Out of touch protestors...and Guardian, Red Ed, Lisa Nandy, CiF, etc.

So the Guardian claim that the student protests yesterday were justified, Red Ed wants to go and join in and Labour MPs are queuing up to show their support.. If you look at the comments on CIF, it would suggest that there's a lot of public support for the protests. I am not so sure. I've already blogged about how small these protests are as a percentage of the UK electorate. In the staffroom of the school where I work - which is by no means a right wing hotbed - there is a great deal of bafflement at the protests and protestors.  I think the first one had some sympathy, but the others have just seemed like a chance for kids to skive off and muck about in London.

Added to that, a lot of the people I work with - and a lot of normal people in general - didn't have EMA, did have to pay some element of fees, did have to work or bring up children whilst they went to university, and certainly haven't had anything like the cushy lifestyle these students seem to have.  Most people look at the protesting students and see people who are more privileged than them, not less. And they're right. I keep harping on about it, but it's a complete myth to claim that the "older generation" had their fees paid for them.  About 5-10% of the older generation had their university fees paid for them.  The other 90-95% didn't go to university. Even as university places have expanded, that's come at the price of people paying fees, doing part-time degrees, going back into study whilst having a family and holding down a part-time job.

Democracy and basic maths

Here's this weird argument I am hearing again and again that somehow, the current student riots are 'democratic' and the government are 'undemocratic'.So we have a poster on Labour List claiming that the government ' lacks democratic legitimacy ' which is funny because 59% of people voted for parties in the coalition and only 35% for the previous Labour government and I never heard anyone on Labour List call that government into question, even after Brown took over without an election.

Of course, this claim is made on the basis of the two parties not carrying out every detail in their manifesto - again, it's a coalition which entails compromise, and it's odd that it's the Lib Dems who get the flak for abandoning tuition fees whereas the Tories don't seem to be getting any flak for abandoning their inheritance tax proposals. And again, both parties have a very good reason for this - the coalition - whereas Labour's failure to enact a good number of their 97 manifesto proposals have nothing like the same justification, given they had a solid mandate from the voters to enact everything in it.

But apparently, regardless of all this, the government is undemocratic and the true keepers of the flame of democracy are...you guessed it, the NUS.

Direct action that is democratically conducted and organised by a mass movement can be empowering and liberating...the real challenge to this government comes from democracy and people taking control of their own lives in resisting this government's ideologically driven attacks.

Hmmm. Let's consider this. 77% of voters voted for parties who wanted to implement Browne.  That suggests there was a fairly strong democratic mandate to adopt it.  Let's also consider how many people are on the streets protesting. The first student protest was the largest and attracted 50,000 people.  Out of an electorate of 45 million people, that's just over 0.1%. Even if we accept that for every person who marches, 10 others felt the same but couldn't be bothered, that's still only just over 1% of the UK electorate. If we consider that a lot of the people marching were under 18, and either subtract them or therefore work it out as a percentage of the UK population, not just electorate, the percentage is even smaller. To put it into perspective, ONE HUNDRED TIMES as many people marched against the Iraq war.  ELEVEN TIMES as many people voted for the BNP in May.  I once worked in an area where I am pretty sure there were 50,000 people who would have marched on Parliament to get rid of all foreigners if they thought they had a chance of success. Is that democracy? What are these people on Labour List suggesting? That if 50,000 people march on an issue, the government should adopt it? That this is somehow democratic?

David Mitchell - not got a clue

Incredible article here by David Mitchell. I don't have a problem with non-professionals commenting on politics - obviously I don't, otherwise where would that leave me - but it would nice to think that if you get a comedian to write a serious article about politics he would try and do some research and make a logical argument. No such luck. First he says this:

One of the many problems with the proposals is that you need to examine them so carefully before you realise that they're not quite as awful as they initially seem. The fact that the vast amount of debt that students will accrue will only be repayable when they earn more than £21,000 a year and will be written off after 30 years of failing to do so elevates the scheme from an utter disgrace to a huge disappointment. .

At least, unlike most of the students, Mitchell has spotted that the scheme is not that awful. But then we get this:

But this scant silver lining is barely noticeable. Kids, especially from poorer backgrounds, will just see the giant cloud of future debt and infer that higher education isn't a welcome opportunity but a big financial gamble.

Quite frankly, if you aren't capable of researching the finance behind this scheme, you aren't bright or motivated enough to go to university.  As Mitchell points out in the previous bit of the paragraph, it's not a 'financial gamble' at all - if the gamble of uni education doesn't pay off, it's the state who will pick up the tab not you. And as I have pointed out before, what is more likely to put off kids?  This plan, or the absurd media hype surrounding it?

 Why have you abandoned a policy that would have alleviated such inequities, and on which you were elected, for one that worsens them?

There is no evidence that free higher ed alleviates inequities. It is a middle class susbidy. The people who have benefitted from the expansion of university places are the children of the middle classes. What is inequitable about rich kids being asked to fund their own education? What is equitable about the taxes of roadsweepers paying for the university education of the children of millionaires? The best bit, however, is this:

The student protests just might be demonstrating a growing political will to reform our higher education system, to have it paid for out of income tax. I think that would be fairer. 

David Mitchell thinks it would be fairer does he? Bless him!  Well if David Mitchell thinks it's fairer, we'd all better do it then. Never mind the fact that paying for higher ed out of income tax means dinner ladies subsidise investment bankers.  Never mind that, David Mitchell thinks it's fairer. Sod the evidence, sod the facts, sod doing any research, an Oxbridge educated comedian thinks he knows best.

Unbelievable.

Another incoherent defence of EMA

Lisa Nandy, one of the new Labour MPs, makes another incoherent defence of EMA.  

The argument for scrapping EMA is twofold: firstly, the ‘mess’ that Labour supposedly left the unsuspecting Conservative Party to clear up means that they are reluctantly forced to cut public spending and secondly that it will be replaced with a means tested and directed payment to those most in need. This logic does not even begin to stack up. The cuts are a political choice and not a necessary evil at all. 

Incredible. Does she really believe this? People are talking a lot about Lib Dems and Conservatives betraying their election pledges, but Nandy stood for election on the policies of Alistair Darling who said the cuts would be ‘worse than Thatcher’s.’ Bit of a backtrack.  Even Sunny Hundal over on Liberal Conspiracy has worked out that a return to the free spending era of the early part of this century is just not possible.

That means even if the economy recovers fully we have an £48bn (48, not 18 as previously stated) a year shortfall that needs to be plugged. Plus, we need a budget surplus if we want to reduce the national debt – which means perhaps another £5-7bn a year of cuts.

The reason why I am so insistent on this EMA point is because I do believe in a strong welfare state and because I want the money that is spent on a welfare state to be spent usefully and intelligently. It always seemed to me in the middle of the boom that EMA was fairly wasteful. Right now it seems a classic example of low-hanging fruit – a really easy way to make savings without impacting too much on outcomes.  I say this as a teacher who cares about my pupils. What annoys me as well is that people like Nandy and Polly Toynbee don’t have a clue about how this policy works on the ground.  They don’t see the presenteeism it encourages, the arbitrariness of its allocation, the waste of so much of it, the way that students receiving it would skip your lesson for a driving lesson and still not buy one course-related book by the end of the year.  We see how out of touch Nandy is in this part of the article:

The details of the new discretionary learner support fund are yet to be released but initial statements suggest that it will not include any costs for travel, it will be administered by individual schools and colleges and provide headteachers with the discretion to decide which pupils should receive it. The practicalities of this seem absurd, expecting colleges to means-test students. I can’t imagine that many would opt for this.

I actually have some sympathy with this last point, about turning teachers into social workers. But of course, this is exactly what the current EMA system does! As a 6th form teacher at the moment, I am responsible for logging my pupil’s attendance. This attendance is relayed to the local authority and if it dips below a certain point kids don’t get EMA. I know that there are cases of pupils asking teachers to mark them in when they weren't in so that they won't lose out on their money. I am only a 6th form teacher, but I know for a fact that our head of sixth spends an awful lot of time dealing with EMA problems.  So if you really are worried about teachers becoming responsible for welfare decisions, you’d get rid of EMA altogether. As it is, I think the proposed discretionary fund, whilst not perfect, isn’t bad.  It will eliminate the vast mass of kids who aren’t that badly off and would have stayed in school anyway.  Those kids who are really struggling will be able to apply for it and have their individual circumstances taken into account. Most kids who receive EMA are in London, and in London a 16-18 bus pass costs £8 a week, so even if you had to give a lot of kids the money for that you’d still make a significant saving. The problem comes when you see a pupil who clearly shouldn’t be in the 6th form, who is getting nothing out of it, but who is nevertheless really desperate for the money. If I were the teacher or head teacher called to adjudicate on that, I would probably end up giving the kid the money because I felt sorry for them. But again, as I have established, that’s not a problem new to this discretionary fund, that’s a problem present in the current system.

Nandy’s final point is this:

The EMA is a crucial plank of the agenda to widen participation in education. If Michael Gove wants more people from poor households to get to Oxford and Cambridge, as he claims, then he is going the wrong way about it and, if the demonstrations this week are anything to go by, he will live to regret it.

Why was social mobility higher in the 1950s and 60s when EMA didn’t exist? How did all the poor people who went to Oxbridge and other universities survive in the 6th form then? How did 6th formers survive before 2004? Does Lisa Nandy have any answers to these questions?

Are tuition fees bad for poor kids? Or for wealthy kids?

I don’t think the tuition fees are what all the students are making them out to be. All this talking about how poor families will be affected by this – I don’t think that’s necessarily true because families don’t pay for the tuition fees, you pay for the tuition fees when you’ve got a job. 

Who said that? Nick Clegg? Vince Cable? David Willetts?  Doubtless if they had said it, the Guardian and co would be up in arms about their ‘patronising attitude’. But they didn’t say it. It was said by Shamima Blake, a rather wonderful 16 year old from East London who makes you hopeful for the future of this country. 

She was interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight last Thursday (27:24 minutes in). Unfortunately, she was outnumbered by two whinging wealthy middle-class kids who admitted they thought it was OK for dinner ladies to subsidise their time in further education.  As Ms Blake went on to say ‘I’ve researched it...and I’m pretty fine with it.’ Fantastic stuff.

One problem with Paxman’s line of argument was that he did concede to the two anti-tuition fees students that it was 'unjust’ that his generation and Nick Clegg’s generation had got a free education but kids now didn’t. This is a common myth I hear going around. It is true that Paxman and Clegg got free higher education. It is not at all true that Paxman and Clegg’s generation got free higher education. A tiny percentage of their generation went to university. Everyone else went to work at 18 and paid their taxes. My mother, who is a part of that generation who didn’t go to university at 18, gets very angry when she hears people pushing this line, and rightly so.  She did go to university when she was older and paid all her fees.  So not only was she denied the chance of university at 18 because there were so few places, when she did eventually get to uni 20 years later she had to pay her fees, and now she has to listen to wealthy, spoilt 18 year olds with about a tenth of her intelligence lecture her about how ‘lucky’ she was and how she should therefore subsidise them. Of course, Paxman and the media and the student protestors don’t even know about people like my mum, or the 35% of UK undergrads who are part-timers and who currently don’t get any help with fees or living costs.   They don’t know about them because for all of the claims to the contrary, this is a protest by the spoilt and self-absorbed children of the middle classes. And this Newsnight debate shows that perfectly.

What will put poor kids off going to uni? A fairer funding scheme, or media hyperbole?

I was talking to my mother about student protests the other night and she said an interesting thing.

"When they first brought fees in, I really worried that you wouldn't be able to afford to go to university. But you did, and I couldn't believe it when I found out you didn't have to pay up front."

 In 1998, she'd listened to the protestors complaining that fees would put poor students off university, and knowing we were a poor family, she worried. In actual fact, because we were poor we got a lot of help and I was able to go to a Russell Group uni without paying anything up front. I have a fairly large student loan I am paying off now, but it's essentially like extra tax.  Indeed, one might almost say it is like a graduate tax.

My point is that now, as in 1998, the thing that is going to put off poor kids going to university is NOT the new funding schemes.  The thing that is going to put them off is ridiculous media hyperbole about graduating with massive debts. Perhaps the new scheme does put you in debt, but believe me there is a gigantic difference between debt that accumulates mortgage-style interest and that you start paying back mortgage style the month after you graduate, and debt that is only paid back once you earn above a certain income, otherwise it gets cancelled. I remember whinging about my loans at uni and being sharply rebuked by an American friend. Quite.

Not only that, but poor students will pay LESS under this scheme than they are at the minute.  The repayment threshold has gone up to 21k from 15.  The people who will really suffer under this scheme are the middle and upper classes, which is why I guess they were all out in force protesting against it.  Let's just be clear about that though, and not have any nonsense about this plan being anti-poor people. If you care about the poor getting a university education, then you have a responsibility not to wilfully misrepresent this plan by claiming it is a wrecking ball to the life chances of the young. I will blog a bit more later about how this will affect the sorts of sixth formers I teach.

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.