Pricing universities out of reach

When I was 18 I wasn’t very interested in studying, so the idea of going to university never really raised its head. In those days, like many of my generation, all I wanted was a few beers of a night and the chance to meet lots of girls. So I went to work in a job I hated, on a salary that offered no real opportunity for expansion and with no real career prospects.

Fortunately ten years later my thinking had changed and I applied to do a degree. Now I was never one of those academic elite who felt able to go to Oxbridge. I was closer to one of those oiks that went to what they now call a new university – in those days we called them polytechnics.

I was very grateful for my place and particularly relieved that I was given a full grant and even a few pounds extra because I was a mature student. Had I have been forced to pay student fees there is no way I could have afforded to go. I was a husband and a father (though I was to be divorced just weeks before going to ‘the poly’.

I studied hard, managed to obtain a good degree and went on later to gain a teaching qualification and a master’s degree. Because of circumstances I had an employer who paid for both of these postgraduate qualifications – again if I had been forced to pay the fees myself I would not have been able to afford them.

I am in no doubt I have been very fortunate.

Today I hear Oxford will probably charge £9,000 a year for tuition fees to study at their illustrious university – slightly less than the annual salary of someone on a statutory minimum wage and substantially more than the amount a married couple receive on the dole.

For someone like myself, who went back to education later in life this huge hike in fees is a disgrace and divisive. It will mean very few working class people will be able to think about going to Oxford or any of the other ‘red bricks’– even if intellectually they would be able to cope with the standards required.

So we have a situation, thanks to Cameron and Clegg, where the working class, and particularly those who are out of work, can never aspire to entering the portals of academia. Effectively they have made learning beyond the financial reach of the poor, the underprivileged, the unemployed, the disabled and ordinary working class folk with families who want to return to education.

Oh, and what about the single mothers who want a chance to develop their lives once their baby is old enough to be handed to a childminder?

It is an absolute disgrace and epitomises the divisiveness of this government – where the ‘haves’ can get the opportunities, and the ‘have not’s’ are forced to struggle through life, trying to make ends meet. No doubt Cameron would prefer the kind of society epitomised in the book “The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist”. As society where the privileged have all the finer things in life and the working class scrape an existence, fighting a daily battle to survive

No guesses as to which side of the fence Clegg and Cameron want to sit on!

2.5m unemployed.So this is "Caring Conservativism"?

News today that unemployment has increased by 49,000 will come as no surprise to observers of labour market statistics. Grayling and Duncan Smith will, of course, focus on the slight reduction in the number of people claiming benefit. They will ignore the fact that close to 1m young people are out of work and many of these have never had a job.

Here in the West Midlands, we have seen how the present government ignore local needs. With statistics showing the total number of people unemployed in the region, between September and November 2010, was 264,000, an increase of 48,000, we can only hope predictions of inflation levels of 5% and beyond are without foundation.

Once upon a time, in what now seems a distant land, many of these unfortunate people could have relied on local support to find employment through the Working Neighbourhood Fund. Unfortunately, David “I believe in modern, caring Conservativism” Cameron and his cohorts chose to axe this support some months ago.

No doubt the Tories will make great play on the fact there were 480,000 vacancies in the three months to December - an increase of 18,000 from the three months to September and fourteen thousand higher than a year earlier. Unfortunately, this increase is purely due to the recruitment for the pending official census, who began employing temporary collectors and enumerators in preparation for data collection in October. As the ONS has already stated:

“Excluding the Census vacancies, there were 456,000 job vacancies in the three months to December 2010, down 6,000 from the three months to September 2010.”

This only leaves Cameron with his mantra of ‘the private sector will grow and help the unemployed back to work’. The argument is getting weaker by the day and even the Jobs Editor at the Daily Telegraph is starting to question its ‘truth’. Today, when writing about the latest statistics, she said:

“It is the latest sign that the private sector is struggling to create enough jobs to offset the number of people being made redundant in the public sector.”

She is not alone, Howard Archer, at IHS Global Insight was quoted as saying:

“Major job losses will occur in the public sector as the government slashes spending, and we doubt that the private sector will be able to fully compensate for this. Indeed, we suspect that firms will become increasingly cautious in their employment plans, reflecting slower growth and concerns that the intensified fiscal squeeze will hold back economic activity for an extended period. There are also likely to be significant job losses in private companies supplying services or goods to the public sector. In particular, many firms are likely to try to meet any increase in business through making greater use of the workers they have already or through using part-time staff, and they are likely to be reluctant to take on any more permanent staff unless they are really convinced that sustained improvement in their business is probable.”

Whilst Ian Brinkley, associate director of the Work Foundation argued:

The labour market recovery has come to an abrupt halt as accelerating job losses in the public sector and lack of overall growth in jobs in the private sector start to bite. Women's employment has been especially badly hit. The consequent rise in unemployment would have been worse but for the fact that many women have become "economically inactive" and stopped looking for work.

Now, given all these people are experts in their field, with many years of experience, how come Cameron can deny all the available evidence? Doe he know something we don’t? Does he have some kind of hotline to God allowing him to predict the future more accurately than some of the top economic minds in the country? Or, is his incalcitrant behaviour reminiscent of the uncaring Toryism of the Thatcher years, where unemployment reached 3 million and mortgage rates hit a staggering 15%!

We should not be surprised – the evidence of Cameron’s modern Conservativism was made evident when Osborne stood up for his ‘Emergency’ budget back in June 2010. Since then, things have only got worse and now, as the snows of December thaw away into the recesses of our mind, we are set to face a new ‘Winter of Discontent’, where the ‘haves’ protect what they have, whilst the ‘have-nots’ look in from outside.

Today the Conservatives should be ashamed of themselves, but I doubt they will give it more than a passing thought. In their eyes, these figures are little more than a hiccup in their overall plan to change Britain. One can only fear what the next five years will bring and what this country will turn into if they have their way.

Post-Budget Blues

The first day since the 'Emergency' Budget and all I have heard today is a constant stream of Tory hype. If this isn't watered (or maybe not so watered) down Thatcherism, then I don't know what is.

The Chancellor tells us it was a progressive Budget, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies say it was regressive. Cameron wants me to be leave it was tough, but fair - and then I read that VAT is up to 20%, long-term unemployed will have their housing benefit cut to 90% after a year, child benefit is to be frozen for three years, and Sure Start maternity grants will only go to the first child. So please, Mr Osborne, tell me where is the fairness?

Where is the fairness in a budget that taxes the lower paid and adds 2.5% to their cost of living. Explain how it is just to cap housing benefit and if their rent is above the limit, they must lose their home or become homeless. Where is it right that benefits will increase in line with the consumer price index, whilst the unemployed, the sick and the low paid, those in most need can barely afford to feed themselves and their families.

Perhaps I should ask the public sector workers who now face a two-year wage freeze and the risk that three-quarters of a million now face the risk of redundancy? Or perhaps I should go and talk to the pensioners, who once again have been trampled on.

No, I think I will find the answers I need if I talk to the bankers, who will still enjoy their obscene bonuses. perhaps I could talk to the private landlords who overcharge and abuse their tenants and then when they sell their houses, only pay 18% tax

You and your Liberal friends tell me you want a fair and just society. Can you wonder why I find it hard to believe you?

A future for the unemployed

Last week George Osborne cut £535m from the Department of Work and Pensions budget at a time when currently 2.51m (542,000 of these are classified as having been long-term unemployed) people are registered as unemployed and a further 8.16m people identified as inactive. Furthermore, Ian Duncan Smith has indicated that 2.6m people currently in receipt of Incapacity Benefit will be reassessed and those available for work will be transferred onto Jobseeker’s Allowance. He estimates that approximately 50% of these people will be added to the overall unemployment figures. Thus with 3 weeks of being in government the Con-Dems have managed to ensure we will have 12m people out of work, with possibly a further half a million to follow as the cuts start to take effect on public services.
Additionally, it is now known that 7.67m people are currently employed on a part-time basis, many of whom opt for this type of work because they are unable to secure full-time employment. The government, for its part, welcomes people taking this approach as it helps keep unemployment below 8% (Source: Office of Labour Market Statistics).
The Con-Dem approach to tackling unemployment remains vague and tomorrow, Chris Grayling, the Minister of State at DWP will meet with private training providers such as Serco (infamous for their running of Yarls Wood immigration detention centre) and A4e to outline how any new programme might work. We already know it is their intention to scrap all existing welfare to work programmes, such as Flexible New Deal, Future Jobs Fund, Pathways to Work and Flexible Routeways. We also know these will be replaced by the Tory flagship provision – Work Programme.
The only clear issue is that the funding arrangements for the new provision will differ substantially from all previously run contracts. According to plans already outlined, training providers will only be paid when someone has been in a sustainable job for 12 months. The existing mechanism allows for a training provider to claim a small service fee in order to cover costs and the balance paid once a person has been in employment for 3 or 6 months (depending on the contract). This will change under new measures and will be replaced by a mechanism where providers will generally only receive a payment when the ‘client’ has been in employment for a year – an approach that will clearly mean smaller providers and third sector organisations will be unable to bid for these lucrative contracts. The effect of this will be that local organisations who have an intimate knowledge of their area and the needs of the communities they serve will be substantially ‘disenfranchised’ because of Tory commitment to centralising services and their fascination with ‘big is beautiful’.
The government rationale for the Work Programme is that it will be cost effective to contract independent training providers to deliver this provision. However, the government seem to have failed to recognise a key flaw in their strategy. The total number of job vacancies for the period February – April, 2010 was 475,000, whilst the number of jobless people potentially seeking work for the same period was approximately 11m. Whichever way you look at it, the figures don’t add up. Understandably the Tories and their lap dogs, the Liberal Democrats, have been hesitant to suggest how training providers will be expected to create jobs.
In order to tackle unemployment in this country it is critical a number of key issues are addressed:
• First we need to create a substantial house building strategy to tackle the critical need for homes in the UK and address the high level of unemployment amongst those working in the ‘trowel trades’. This would include the creation of 1m new homes each year for 5 years and would be under the auspices of local authorities through social housing trusts and would offer employment to approximately 750,000 people.
• Introduce a series of programmes to tackle the high level of unemployment amongst young people – including restoring the Future Jobs Fund and introducing a significant apprenticeship programme in order to offer 250,000 new apprenticeships – automatically cutting youth unemployment by a third.
• Nationalisation the banking and finance industry in order that profits from these companies can be used to rebuild our industrial base. Further savings could be achieved by scrapping the Trident programme and reinvesting the money saved into local business initiatives.
• Renationalisation of the rail and postal system to protect existing jobs and rebuild our transport infrastructure. This would include a massive investment in improving our rail network
• Through the creation of worker-owned co-operatives and other common ownership programmes, establish a coherent industrial policy to support the establishment of a competitive and technologically advanced engineering industry in the UK. We were once one of the foremost industrial nations and this was allowed to slip into decline under Thatcher, Major and later by Blair.
• Develop ecologically friendly energy sources – wind farms, wave, solar etc. These new technologies would help establish many new jobs and add to the wealth of local communities.

This approach, whilst openly and unapologetically socialist in its emphasis, would tackle head on the issue of rising unemployment. Of course, critics would argue we can’t afford it right now because our national debt is so high, but in 1945 our debt was 216% of GDP compared to 51% today and a post-war Labour government initiated polices that by 1951 had created full employment.

If we could do it then – we can do it again!