University Tuition Fees

[dorotheehw]

How can mums support the student protest against the rise in tuition fees for higher education. I went to uni one day a week when my children were 8 and 12. I could not have afforded it under proposed fees nor would I have wanted a debt of £30.000

Hi all

I would like to thank you all for your interesting points and add a couple of my own.

This, I believe, is quite an interesting and informative video that you might be interested in:

falseeconomy.org.uk/blog/video-a-brilliant-demolition-of-osbornes-austerity-economics

I think the saddest poster I've seen so far is a take on the quotation from here

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came%E2%80%A6

that simply said 'First they came for the students, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a student.......'

Now I don't mean to suggest that anyone is due to be exterminated but I'm sure you get my drift.

I don't think people quite understand how desperate these cuts are for so many people,especially women,and how bad it's going to make things for everyone in the future.

In addition I don't think that people really 'get' what Cameron meant by wanting to adopt the 'american model'.

Watch the Michael Moore film Capitalism and hear the story of an airline pilot on $19,000 a year with $100,000 of student loans as a starting point. Currently there are so few jobs in the States that 5 million people are literally penniless, with another 2 million set to join them when their 4 extra months of Unemployment Insurance runs out. Medicaid for the disabled has been cut too and the Republicans won't even vote through the bill that gives healthcare to the 9-11 first responders until the further two years of tax cuts to the very rich has been decided. Yes let's adopt the american model hey?!

Without a safety net it truly is an employers market, and when employers know that it's a case of work or starve why would they pay £14,000 for a full time admin post if they can pay £11,000? And why stop at the pen pushers when that becomes the case. It might not be affecting you now but it will do, businesses are there to make money and keep their stockholders happy, not play fair.

Sorry if I'm waffling on here but I wanted to join in the discussion. At the moment I'm using the aforementioned model to try and establish what sort of tax cuts have been given to corporations here. Apparently the tax cuts in America were to encourage employment, it obviously didn't work.

I worry that the concentrated focus on tuition fees is averting our gazes while dastardly things are happening that (see John Pilger's film about where the loyalties of the media lie) we won't even hear about until it affects us directly.

Oh, and with regards to EMA the last day to pick up an application form was Friday, so that's the death of that one.

Peace.

I think that's true Pinked. Sadly people only sit up and take notice when they're being affected directly.

I also think there's a sort of masochistic side to the British people such that they believe this 'there's no money left so we all have to suffer' rhetoric without actually looking at who is conspicuously not suffering and why and why the blood hell we're in a recession in the first place.

fivecandles - Ok, I get the message that you are a class warrior who thinks the Tories are evil. I am not a class warrior and I don't share your views of the Tories. And I certainly don't share the view that people should be excluded from senior posts in government because they've had an expensive education or because they are from a particular background.

And on that note, since this is no longer about tuition fees, I'm ducking out of this thread.

fivecandles

Thanks for the response. Totally agree with you there, I mean austerity, what sort of word is that to use to mean 'go without'. Doesn't anybody have an issue with this romanticizing of poverty. Like you say, it angers me too that the discourse appears to be, just keep your head down and get on with it and we'll be ok in 4 years.

Ironically, or not, the very people who are literally running from job to job trying to keep the roof over their heads, bills paid and food on the table, are the ones who haven't got the time to investigate fully what's going on and are the ones who will be hit the hardest. Bloody ratrace!

Anyway, if yourself, or anyone else, uses Twitter and would like to check out the profiles of some lovely american mums, who have helped me to understand the political arena and are more than happy to share their experiences of living in an 'austere' society and how they got there then:

@GottaLaff - She also runs a blog called The Political Carnival and manages to catch interesting news from all over the globe.
@KimDoyleWille - who runs the @feedingamerica charity
@Leftpalm - has a disabled son in a wheelchair soon to lose healthcare

Thanks.

ph, I'm not a class warrior and don't believe people should be excluded from anything because of their educational backgrounds (or excluded from education because of their backgrounds for that matter). However, I think it's important to recognize that the make up of parliament (as I posted earlier) is no way representative of the general population and the three people who have the most power in politics have no direct experience of the realities of state education themselves. In fact, they come from extremely privileged backgrounds and have had the most exclusive and costly private education. Don't you see any hypocrisy at all in the fact that Cameron who went to Eton and spent his student days at Oxford living it up as a member of the notorious Bullivant club is putting in measures which will make having any sort of higher education at all increasingly difficult for all but the very rich?

Gove, also privately educated followed by Oxford. His wealth is estimated at 1 million. Again, he is in charge of state education without ever really experiencing it.

Do you think any one of these white, privileged men are going to struggle to send their own children to university?

Ad for Gove's expenses claims:

'Michael Gove reportedly claimed £7,000 for furnishing a London property before 'flipping' his designated second home to a house in his constituency, a property for which he claimed around £13,000 to cover stamp duty. Around a third of the first £7,000 were spent at an interior design company owned by Gove's mother-in-law.[19] Gove also claimed for a cot mattress, despite children's items being banned under the Commons rule. Gove said he would repay the claim for the cot mattress, but maintained that his other claims were "below the acceptable threshold costs for furniture" and that the property flipping was necessary "to effectively discharge my parliamentary duties".[19] While he was moving between his multiple homes, he stayed at the Pennyhill Park Hotel and Spa, charging the taxpayer more than £500 per night's stay.'

You don't have a problem with this man telling us there's no money left for High Education whilst pursuing the most vulnerable members of society (those on EMA, children via child benefit, those on disability benefits) with a vengeance?

Can we be absolutely clear about this. Gove spent £7000 of taxpayers money on FURNISHING HIS OWN HOME and £500 per night at a HOTEL but thinks ordinary people should accumulate massive debts to train to be doctors, nurses and teachers.

So agree 5candles.
We're expecting a primary curriculum based on prep school models, which is actually quite understandable, given that the government knows nothing about any other type of education.
(Have to say the Labour cabinet were almost as elite.)

This was where the GTC should have had influence, but they blew it.... big time.

Stoat - I'm pretty sure Gove went to a state primary (and got a scholarship to private secondary).

He was also adopted as a baby, brought up in a Labour supporting home, and went on strike as a young journalist.

Such are my prejudices... again