by frog
Here’s eye-witness perspective on the student protests in London.
The first from NZ academic Bronwyn Hayward who is currently in the UK. She asks:
Where were the adults when Britain’s young people are finding their political voice?
And this from Laurie Penny who writes for the New Statesman:
I am genuinely afraid that I might be about to die, and begin to thumb in my parents’ mobile numbers on my phone to send them a message of love.
Both posts are worth a few minutes of your time.
Published in Justice & Democracy by frog on Mon, December 13th, 2010
Tags: charles and camilla, new zealand green party, tuition fees
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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Looks like the wheels are falling off the trolley.
It’s a replay of the CPE riots a few years ago in France, when the politicians thought they could cut off opportunities for the young people about to enter the workforce.
About time the baby boomers worked out that just having greater numbers in their generation doesn’t give them the right to cut off all future prospects for the latest generation of school-leavers.
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Another first-hand account of the education protests, and links to more images here:
http://www.indymedia.org.nz/article/79108/london-tory-hq-occupied-50000-protest-ed
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Laurie Penny is a lying Oxbridge red propagandist. I wouldn’t take what she says seriously.
As for the idiot academic who burbles about “Britain’s young people are finding their political voice”: yeah right. A few thousand disaffected middle class louts regurgitating discredited Foucoultian bunk and anarcho-cretins shipped in from the continent. Don’t think this is part of some socialist wave, it’ll turn into a wet fart like the French riots did.
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The adults are working, and voted for political parties that support fees. After all Labour did as well. Laurie Penny didn’t comment on the report that Transport for London diverted buses away from Trafalgar Square because some thugs in the protests were throwing things at them, and a window had been smashed.
I’ll be amused when UK blogs start commenting on political issues in New Zealand or protests without being present.
Stick to your knitting frog.
I saw the protests, almost entirely a bunch of middle class kids having fun, hijacked by the Socialist Worker and groups of street gang kids seeking to wreck havoc. The people working in the street I was in were fearful given what had been seen before.
A bunch went up Oxford Street vandalising and intimidating, forcing shops to close.
The sight that has caught enough attention is the son of multi-millionaire musician David Gilmour protesting that the state wont pay for his education when he himself lives a rarified existence and his father has enough money to pay for the education of around 3000 students.
Bear in mind the UK policy offers full loans to students that they do not need to start to repay until after they are earning above the average wage. This is hardly harsh, it doesn’t shut out anyone on the basis of income or background, but does mean that those who use their degrees to earn more money pay for it.
Not that the students wanting a fun day out, the far left hangers on and those who embraced violence and vandalism have a single sane idea to address the UK’s looming trillion pound public debt (given next to none of them actually know the portion of that attributable to bank bailout is around 5%).
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Katie,
Its not fair to blame the “baby boomers” for cutting back on education spending. The flaw in your argument is that you see politicians who are from that generation making cut backs which affect youth, however you don’t see the other people from that generation who are not responsible for such decisions, and indeed are also suffering from cutbacks to government spending. The reason you see baby boomers making these decisions (and incorrectly blame the entire generation for the decisions) is that it takes years to “move up the ladder” to be in positions of power. It’s not surprising the most powerful politicians/business people are baby boomers; they’ve simply had enough time to get into those positions.
Indeed if you’re looking for someone to blame for the UK government’s cuts to education, you might be better looking at the banks which were bailed out by that nation’s government.
p.s. I’m not a baby boomer.
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Libertyscott,
You’re right that the UK bank bail out only contributed a portion to that country’s public debt. Its a sizeable portion for a single event though.
To bring the discussion back closer to home, I have often heard young people (and people from my generation) blame the baby boomers for their perceived lack of opportunities. They seem to think it is unfair that baby boomers received fully state funded education, yet now they have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for theirs.
This is the reality: the baby boomers received their education as a result of struggles by their parents (the ones who lived through the Great Depression). It was paid for by that older generation’s taxes.
If the younger generation want fully state funded education then they’ll also have to accept it will need to be funded through taxation. Once they start working, their taxes will start funding education for the next generation. You can’t have tax cuts and increased government spending at the same time (well you can, but it won’t last for long).
What happened in New Zealand in the mid 1980s was that some of the baby boomer generation received massive income tax cuts, even after the effect of GST was factored in. However, one cannot blame the baby boomer generation as a whole for cutbacks in education. Do you remember “Mrs Mop”, the cleaner in the advert who was meant to benefit from the tax changes in the 1980s; that was a fine piece of political propaganda. She was probably from the baby boomer generation, and ended up paying about the same, or even more, in tax, and is now likely looking forward to retiring as a pauper. So its not really a generational issue; its that a certain sector of society has been gathering up as much wealth to themselves at the expense of the rest of us – this is the issue which really needs to be addressed.
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…and it isn’t only here…
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/record-social-inequality-and-its-violent-aftermath-explained-three-minute-cartoon
… but I can tell you true, as a boomer, that this isn’t the doing of “boomers”, who are mostly as broke as you…. it is the doing of thieves, frauds, shysters and other words that actually mean bankers, and a system that is so deeply broken that most people can’t even see the faults.
BJ
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Except that far fewer of those Baby Boomers enjoyed the fully state funded education because the entrance standards into Universities were tough. I imagine that many of my generation who are at University now would not be there if we went back to the days of fully state funded education with tough entrance standards.
In saying that, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing – there are far too many people going to University who will not be able to get a job at the end of it.
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Samiuela
The difficulty with the education system is that New Zealand baby boomers don’t want to pay the increased expense the newly educated have to charge to try and recover their fees. This adds to the recession because the educated will not work for less and leave because the baby boomers don’t want to pay for that education in a round about way. This is an additional negative dynamic to having high fees for education.
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The baby boomers who went to University went at the expense of high taxes, up to 60%, on boomer tradesmen and technicians who did not go to university. Only a fraction went to Uni compared with now. It is the student loan system that enables the much higher numbers.
Doesn’t stop graduates complaining about the cost of a plumber though.
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Humungous amounts of credit made available have enslaved us all. To whom do we owe this money and where did they get it from? Could it be that it never existed, therefore should be written off? Or could it be that anonymous trillionaires have made unimaginable profits by getting slave labour in Asia to make, for example Nike shoes for $2 a pair and wholesaling them for over $100?
Money does not represent anything real. it used to represent gold. What does it represent now?
Why is the world broke? We have not run out of food or oil.
This is a huge scam. We have been enslaved by smoke and mirrors.
Why does no one even ask where this money came from and to whom does the world owe it?
No one seems to know. No one even asks!
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State paid education that Jon-ston mentions ran on a meritocracy that ensured a high standard of student by the high entrance exams.
Yes it has to be payed for by tax on a graduated system with non-productive and speculative businesses paying the top amounts like the TOBIN and Capital Gains Tax.
These are the very businesses who get kick backs (refunds) on GST and don’t want to contribute to the upskilling of the next generation.
So what do they do????
They simply vote for the ACT and National Parties.
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Phil Toms, were we ever forced to borrow this money? In most cases, we were not – indeed, for years, Alan Bollard was pleading with us to save more money, but instead we engaged in a spending binge.
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John-ston,
Its not so much that entrance standards to university were tougher in the past (I’m not actually sure they were), but kids are staying in education longer because they realise that its no longer possible to leave school at 15 and get a job. This also partly (mainly?) explains what people see as declining educational standards. In the past those who chose to go to university were the most academically able; others could simply leave school and get a job and were never counted in the educational statistics for levels beyond that at which they left school. Now the less capable students go to university, and appear to drag the educational standards down, when in reality its simply that a broader section of school leavers end up in university.
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