I have a lot of sympathy for students who see themselves getting bad value from their degrees & find trying to balance staying financially solvent & studying a sometimes impossible challenge;
But I also have sympathy with university staff trying to encourage in-person attendance (knowing as I do how degraded on-line learning can be).
Sadly, this crisis in higher education is driven by external forces that are pitting students & staff against each other.
Unsurprisingly, given the problems for merchant shipping at the southern end of the Suez Canal, more ships are passing round the Cape of Good Hope... leading to longer journeys & container transfers at the west of the Mediterranean for shipment going to Italy, Greece etc.
Both add costs to shipments & as noted in a post yesterday, this will be another external driver of continued inflation.
Revealing the direction of Tory policy, while (finally) Rishi Sunak has explicitly recognised the tax-raising impact of fiscal drag (the freezing of personal tax allowances, while prices & wages rise)... he only proposes unfreezing the personal allowance for pensioners.
Its a pity (if unsurprising) that he has not previously 'recognised' the impact of fiscal drag on the rest of the population... or more accurately its all too clear that until now he was happy to raise taxes on workers.
In academia there's a clear group of scholars (I guess among which I would have found myself) who do not merely analyse the political economy (critically) but also advocate for structural changes - so when I say 'politically normative' I mean word that doesn't merely say what is happening but takes a position on what ought to happen...
Keir Starmer appears to think this is a get out of jail free card, on accusations of backtracking on previous promises:
'with the damage that’s been done to the economy, particularly by Liz Truss, it is not possible to do that'!
While he may well be right that things have been made so much worse in the last three years that earlier promises have been undermined.... for many, its a series of shifts that have suggested he wasn't serious in the first place.
Zoe Williams (Guardian) thinks Rishi Sunak might actually be trying to lose the election & that sort of makes sense;
The Tories have so wrecked the country that their best bet is to walk away, leave Labour the almost impossible task of clearing up the mess & then in five years time (with the collusion of a supine right wing press) claim Labour have had their chance & the Tories can now save us from the wreckage (without acknowledging its Tory policies that did it)!
@ChrisMayLA6 when a distant family member who is a member of their local conservative club (I know... In my defence, I don't speak to them much 🤮) comes on the text saying "who should I vote for to stop my kids having to do national service?", they've either totally lost the plot or they're deliberately throwing it.
You might disagree with Michael Hesletine on many things but I'm guessing many of us will agree with him on this:
'The state of our economy, defence & environment, the need to level up our society, control immigration & restore Britain’s standing in the world. None of these issues can be honestly addressed in isolation from our relationship with Europe. Yet Europe is the no-go area'!
Ignoring brexit & its consequences marks this as (likely) a pretty dishonest election!
@ChrisMayLA6 The Overton window has slid so far that at the last election IIRC Heseltine (and other still-living Thatcher-era Conservative government ministers) were telling their supporters to vote LibDem.
Heseltine is right on a lot of things these days (but still too far to the right for my taste).
@ChrisMayLA6 Britain’s body politic as a whole looks and sounds for all the world as though it is desperately in need of therapy. Before we contemplate trying to rejoin the EU we need the whole country to come to terms with our real (reduced) place in the world, lose the swagger and sense of entitlement, and develop the maturity needed to be part of a collective body. It’ll help us come to terms with losing all the special terms we had before we flounced out. Before we can do the..
as @RichardJMurphy argues this morning the Starmerist Labour Party seems to have contempt for those on the left.
What is interesting about this to me (as a once functioning politics academic) is I'm reminded of the talk of a politics beyond left & right in the 80s/90s led by people like Anthony Giddens.
We now seem to have got beyond left & right not by virtue of ideological progression but rather by the continued movement (and narrowing) of the 'Overton Window' of what is seen as acceptable,
Someone needs to sit the Guardian editorial team down & explain to them:
Rising house prices are not 'growth' - this is asset price inflation driven by financial instruments & constrained supply... read my lips: IT IS INFLATION!
(just because its excluded from RPI/CPI measure doesn't make it growth!)
And most inflationary areas are not 'best performing' - they are areas of housing crisis!!!!
@ChrisMayLA6 Could you tack on a module which explains to journalists that if the percentage rate of inflation goes down then prices still go up, but just not as fast? Actually you might need to tack on a preceding module that explains ratios and percentages and how meaningless it is to talk about large changes in small numbers whilst not grasping small changes in big numbers. It’s unfortunate that journalism is controlled by the kids who flunked arithmetic aged 10.
One of the mantras of modern education has been the benefits of (need for) 'lifetime learning'; the utility of adults retiring to education when their skills need updating or they wish to acquire knowledge to change (or develop) their career(s).
That funding cuts since 2010 have nearly halved the numbers of adults (re)entering various levels of education is both depressing & another instance of austerity & Tory cuts constraining people's life choices (chances).
The number of chefs coming into the UK on skilled worker visas has been rising quickly.... the bad news for the hospitality sector is once the new threshold for wage levels for visa applicants kicks in, the average wage of chefs means they will earn too little to get a visa...
Perhaps more interestingly if we compare chefs with software developers, we might suggest that the UK's strategy of more IT training seems to have worked... even if we seem unable to train chefs?
Before Brexit you'll recall the easy journeys to Europe & how this has become more difficult since... well sadly, you ain't seen nothing yet.
The EU's new border regime (which of course we are now outside; more outside than we were from Schengen), will require prior registration (like the US system) and biometric uploads on entry to the EU.
From 6th October the cost in time & inconvenience we have visited on ourselves (or was visited on us by Leave voters) is going to get a while lot worse!
This is one of the main reasons I think the tories have called the election early. When this comes in in october, along with goods checks at the UK end, the doodoo is really going to hit the fan.
Given the long term policy of the pensions 'triple lock' has lifted many pensioners out of relative poverty (even if our pensions remain low by international standards), it make sense to suggest that a similarly long-term political commitment on child poverty is required - a 'child's lock' commitment to raise child-related benefits to a higher level & track them to rises in earnings & inflation.
While in many ways this is a crucial election for the future of the country, for many, Labour no longer offer much hope of salvation.
The next six weeks will see the (normal) pre-election media driven battle between the two main party leaders, but sadly, this aspect of the election is going to be as edifying as watching too bald men fight over a comb;
the real politics is likely to be away from the leaders; perhaps for once the media might give the Greens more airtime?
In the battle for the youth vote we now seem to have some clear blue water between the parties;
Labour is (at least at the moment) offering to lower the voting age to 16 - perhaps hoping that 18 year olds will see this as a positive move for their younger siblings?
Meanwhile the Tories are offering mandatory 'national service' at 18 to build character & experience....
Hmmm... while actually, I'm not sure the Tories idea is nuts, I can't see many 18 year olds going for it.
The key thing about the compulsive element (and this would need to be class blind - no buying your way out) is that people from diverse backgrounds would physically/socially interact - I'm not convinced that this is achieved online (but then again I'm over 60 & am sceptical about many of the claimed benefits off online 'community')