British Politics
Been on holiday for a few weeks, surprised to find no general discussion of British politics so though I'd kick one off.
That’s a cheap shot in lieu of an actual argument. Education beyond GCSE is pyramidal by nature. I suppose you think that’s snobbery?
If we want students to get high quality teaching., or at least of a similar quality that students 30 years ago were getting, turning C grade A level students into university lecturers might be good for their careers but is counterproductive.
There's more to the expansion than just making more junk courses. A LOT of working class kids did degrees they just wouldn't have even considered it prior. I am from a council estate, and barely any kids even considered it in an estate of several dozen (maybe hundreds of) kids back int eh 1970s and early 80s. I can only think of 1 other such kid who did a degree from my estate. Weirdly, both of us went on to PhDs, an unbelievable step for kids from the generation before us and still quite rare when we did it. I only considered doing a degree, and did it (before the expansion) because I won a scholarship to a grammar school, and it was always an expected route in my school. My friends, from local comprehensives, had trouble even being able to do GCEs, the default of such places were CSEs - which was a big roadblock to higher education.
I've also lived long enough and had enough experience to know people that might not have appeared academically suitable at 18 to do a degree, could in fact easily achieve really solid degrees if they were allowed onto such programs. And when I hear people saying stuff contrary to that, one word springs to mind.... 'snob'.
So don't throw 'cheap shot' at me, after you threw one, because that's bad form.
When he mentioned not having an 'opportunity' that does not automatically mean not getting the grades, and assuming that.... makes you sound like a snob.
I’m very much in favour of preference being given to pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds because, as I also know from experience, many comprehensive schools were a very poor environment for academic advancement in the 70s and 80s and talented kids were held back by dint of not being middle class.
That’s a completely separate argument to the one about the proliferation of young people encouraged or almost forced to study Mickey Mouse degrees and incur huge debts so they can compete with each other to serve you in Costa.
Part of the solution imo is to completely scrap the actually snobbish public school system and get those talented teachers working with normal kids in state schools, but being a working class Tory I don’t think you’d be in favour of such anti snobbery measures.
I think you and I probably fundamentally agree on how important STEM and humanities should become a major front and centre in higher education. I personally include creative degrees (art, music, film/TV making, textiles, clothes design and suchlike) under this umbrella. I also believe apprenticeships should also be considered more highly in the media and society than they currently are, but that's a longer slog.
I also am a strong believer that a government should try and forecast what skills shortages there are now and in the foreseeable future, and lower the potential cost to students where they want recruitment. Make doctors/nurses etc etc have a really prominent assist to get payback on loans by time in service in the UK, that sort of thing (or even easier, pay fees and reinstate living grants for such important sets of skills). I hate the NHS relies on poaching skills from overseas to fill requirements. It is appalling to steal talent from countries that probably need it way more because we don't train people here.
Yes of course retain and hopefully expand the current strong creative sector, but art colleges aren’t what we’re talking about, which is the terrible personal and financial cost young people have to incur just to gain the same sort of employment that a school leaver reached 30 years ago.
I note you didn’t respond to the idea of scrapping public schools.
oh I missed that bit. I don't like private schools, but I personally benefitted from a 2-tier school system that allowed me to go to a school that was much better because I was more keen on education when I was 10, so I got my scholarship.
Private schools....I'm conflicted over it, frankly. Shouldn't be needed, in a better world. But I'm suspicious of state class-war, so let them be imo.
Frankly, state schools need to be better funded.
Tuition fees are a very bad idea.
Far worse was Thatcher (or possibly even earlier) allowing schools to chose their exam board. As stupid as letting banks chose their rating agencies.
Now we have to tell big whoppers about how much worse previous years students/teachers were to explain how fantastic the grades have become. As big a whopper as the claim that if far more get degrees they will all get the jobs that the few with degrees used to get.
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.
Okay, but what about children whose parents never went to university, who were never encouraged to study, who have mental health challenges or learning differences or who for a multitude of other reasons are just not ready at 18?
As Diebitter stated, it's a really snobbish attitude to pull up the drawbridge on those who do not come from affluent, stable, middle-class backgrounds. As Orwell so eloquently put it:
Sometimes I look at a Socialist — the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation — and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard. Take the plays of a lifelong Socialist like Shaw. How much understanding or even awareness of working-class life do they display? Shaw himself declares that you can only bring a working man on the stage ‘as an object of compassion’; in practice he doesn’t bring him on even as that, but merely as a sort of W. W. Jacobs figure of fun — the ready-made comic East Ender, like those in Major Barbara and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. At best his attitude to the working class is the s******ing Punch attitude, in more serious moments (consider, for instance, the young man who symbolizes the dispossessed classes in Misalliance) he finds them merely contemptible and disgusting. Poverty and, what is more, the habits of mind created by poverty, are something to be abolished from above, by violence if necessary; perhaps even preferably by violence. Hence his worship of ‘great’ men and appetite for dictatorships, Fascist or Communist; for to him, apparently (vide his remarks apropos of the Italo-Abyssinian war and the Stalin-Wells conversations), Stalin and Mussolini are almost equivalent persons. You get the same thing in a more mealy-mouthed form in Mrs Sidney Webb’s autobiography, which gives, unconsciously, a most revealing picture of the high-minded Socialist slum-visitor. The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which ‘we’, the clever ones, are going to impose upon ‘them’, the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred — a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred — against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs.
Therein lies the problem indeed. Socialists who on one hand want greater financial equality, but on the other hand recoil at the thought of having people from working class backgrounds in positions of power and influence.
Islamic Fascism 1-0 Jews
Islamic Fascism 1-0 Jews
Bigger and more broad point though,
Thing is russia is banned from FIFA and UEFA competitions…Israel is not so it is blatant and outrageous Hypocrisy… either ban them both or allow them both to play.
I must have missed the part where Ukraine instigated the war against Russia by invading their sovereign territory and raping, torturing and murdering women and children.
Okay, but what about children whose parents never went to university, who were never encouraged to study, who have mental health challenges or learning differences or who for a multitude of other reasons are just not ready at 18?As Diebitter stated, it's a really snobbish attitude to pull up the drawbridge on those who do not come from affluent, stable, middle-class backgrounds
You need to explain how young people getting into huge amounts of debt to compete with the same people for the same jobs as previously when they had no debt helps working class people who will be disproportionately affected by this, not having wealthy parents to bail them out.
You and diebitter are only considering your own circumstances and not the majority of working class people with degrees who don’t get onto the academia gravy train. But then you’re both Tories, so at least you’re being consistent.
Islamic Fascism 1-0 Jews
The vast majority of Birminghams population will probably be relieved not to have the fascist thugs of Macabi fans descending en masse into their city when you look at how they behaved in Holland.
You need to explain how young people getting into huge amounts of debt to compete with the same people for the same jobs as previously when they had no debt helps working class people who will be disproportionately affected by this, not having wealthy parents to bail them out.You and diebitter are only considering your own circumstances and not the majority of working class peo
Because we give you our beliefs augmented with personal anecdote, you then play the 'you don't understand this the way I do'. Lol. Typical leftie twattery.
Snob, snob, snob.
I don’t love the EU and have never said otherwise. It certainly was a gravy train for a lot of people it employed, but there were also large tangible benefits to member states that even you would find hard to deny.
Brexits heralded “sovereignty” also prevented the UK from being able to return some asylum seekers to EU countries, one of many false promises made by the Leave charlatans funded by Russia and by billionaires keen to avoid scrutiny of their assets.
Ever get the feeling you were cheated?
It's more high-handed leftie snobbery is somewhat irritating, the same way pigeon crap on a windscreen is.
I'll put you on ignore for a day or two, you won't irritate me then 😀
“Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”
The craven selfishness at the heart of your political opinions exposed bare, so you resort to petty name calling. Tories.
When everyone in the UK has watched this video, we can start to fix ourselves.
There are a hundred problems now with the UK after 40 years of Tory policies. Bitcoin isn't going to solve any of that.
Edit. Bitcoin has crashed again - explains this idiot posting this video over and over again.
Government loses bid to block appeal against Palestine Action ban
In a highly significant ruling, the Court of Appeal paved the way for the review of the ban before a High Court judge next month.
You need to explain how young people getting into huge amounts of debt to compete with the same people for the same jobs as previously when they had no debt helps working class people who will be disproportionately affected by this, not having wealthy parents to bail them out.
If I'd been faced with that kind of debt (I actually got a County Major Award including living costs) I don't think I'd have gone to university. Or if I did it would have been because I was too young to understand the consequences, which is what the system kind of counts on.
I must have missed the part where Ukraine instigated the war against Russia by invading their sovereign territory and raping, torturing and murdering women and children.
Both Russia and Israel claim that they are defending themselves and that the other side started it. The conflict goes back years in both cases.
FWIW I’m not for punishing athletes. But when you have genocide scholars(including Jews) saying that Israel is committing a genocide then what do we say.?
And the situation is not Islam versus Jews. As huge mass masses of Jews are critical of Netanyahu…and many non Muslims are the ones pushing for Israeli organizations including sports teams to be penalized.
Again Russia and Israel has been accused of committing war crimes. So the international sporting organizations need to either ban both or allow both to play in sporting events. Otherwise it’s hypocrisy.
I see the King has told Prince Andrew he's no longer Duke of York or a Knight of the Garter, what with the recent Epstein-Giuffre revelations.
