The UK: Eating Your Seed Corn

Right wing nuts are rampant everywhere. In the UK they have pushed to raise fees for higher education. Wow! That is a great way to cut yourself off at the knees. You can "save" money now by not educating the next generation.

I accuse the UK Conservatives of having "too limited" a vision. Why don't they simply abolish education from the public purse and tell people they have to figure out how to pay to educate themselves. Obviously education is not important in a modern economy. Who cares that only 20% of the population earn enough to pay their own way. Let the other 80% take out loans. Or if they don't have collateral sufficient for a loan, let them go back to the "good old days" of my ancestors to made it to the new world as "indentured servants" (that's a fancy name for a person who sells himself into slavery for a limited time, 7 years, or 14 years, or 21 years depending how much money needs to be raised).

I don't claim to understand this, but the trend of raising costs in the following bit from BBC News is pretty obvious:

The motion, which still has to be backed by the House of Lords, raises the ceiling on annual tuition fees for English students to £9,000 - although the government says that would only apply in "exceptional circumstances" where universities meet "much tougher conditions on widening participation and fair access".

Another motion, also backed by a 21 majority, says the "basic threshold" for fees should rise to up to £6,000 a year - up from £3,290 at the moment. This would be introduced for the 2012-13 academic year.

I'm sitting in Canada thinking that some kind of hallucinogen has been unleashed in the water. Ireland has taken the people's money and given it to the banks and their ultra-rich owners and told the rest of the population to "suck it up" and work harder, pay more taxes, because the rich want to feather their beds a bit more. Apparently the Brits got jealous, so they are now trying to outdo the Irish with their own schemes like pricing education out of reach of the bottom 80% of the population!

A second thought... It has been several hundred years since the commoners cut off the head of a royal. Maybe the time has come again...



I'm being extreme, but when a "government" so caves in to the rich that it destroys the future of the nation' youth, extreme words are forced upon you. To lie down and take something like this is to allow those with power to crush the life out of the future of a country.

I simply don't understand where the crazy right all around the world is on the march to put a boot in the face of working people and the middle class. All in the service of the ultra-rich, the top 1%, the top 0.1%, and more seriously in service to the top 0.01% who are calling the shots.

Yet another thought... The above attack on the British "royals" is seen as shocking. This is seen as hooligans and ruffians gone amok. But if you watch the video below, similar students are held up as heros...



Violence is very bad. But when you have a government that won't listen, you drive a portion of the population to acts of madness. In the case of Tianamen it is held up as "patriotism" and "heroic". But the riots in the UK are held up as "meaningless violence". Amazing how the same thing looks so different. As far as I can tell, in both cases it is the youth of the country trying to save their country from madness that they see in the governing class!