British Politics

No, and kelhus99 is lying again.

Prestige for a company to have a former UK PM on its board because ~no one in the US knows and cares how incompetent he was.

It's not the prestige among the ignorant. It's pure contacts and power/money networking.

They are a very very rich and powerful family.

It’s both.

He wasn't arrested for criticising radical Islam, though (not that he likes radical Islam). He was arrested for saying that women being threatened by men who won't go away should do what Queen Camilla says she did when younger and hit them in the nuts. Only Camilla didn't just use her fist, she used a spike-heeled shoe.

It seems unlikely that that case will go anywhere, though it may depend on the outcome of the current case at the end of the month. (In that case, Linehan is accused of stalking a very strange person who admitted on cross-examination that it was the other way round and he had in fact been stalking Linehan.)

Networking is a pretty important part of business. He was in the investment banking world before politics. Seems like a pretty solid resume as far as these things go.

I'm surprised my work survived this long under Reevesonomics but it does no longer and I'm more a free agent ffs

I'm really sorry to hear that sixfour, good luck for the next chapter.

yeah, that sucks, be lucky sixfour.

Soaring costs are hurting everyone. Business's are closing, unemployment is increasing, the health of the nation is in decline, we have an ageing population and despite having one of the highest tax burdens on record all we see are crumbling public services and a UK nothing like it once was. When I go to my local supermarket I see more and more things behind lock boxes. It's all incredibly depressing.

Some blame the rich/successful saying they should pay more tax, some blame the poor saying cut the benefits. Some blame the immigrants, some blame foreign leaders and both sides of the political spectrum blame the other side. However the question we should be asking ourselves is what is the problem?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtFOxNbm...

Good luck with the next step! In academia so I suspect I won't be too far behind.

chronically terrible governance for over 20 years now

To be honest, it's been chronically terrible for many decades, with an occasional few years of good. Blair was actually good from 97 to 2002 maybe, but it went to **** when he suddenly got obsessed with his world stage work instead of GB, and then Brown went to war with small businesses.... and the whole signing the Lisbon treaty without referendum.

That's the only bit of governance that actually felt good to me, for my whole life in the UK. The rest has been pretty chronically bad, probably cushioned by a pretty good civil service, I suspect.

Thanks gents

Our department/school/institution seems fairly robust, but it's certainly a concern. We have some extremely talented grad students who just can't get their foot on the ladder. I also heard about another uni firing a lecturer for being crap, which I've never heard of before and is very likely related to the financial situation.

Universities should ditch a lot of the non-academic courses that emerged in the 90s and get back to concentrating on STEM and the Humanities.

What kind of courses do you mean?

Mainly the bollocks courses that sprang up mainly to satisfy Blair's dream of everyone having a degree aka young people getting £40k into debt with a useless qualification.

So marketing, media studies etc. Those aren't academic subjects to my mind and should be studied outside of universities.

I certainly don't agree with Badenoch's idea of scrapping subjects such as English and Psychology, but she is an uncultured moron who only understands (or thinks she understands) money.

It wasn't everyone, it was 50% of school leavers, like in France. Why on earth he thought that was a good idea, no one knows, because it was already evident that the French just produced hordes of unemployable graduates with nonsense qualifications. There aren't that many meaningful graduate jobs and you don't expand the economy just by producing more graduates.

The 1960s expansion of higher education, so strongly opposed by old-school Oxford reactionary Kingsley Amis ('More will only mean worse'), was probably called for and OK, but the colossal 1990s expansion, and the resulting marketisation and the loss of tuition grants (because the public couldn't possibly fund that many students), was just a bad idea.

Part of the idea was to turn half the population into liberals like himself, which he assumed would happen once they’d been through the university system and had been exposed to the same brilliant ideas that made him a Thatcherite centrist.

The idea was fundamentally flawed, because the idea of higher education is pyramidal by nature, and forcing people to get more and more qualifications to compete for the same work is just stupid.

Having more go to university and making them pay tuition fees was a good idea, just not to the extent that it happened. I for one wouldn't have had the opportunity to go to university under the old system.

So yes, even though it's my sector and by extension potentially me under threat, it's ultimately needed. There are too many courses, students and indeed lecturers that are just not up to the standard required, and so there has to be some shrinkage.

Therein lies the problem. If you wouldn't have got in to university under the old system but are now teaching at one, there's a big problem with the quality of teaching at what are now called universities.

Universities were never meant to be employment schemes for the academically challenged.