I was eligible for it. I never claimed it – partly this was teenage laziness but partly it was because I didn’t really believe something so ridiculous had been invented. I was staying on in the 6^th form anyway. My parents weren’t wealthy but they could afford to give me pocket money. I ate lunches in school and dinners at home. It felt slightly ridiculous that I would actually get money to do what I had been doing for the past five years. I am not being sanctimonious here – in hindsight I wish I had got my act together and claimed the money. I am just pointing out what a waste a lot of it – a waste in the sense that it was designed to encourage people who wouldn’t have done so to stay on in school, when all the evidence shows that about 90% of those eligible for it were like me and would have stayed on anyway.  Now I am a teacher, I can see even more what a waste it is. Of the 60 odd kids I’ve taught who have been eligible for EMA, only a handful would have dropped out without it. And of those only one actually wanted to study in the 6^th form. The others were only there for the EMA – that is to say, it functioned as a bribe.

But EMA exists, and amongst the ahistorical youth of today is seen as a kind of birthright. The NUS have a hilarious website filled with the illiterate rants of teenagers defending their entitlement.  According to the campaign leader, and many of the comments on there, EMA is utterly vital to their education – nay, the nation’s future prosperity. One wonders how people survived at 6^th form in the dim and distant days before 2004, let alone those students in the 50s and 60s. One wonders why it was that social mobility was higher in the 1970s than today.  Not all the students defend it on the grounds of national interest though – some are clearer about the vested interest:

If E.M.A GETS STOPPED I AINT GUNNA GO COLLEGE THERES NO POINT .. X

This young man is at least honest. He’s at college for the money, if you cut it then he will swan off and become one of the NEETs so dreaded by politicians.  You have to wonder what he thinks the point of college is for him – call me a cynic but the point actually seems to be the £20. If he got EMA and did attend college, I somehow doubt it would turn him into a paragon of intellectual devotion. Rather, I would suggest that he would end up sitting hung over at the back of the class, not contributing and not doing any work. If he didn’t get EMA, he probably would become a NEET. If he did, he’d stay at college and be a NEET in all but name and the statistics.  This is what I think some of the statistics about the ‘success’ of EMA show – yes, if you bribe kids to stay on at school, you will obviously raise attendance. You will probably also raise attainment slightly because it’s harder to get a U than an E in a lot of courses, especially where there is a large coursework element. Whether this sort of improved attainment really is an improvement is another issue.  Here is another pupil:

I Think that without ema i will never be able to afford to go to college and pay for the equipment i need as most of my work is done on apple macs as i am a media student all my ema will go towards paying off my fee for my apple mac and other equipment.

This sort of poor grammar and spelling is not unusual on the Save EMA website.  Very few of those agitating to receive it demonstrate the sort of writing ability you would expect of college students. Or, as one of my friends once said to me, 'if you can’t spell college, you shouldn’t be going to college.'

One more student:

Its difficult to get a part-time job, because of the credit crunch. Cutting EMA will just make it worse, as students will drop out, affecting the economy even more.

Im doing 6form this september and i hope i get my EMA. Thank you for this campaign, hopefully It will work out.

It would seem to me that if it really is difficult to get a job – as many of the comments testify - then that’s all the more reason for staying on at college, because the alternative is presumably NEETdom which isn’t going to do any good for your personal prospects or those of the country.