Westminstenders: Blue Passports

[RedToothBrush]

Yay for the blue passports.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all

May next year bring us £350 million for the NHS, cake, unicorns, financial passporting, access to the single market, Irish love and of course control to the people.

(Apologies been up to my eyeballs. Normal service will resume after Christmas).

People act like these events are attracting half the university. In reality most of them will be attended by the same small number of people everytime. Most students do not engage with the student union much beyond Freshers week and to couldn't care less who is talking at some debate club meeting they have never heard of. The only reason this has become a thing is because a small number of incidents have been blown up out of all proportion.

Germaine Greer has not been removed from degree courses and her work will be discussed and debated by thousands of students as will the words of rightwing activists. This will happen as part of properly validated and balanced degrees. These events where people are supposedly being 'no platformed' really do not have the wide reaching influence some seem to believe.

There is a part where he points out that the mountain dwellers in one part of Europe have more in common with the mountain dwellers in another part than with the people of their own country.

Well, quite. I imagine the inhabitants of Manchester or Bristol have more in common with the inhabitants of Lyon or Milan than Cornwall or Lincolnshire.

Just a nice video that was recommended by the humanist society.
Bertrand Russell in 1959. What he says at 28 minutes in is particularly pertinent, but it's all fascinating, and relevant: funny and wise.

1dad I'm not sure that uni no-platforming affects Tory vs Labour, i.e. party politics of the future
the transactivists are the most prominent and they aren't particularly leftwing or rightwing - some are Trump fans, some Corbynites

I suspect the govt just can't resist interfering in education, despite how disastrous their interference in schools has been.

BigChocFrenzy I disagree. I think a particular flavour of political agenda is growing in influence and using its influence to shut down voices that don't fit its political model. Such as the non platforming of people like Julie Bindel or simple things like the banning of the Daily Mail on Campus shops. I suspect the Tories have realised that this is to the detriment of conservatives in terms of future political struggle.

bigly We need to clarify what we mean by the various cases of "ban" or "no-platform"

It is very different whether a university, or a student union ban a speaker, or whether individual clubs choose to do so.

imo, individual clubs can ban any speaker they want, for their own meetings, whether because of controversy or just being too boring.

However, if the uni or the union ban them, then that is serious, official and should be made much more difficult,
because the default should always be to allow any legal speech.

Student Union ban:
I suggest requiring a vote of say 55% of all members of the union to be in favour of a ban
So, unless there is a high turnout, a ban would be impossible and the default remains, that the speaker can come

A Union ban should only be on inviting a speaker onto Union property - so a really determined club could anyway hire a hall elsewhere, if they wish.

Uni ban:
Again could only be wrt a speaker on their property, not what clubs do off-site
This should be a vote by their governing body, however that is composed
They would presumably be very influenced by uni staff opinions.

1dad The current Tory party is totally different to the one of my youth, which was confident. tolerant - and quietly competent.

Todays Tories and their supporters seem insecure, angry and paranoid about the young being influenced by school or uni.
However, the main reason the Tories are the party of the age 50+ is because that is the age group they have long targeted for votes, at the expense of the young.

The Tory party just looks old and out of tough with the real world,
Cameron tried to modernise the Tory party and make it socially liberal, hoping to partially stem the loss of young votes, but that was never a convincing change and has now gone.
The party looks more cold-hearted than it ever did before, naked greed and stupidity, very unattractive.

I disagree with the ideas that 3 years of uni debates form opinions much after those 3 years
-few students bother to attend Union or club debates.

What does affect views is higher education itself:
when students are taught to examine facts in their studies and then apply the same analytical skills to what politicians are saying and how their own lives and prosperity are affected.
That makes it more difficult to brush them off with empty soundbites.
That makes them dangerous.

What imo forms longterm political allegiances are:

• parents and their views
• the conditions in which people grew up, their experiences in youth and early adulthood
• Whether they suffer hardship, whether they are later able to prosper and have the life they reasonably expected, including a comfortable retirement

The Tories are flailing around, looking for people like subversive teachers & lecturers to blame for their low level of support not just among the young, but the under-45s.

But it's about prosperity:
Most of Generation Rent are not getting their fair share and don't expect to in the future.

Reposting:

Brendan Cox@MrBrendanCox
...A lovely reminder at the end of the year that bad shit happens but the world is still full of good people.

Thank you for posting this, BigChoc.

The terms 'university' and ‘student union’ are being used too interchangeably for my liking.

Useful twitter thread: twitter.com/SocialHistoryOx/status/945590494486302720

Never having been to an event where there is a guest speaker at university , does the speaker do their spiel and then leaves or is the event more like question time where their theories / speech are dissected by questions from the audience ?

Hope that question makes sense , may have a teeny bit of a bad head

does the speaker do their spiel and then leaves or is the event more like question time

It depends on the event. Sometimes the speaker will be on a panel with other speakers with (generally) opposing views, often one or more of the other panellists will be local academics. There is always a Q&A, but sometimes the organisers control the microphone, so can choose who gets to ask a question. The main problem is the issue of balance. For instance, no serious scientist doubts climate change, so is it legitimate for a university or student society to invite a climate change denier? Even if there is another speaker with opposing views? It's very difficuly to achieve balance when one view is extreme and adding a "mainstream" speaker just suggests that the extreme view is 50% legitimate.

More generally, the problem with the government's views on this is that they are (again) trying to control what goes on in universities. Universities are very protective of freedom of speech and thought, and so wouldn't ban a speaker without very good reason. Universities are also private not-for-profit organisations (at least in this country), so arguably the government shouldn't be telling them what to do (except when it comes to teaching, within reason).

Alongside the brave new internet on its way, free speech is on its way out. A monetised higher education system has already pretty much put pay to intellectual rigour anyway. That and racist may have lost the 'HE market' thousands of EU national applications anyway.

I blame the demise of the formal debate too, on these philistine shores.
It should be taught and practised like the secular ceremony it is: informed, decorous and enlightening. With a vote at the end.

Imagine if the discussion of britain's involvement in the EU had been or is being conducted like that.

Imagine if political discourse was still conducted like that.

The University of East Anglia had first hand experience of the shut down of free speech on climate change data.

Warnings of post-Brexit price rises unless UK can copy EU trade deals

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/26/warnings-of-post-brexit-price-rises-unless-uk-can-copy-eu-trade-deals

The BRC [British Retail Consortium] chief executive, Helen Dickinson, said
the cost of everyday products from food to clothing would go up if the UK lost the preferential arrangements it enjoys as a member of the EU.
^*
Currently, Britain benefits from zero or low tariffs on various imports from trade deals struck by the EU with 73 third-party countries.*
^
As it stands, those arrangements will come to an end the moment Britain leaves the EU.^
^
“On 29 March 2019 we fall out of all of those agreements.^
On that minute after we leave, those arrangements cease to apply to the UK,”

“So what is important between now and 2019 is that the UK gets on with the job in hand in terms of focusing on
at least replicating existing arrangements just to get us back to where we are at the moment.
< no worries, Liam Fox is on the job < Heeeelp ! >

We are talking here about everyday products that people buy week in, week out"

I don't think anyone should be prevented from saying anything, anywhere, so long as it isn't breaking the law as it stands. However what is said should be held up to scrutiny and questioned properly. There should be no false equivalence of credibility as outlined earlier.
Had there been more open discussion of a number of issues, including immigration with its benefits and drawbacks (and how to combat drawbacks, including proper infrastructure planning), perhaps we wouldn't be in the position we are now. My preference for proportional representation is also driven by my feeling that voices should be heard. UKIP held up to proper scrutiny in Parliament might not have had the success it did without representation by pulling the Conservatives to the right.

Big question is what happens to the UK wrt non-EU trade during the 21 months of "vassal state" status following Brexit on 29 March 2019:

Is it just BINO minus UK voting rights ?

Can the Uk - and the EU if Barnier decides leaving the UK to DD & Fox is too cruel - persuade the 70 other countries to let the UK continue in the EU's deals for those 21 months ?

If so, the UK public won't notice much change and their Brexit interest will probably die out, leaving the next govt a much freer hand to go for the softest possible longterm Brexit deal with the EU.

If not, what happens after the transition ends on 31 Dec 2020 ?
We can't reasonably expect the EU would continue to spoon-feed the UK, as a pity project, if transition ends with the UK govt still in unicorn lala land.

I would absolutely push for the right of Ukip to debate if they stick to civilised rules of behaviour
It would need to be under conditions where Kippers can't drown out replies that have inconvenient facts they don't like.

It is ok, maybe necessary, to debate immigration & refugees.
Not OK if UKIP want to bring Farage's "bursting point" poster and debate on that level.

Not OK if Farage wants to repeat his Dulwich College escapade and march around chanting "gas the Jews"
He has never apologised for that and said he was wrong.
He has only tried to justify his actions then by saying it was while another ethnic minority, AfroCaribbeans, were rioting elsewhere in the UK
So any furrin group can be threatened with genocide if other furrins riot

I support PR - Scotland's system looks ok - and accept this means the far right and far left would probably get MPs]

I accept there is a risk that economic disaster can lead to one extreme taking over, as happened in the 1930s Weimar Republic.
However, currently it seems that the Tory party is being taken over by its wimgnuts, so rule by extremists might happen under FPTP anyway.

PR might expose UKIP policies and politicians to scrutiny
or their voters might ignore all this, as they do the conduct of UKIp MEPs, who almost never attend debates, misuse public funds, get convicted for fraud etc

Because UKIP has only had a democratic voice (in the sense of being elected) in the European Parliament, its bad behaviour has been largely ignored. I think that had it been represented in Westminister, its failings would have been far more evident and would have put off many more people who now find some sympathy with the views it articulates (especially when given carte blanche to do so via the BBC).

I should have said a national democratic presence or voice. UKIP have shown how pathetically useless they are in local government and have lost representation accordingly.

if they stick to civilised rules of behaviour

So many conflate their sex, skin colour and 'class' with entitlement to be thuggish.

UKIP in European Parliament has advertised far and wide how low britain has gone in condoning and enabling illiterate white fascist men.

Interesting that even with PR, UKIP have made no inroads into Scotland with the single solitary exception to our shame of the obnoxious MEP David Coburn, who only got in because of the collapse of the LibDem vote and there not being enough votes under the d'Hondt system for a third SNP MEP (so he got in under the "Last Man Standing" rule).

What the PR system in both Holyrood and local Councils has allowed has been greater representation for the Greens. It has however created the circumstances for strange bedfellows, where there are coalition administrations of Conservative and Labour councillors in order to keep the SNP out

"Todays Tories and their supporters seem insecure, angry and paranoid about the young being influenced by school or uni."

Oh, Mrs. T and her ilk were perfectly capable of paranoid hysteria, too.
Did you never hear about Section 28?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/5710650/David-Cameron-says-sorry-over-Section-28-gay-law.html