JOE is another YouTube channel that cuts the speeches and pronouncements of politicians and celebrities to make them appear to say stupid things as satire. It was Hallowe’en yesterday, so they’ve created this suitably seasonal musical parody. In this clip, they send up the Tory government by having Jacob Rees-Mogg intone a twisted version of Vincent Price’s spoken words in the 1980s Michael Jackson hit, ‘Thriller’. This shows the Tories rising from the graves as a true Zombie government, who have trashed the economy, jacked up mortgages, devastated people’s pensions. Jeremy Hunt is once again a psycho who will make more cuts to the NHS than Norman Bates. And Liz Truss is Chucky, the killer doll.
Posts Tagged ‘Mortgages’
38 Degrees Petition Against Liz Truss Enjoying PM’s Perks and Appointing New Peers
October 28, 2022I got this petition early today from internet democracy group 38 Degrees. One of their community, Vicky Ropner, has put up a petition calling for Liz Truss to be prevented from enjoying the perks of ex-prime ministers. These include the ability to appoint new peers to the House of Lords. Truss was only Prime Minister for three months and was simply too disastrous as premier to enjoy these benefits. I completely agree and have very definitely signed it. It is grossly unfair that she should enjoy the privilege of elevating her cronies when her wretched policies have resulted in horrific levels of inflation and increased mortgage rates. Not to mention something like a quarter of this great nation’s children relying on food banks and people having to use ‘warm banks’ to keep warm ’cause they can’t afford to heat their homes.
No to perks for Truss.
And definitely ‘No’ to the Tories.
Here’s the petition
‘Dear David,
Liz Truss left her position as Prime Minister after being in the job for less than 2 months. [1] But despite being in the job for such a short amount of time, she could still be allowed to put through a resignation honours list and choose people to promote to the House of Lords. [2]
That’s why Vicky, a 38 Degrees supporter, set up a petition demanding Truss is denied the privilege. She believes an “incompetent and disgraceful” Prime Minister should not get such rewards.
Recently, the House of Lords Appointments Committee – who decides whether or not approve new members of the House of Lords – rejected a number of nominations, and spoke out against unsuitable candidates being put forward. [3] Huge public pressure could convince them to step in and stop Liz Truss’ honours list being approved.
So, if you agree with Vicky and believe a Prime Minister forced to resign after just a few weeks should not be allowed to reward their friends with jobs for life in the Lords, can you sign the petition today? [4] It only takes 30 seconds, and we’ll hand the petition in to those in charge in the next few days!
“Campaign created by Vicky Ropner
To: The Conservative Party, Parliament and the House of Lords Appointments Commission
What: Liz Truss and the Conservative party need to realise that the public mood is for her to leave quietly without an honours list or any other perks of the job. She has been an incompetent and disgraceful Prime Minister.
Why is this important: Liz didn’t even last 3 months, there is no other occupation that would grant you anything for that, no honest one anyway. Instead she fell at the first hurdle, making huge and avoidable mistakes because of her arrogance. Consequently the people of the UK experienced even more worry and suffering.
It now must be made law that a PM that resigns or is forced to go before a year has passed, has no rights to the perks of the job after leaving. It is insulting and ridiculous that she should be able to set her friends up in the House of Lords, receive severance pay and other perks after being such an appalling PM. She blamed circumstance and not herself. She chose such an appalling cabinet that wasn’t fit for purpose.
She managed one thing, she attended the Queen’s funeral, even Larry the cat could have managed that if they’d provided a comfy enough chair!
Stop this nonsense NOW!
Thanks for being involved,
David, Megan and the 38 Degrees team
PS. Not everyone reading this email will agree with the concept of the House of Lords at all, but one thing we can all agree on, is it’s here to stay for the foreseeable future. So we should be able to expect representatives in the House of Lords to be chosen because they want to do the best for our country, not because of who their mates are.
PPS: Vicky Ropner started their petition on the 38 Degrees website.
With 38 Degrees anyone can start their own campaign with the click of a button. But that’s just where your journey begins. Creating a petition, then sharing it with friends and colleagues, can soon give you a groundswell of support. Perhaps you’ll end up changing something really important.
Use this link to get your campaign started today, it takes just a couple of minutes and we’ll support you every step of the way: https://link.38degrees.org.uk/start-campaign.
NOTES:
[1] The Guardian: Liz Truss resigns as PM and triggers fresh leadership election
[2] Evening Standard: Outrage as Liz Truss gets a resignation honours list
[3] Yahoo!news: Four of Boris Johnson’s peerage nominations ‘rejected by Lords watchdog’
Times [Paywall]: Lords watchdog snubs Tory peers
Times [Paywall]: Stop nominating unsuitable peers, Tories and Labour told
[4] 38 Degrees: Liz Truss should go without an honours list or any other perks!‘
‘Led By Donkey’s’ Potted Biography of the Horror That Is Jacob Rees-Mogg
October 23, 2022
I found this brief biography, ‘Who Is Jacob Rees-Mogg’ on the Led by Donkeys channel on YouTube. It covers Mogg’s life and career from his birth to today and shows exactly why he shouldn’t be anywhere near government – the greed, snobbishness, mendacity, duplicity and sheer governmental incompetence. Here’s a summary of its contents.
Mogg was born in May 1969 in London, the son William Rees-Mogg, the editor of the Times. He was naturally educated at Eton. In 1982, while he was a twelve-year old schoolboy, he was the subject of a French documentary as he was a financial trader and supporter of Thatcher. In one interview for the programme he said, ‘I love money. I always have done.’ When asked if he wanted to get married, he replied ‘No’, as he didn’t want to get divorced and his wife to get his money. In 1997 he campaigned for the Tories in the traditional Labour seat of East Fife. The image accompanying this shows him stepping over a fence looking exactly like John Cleese as the Minister for Silly Walks, but without the bowler hat. The locals were bemused by the fact that he was accompanied by his nanny, who was there to iron his shirts. 1998 – according to a biographer, his maid and his nanny took turns holding a book over his head at a picnic at Glyndebourne to make sure he didn’t get sunburnt. That same year he campaigned in the Wrekin, where he also lost. In 2006 he made a statement comparing people who weren’t privately educated and who never went to Oxford and Cambridge to potted plants and implied that they were incapable of writing an articulate letter. The next year, 2007, he and two of his friends set up Somerset Investment Capital. This committed itself to business ethics, but then stated that environmental, social and governmental concerns would not form the basis of their ethical policy.
In 2010 he finally succeeded in getting his wretched backside elected to parliament in the Somerset Northeast constituency. Three years later in 2013, Mogg distinguished himself by denying that workers have a right to a paid holiday. Then he took the decision to attend the annual dinner of the far-right Traditional Britain Group, despite being briefed about them by anti-Fascist organisation and magazine, Searchlight. He only decided to disassociate himself from them when they issued a statement denouncing Doreen Lawrence, the mother of murdered Black teenager Stephen Lawrence, as a ‘monstrous disgrace’ and recommending that people like her should be asked to leave the country. He also described man-made global warming as ‘much debated’ – totally wrong, as the vast majority of scientists are convinced it exists. The next year, 2014, Mogg advises that humanity should adapt to rather than attempt to mitigate climate change. He also lies about a UN report, claiming that it states that if measures were adopted to combat climate changes today it would take hundreds or a thousand years to produce results. The report said no such thing. In March the same year it was revealed his investment company was making a cool £3million from mining and £2.4 million in oil and gas.
In 2015 he stated his opposition to gay marriage and followed this in 2016 with a statement backing Donald Trump, who was then running a very racist, sexist and bigoted campaign. A year after that, in 2017, he revealed that he had never changed a nappy despite having six children. He also lied again, this time claiming that Labour had deliberately not told people they could get help from food banks. He also said that he thought the idea of people giving to these charities was ‘uplifting’. This was much mocked at the time. It is uplifting that people are willing to give to them, but utterly despicable that they have to exist in the first place. He also still opposed marriage equality and abortion in all circumstances as well as the morning after pill. Thus, he suffered no little embarrassment when it was revealed that he had investments in a company producing a stomach pill widely used in illegal abortions in Indonesia. He also had shares in a company producing drugs for legal abortions in India. He sold these shares, but retained those in tobacco, oil and gas companies. He also met Trump’s aide, Steve Bannon, a journalist for the far-right news outlet Breitbart, discussing how the right could win both in American and Britain. This segment has footage of the torchlight fascists marching in the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville. In 2018 it was revealed that Somerset Capital had also invested in Sberbank, a Russian bank that had been sanctioned by the EU since 2014 because of the Russian occupation of Crimea. It was also revealed a year later in 2019 that he’d made £7 million in profit from the Brexit vote. But backing Brexit didn’t stop him establishing two funds in Dublin to take advantage of the fact that it was still in the EU while London was not. Somerset Capital was paying him £15,000 per month and he owned 15 per cent of the shares. His firm was managed by subsidiaries operating perfectly legally in the tax havens of the Cayman Islands and Singapore.
Going back to the far-right, in 2019 he retweeted a comment by the leader of Germany’s Alternative Fuer Deutschland. He was also interviewed by Trump-supporter James Delingpole for Breitbart. The ousting of Tweezer by Johnson that year was also due in no small part to his machinations and that of his European Research Group. He also chose to show precisely what he thought about a debate on Brexit by lying down and appearing to go to sleep on the hallowed green benches of parliament. He also implied in a radio interview that the victims of the Grenfell fire died because they were too stupid to leave the building. He then mysterious vanished from the campaign trail, suggesting that his aides had advised him to lie low for a while. When a voter did try to ask him about his comment, he fled.
This year Truss made him Minister for Brexit Opportunities, despite profiting from investments in a Russian gas company, whose chair was one of Putin’s chums. He did, however, promise to divest himself of these investment after the invasion of Ukraine. Truss then appointed him Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. He backed the disastrous minibudget to the hilt, which has resulted in catastrophic mortgage hikes and the reimposition of austerity. Rather than accept responsibility, he blamed the mess on the Bank of England. The video ends with a young female journalist at the Financial Times describing this as ‘bollocks’.
This is who is now in government. And he’s only just down the road from me in Bath and Northeast Somerset. Uuurgh!
And after watching that video, here’s something that might cheer you up. Mogg’s frank statement that he loved money made me think of the Flying Lizard’s cover of the Beatle’s class, ‘Money’. Here it is, also from the TopPop channel on YouTube.
Cassetteboy Vs Liz Truss’ New Tax Plan
October 5, 2022You know Cassetteboy – the merry team of funsters who take speeches by the great, the not-so-good and the downright evil and edit them so they appear to be reciting a kind of musical chant about how stupid and nasty they are. Well, they’ve done it to Cheeselab, so that she sings about how her new manifesto has trashed the economy, resulted in a U-turn and cost us all £65 million to get back to square one. She also musically boasts about how the compassion she shows is all false, she’s really for the rich, is going to cut public services, and will do absolutely nothing for your pension and mortgage.
All of which is absolutely true.
Here’s the video. Enjoy!
Al-Jazeera Documentary on Nazism in Hungary
December 1, 2018This is a very serious video from the Arab news agency, Al-Jazeera, looking at the rise of Fascism in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. It concentrates on the paramilitary sports organization, the Highwaymen’s Army, which is affiliated to the Nazi group Force and Determination, talking to some of its members and showing them training and attending rallies and Hungarian heritage events.
The Highwaymen’s Army
The Highwaymen’s Army is the second largest Nazi organization in the country, and many of its members are former policemen and soldiers. It’s small, with a membership of about a thousand men, formed by Laszlo Toroczkai, the mayor of a town on the Serbian border. He’s one of the main figures in Hungarian Fascism, and has a formed a new party, My Homeland, to appeal to young people. The young people interviewed say that there’s a war going on against the White race, and complain that you can say anything you want, except if you’re White, heterosexual and Christian. They discuss studying political science at university and prospect of careers as Far Right politicians. One of them says that of the 1,000 men in the movement, 700 are ‘complete idiots’, ‘all those alcoholic skinheads’. I’d say that’s a very low estimate. I’d say that out of those thousand people, all thousand are going to be complete morons, regardless of whether they’re shaven-headed drunks. They state that mass immigration has resulted in a clash of cultures, and that the culture ‘invading’ them is not comfortable with European culture.
Orban and Anti-Immigration
There’s footage of Orban, the country’s Far Right president from the Fidesz Party at a rally declaring that Europe is being invaded, and if they let it, tens of millions of migrants will come from Africa and the Middle East, leaving White western young people a minority in their own countries.
It discusses how Hungary was the first country to close its borders, preventing immigrants from entering or leaving, in response to the mass immigration from Syria in 2015, and one of the Fascists interview speaks of his disgust at the immigrants at the railway station throwing back the food and water they’d been given.
Another speaker, Gaspar Tamas, a philosopher and political scientist, who is clearly an anti-Fascist, states that the fear of ethnic minorities is traditional in Hungary, and formed the basis of its policies for 140 years. The fear that they will be swamped by foreigners is found everywhere and at all times, but in eastern Europe goes all the way back to the Ottoman conquests of the Balkans in the 15th-17th centuries. Tamas states that it’s now a myth, as no-one’s threatening Hungary. But it’s the one topic everyone’s talking about.
The documentary states that in 2017 the EU tried to prosecute Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary for not taking in any refugees.
Soros as the Bogeyman of the Anti-Semitic Right
Another commenter states that because there are no immigrants in Hungary, Orban had to invent a new enemy, that of the financier and philanthropist George Soros. Orban has declared that Soros is interfering in Hungarian politics in order to bring immigrants into the country to destroy its people, culture and Christian identity. Tamas explains that Soros is hated and reviled because he supports human rights groups and free university education, which are resented anyway. But they’ve gone back to the old, vile conspiracy theory which explains everything from capitalism to socialism, from Fremenism to human rights, as part of a plot of by the Jews. The film shows posters all over Hungary attacking Soros.
It then moves back to one of the Fascists, who states very clearly that the Jews are exploiting Hungary and influencing its politics. They are the creators of the global financial crisis as part of their plans. He declares his hatred of them, says they should be excluded from public life, and doesn’t consider them human. He says he thinks Hitler’s programme was perfect, and nationalism put Germany back in order, creating a good economy, industry and prosperity from nothing. This is real, deeply chilling anti-Semitism, not the stupid, malign lies of the Israel lobby against decent people in England.
The film explains that most of the local papers in Hungary are owned by companies that support the government, but the Fascists complain that they still don’t know where to look for good information because of the diet of official lies. Which is clearly ironic, given that the government is also extremely right-wing. It shows a group of young Fascists going on a vigilante patrol through one of the towns at night, looking for ‘degenerates’ – drug addicts and drunks. They state that if they find anyone like this, they tell them to calm down and go home, and call the police if they don’t. There’s no hint that they do anything else in the film, but even so, you’re left wondering if they don’t go further and behave like Nazis everywhere behave when they come across something they despise, and start beating their victims up.
They also discuss their problems with Gypsies, saying that the areas in Budapest occupied by the Romany have the highest crime rates, and that Magyars and Romanies cannot live together in peace.
The Need for Belonging
A commenter says that most of the young people who join these groups do so for a sense of belonging, not because they believe in the ideology. But once they’ve joined, step by step they come to believe in the ideas of the group. The young lads in the group thank the Almighty that their country isn’t a war zone like central London, and state that they’re trying to preserve their Christian values – temperance, honesty and bravery. They talk about temperance in respect to dealing with the ‘degenerates’. They say they’ll try to talk to them, but if they attack them, they fight back.
The documentary then shows the Kurultaj cultural festival, where Hungarians dress up and celebrate the Huns and their leader, Atilla, from whom many Hungarians believe they are descended. It’s a belief which is rejected by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The festival shows displays of horsemanship, archery and traditional dances by people in Hunnish costume. At this event, campaigner collect signatures for a petition protesting against the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, the treaty after the First World War that resulted in Hungary losing 2/3 of its territory.
The Effects of the Collapse of Communism and the 2008 Crash
Another commenter states that many people in Hungary now feel abandoned, and so look book on an idealized past when everything was beautiful and perfect, when people had jobs and Hungary was a European power.
The documentary then shows one of the Fascists walking around his old neighbourhood, an area of apartment blocks surrounded by green spaces and trees. He tells how everything fell apart with the collapse of Communism, and the promises made were not fulfilled. The film states that after Communism collapsed, the economy shrank by 20 per cent, and only regained its pre-1989 levels ten years later. It’s now a prosperous area, but the local people can’t afford the new homes being built. They’re bought by the rich from the capital, as well as wealthy Russians and Germans. The documentary states that before the financial crash of 2008, many Hungarians were encouraged to take out their mortgages in Euros. When the crash came, the value of the Hungarian currency collapsed and the cost of the mortgages increased massively, becoming unaffordable. The Fascist states that his parents owned a flat, but had to sell it. It wiped out a lifetime of work. He came home from work to find his parents crying, and says he wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy. He states that he felt angry, and that it became clear to him that the Jews were behind it, which made him go down his path towards Fascism.
Homophobia and Anti-Gay Pride Concerts
The film then moves to a mass Fascist counter-protest against a Budapest Gay Pride rally. This attracts a mob wearing Black T-shirts, some of them Ultra football hooligans, and bikers in leather waistcoats. They chant ‘Dirty fa***ts’ and ‘Hey, Hey, you’re nothing!’. One of them declares that no-one respects normality anymore. Another man states that there’s no Adam and Bill in the Bible, only Adam and Eve. They also chant ‘Ban it!’ and ‘Hungary! Hungary!’. The MC at the anti-Gay Pride Concert, the speakers blaring out Heavy Metal, declares that gay people shouldn’t come there, as they can’t guarantee their safety. With every gay person, society loses a potential husband or wife. Another Fascist says that in his opinion, the homosexuals are being used as tools to force something unnatural down peoples’ throats. During the concert the crowd starts making the right-armed Nazi salute. Another black-shirted young man holds his right arm crossed against his chest, in what appears to be another nationalist salute. The guy has the same chillingly blank yet fanatical expression on his face that you see on photographs of German Nazis from the Third Reich.
Conclusion: Hungarian Fascism
Gaspar Tamas appears again to state that the new Fascism isn’t like the old. They’re aren’t triumphal marches or dreams of world conquest. It’s simply an uneventful glide towards the precipice. He states that it was dangerous ten years ago. Now it’s here. The film ends with one of the interviewed Nazis denying that he’s homophobic, xenophobic or a Nazi, and people will get nowhere calling him that, although he’s willing to have a debate. He’s just, he says, a guy who has love, for his nationality, his religion and his race. He’s just, he says, an 18 year old guy.
I’m not surprised at the resurgence of the Far Right in eastern Europe. Many of these countries, like Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, were for centuries subject to foreign domination. They were ruled by Germany, Austria and Russia, and had to fight hard for their independence and to retain their own ethnic identity and language. And there are still anxieties about its loss. In Hungary, for example, schoolchildren were taught ‘We are Hungarian. We speak Hungarian’, and the loss of two-thirds of the county’s territory, including to Romania, is felt very deeply.
The Hungarians were oppressed under Communism. Janos Kadar, the dictator after the Hungarian uprising, was a Stalinist thug. An underground Hungarian writer had a poem, in which he looks down at his shoes, and finds that, as he still has shoelaces, he isn’t in prison. It’s an ironic statement on the lack of freedom in Communist Hungarian society. But its people had jobs and some measure of prosperity, which was destroyed with the move to capitalism. There result was massive psychological dislocation. And with the effects of the 2008 crash, the old resentment against Jews and the nonsense about the Jewish banking conspiracy has returned.
As for Orban and Fidesz, they’re using Soros in the same way that Big Brother uses Bernstein in Orwell’s novel, 1984. It’s the way Stalin blamed everything wrong with his Communist order in the USSR on Trotsky, but this time from a Fascist, rather than Marxist viewpoint. It’s the four-minute hate with jackboots.
One of the anti-Fascist commenters at the start states that if you want to see Europe’s future, look at Hungary. And they have a point. An increasing number of people in Europe and America do believe that their countries are being invaded by unassimilable, mostly Muslim immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. They have swallowed the lie of White genocide, and the stupid idea that behind all this is a Jewish conspiracy. And there were people in this country who looked with fear on the migrants, who made their way up through the Balkans towards wester Europe in 2015.
This is the reality that David Rosenberg, one of the left-wing, socialist, anti-Zionist bloggers is trying to warn us about. There is a rising threat to Jews in eastern Europe. But it’s denied by the Israel lobby in this country, because these regimes buy arms from Israel. So they can’t be anti-Semitic.
Every one of us, who loves democracy and racial pluralism, needs to unite to fight this, before it overtakes Europe and America, and the horrors of Nazism return.
The NME Interviews Jeremy Corbyn
June 3, 2017The musical paper, NME, last week put its support firmly behind Jeremy Corbyn. They’ve put on YouTube this interview with the great man by their editor-in-chief, Mike Williams.
Williams states that the other parties are ignoring the needs of young people, with the exception of Corbyn. In the course of the interview, Corbyn talks about how support for Labour is surging because, now that we’re in the election period, the reporting has to be a little fairer, and so people are for the first time hearing what Labour’s policies actually are.
He talks about how children are having their future damaged through growing up in high rent, poorly maintained housing, attending schools that are having their funding cut so they are releasing teachers and teaching assistants.
He talks about how Britain spends less on its welfare support than other nations. This is unacceptable, as we are not a poor nation. He states that he intends to correct this by putting more on corporation tax, but 95 per cent of the people of this country will not be paying anymore.
He also talks about how student debt is also damaging young people’s future. It harms their credit rating and makes it difficult for them to get a mortgage. As you have to be earning over £21,000 before paying it back, it means that many people don’t earn enough, and so, as many people also move abroad, it means that there is a mountain of public debt that’s piling up.
He states that Labour will make tuition free for those beginning uni in 2017/18, but acknowledges that there is a problem with existing students, who have already accumulated a debt. He sketches out various ways Labour may try to reduce it, but acknowledges that at this point he can’t give a definitive answer, because an election has only just been called.
Corbyn and Williams also talk about how the Tories are running down public services, including the welfare state, through massive cuts, in order to give massive tax breaks to big companies, which leave the rest of us worse off.
He rebuts May’s dismissal of Labour’s proposals as ‘utopian’, and makes that dry observation that this the first time he’s heard her use the word. Clearly, he has a low opinion of her intelligence and vocabulary.
As the NME is a music paper, Corbyn also talks about Labour’s proposals to protect and nurture music and young musical talent. About 40 per cent of the music venues in London have closed. Corbyn states that he intends to rectify this by putting more funding into live music venues and music education. There will be an additional £160 million given to schools, which will enable schoolchildren to learn an instrument. He also wishes to give money to councils so they can provide affordable practice spaces to aspiring musicians. In this way, he hopes to encourage the music industry to take up the pool of talent that there will be.
Williams tackles him on the subject of pacifism, and asks him why he has said he will put more money into defence. Corbyn states that he believes in and works for peace, but there is the question of what you would do in a war like the World War II and the need to attack enemies like the Nazis. However, he states he has set up a shadow minister for peace and disarmament, and that if Labour wins he will turn this into a ministerial position.
The two also talk about what will happen to the NHS if Labour don’t get into power. How close is it to collapse? Corbyn states that it is very close to collapse already, and that if this goes on, it will become a health service of last resort to people who cannot afford private healthcare. If that happens, you will have the system where the poor will have to receive care from emergency rooms, a prospect he finds appalling.
Williams asks him what will happen if Labour doesn’t win. Corbyn says in reply that Labour will, but people need to get out and vote.
As for the whole question about young people versus old people, he states that he does not believe politics should be so compartmentalised. He describes a public meeting in which he spoke to a wide cross-section of the community, the young, the old, gay, straight, Black and White. We should be talking, he says, about intergenerational support. The young need the wisdom of the old, and the old need the inspiration of the young.
Williams also asks him the burning question that people have been poring over for the past 20 years: which was better, Blur or Oasis. Corbyn things a bit, and then says Oasis, but then says that what he really should have said, was that he’d refer it to a focus group. But he doesn’t do focus groups.
This is an excellent interview. Corbyn is quiet spoken, in command of the facts and figures, optimistic, but not complacent, and with very clear ideas how to make life better in Britain for everyone, not just the poor. And he has the honesty to admit that Labour doesn’t yet have a fixed policy when it comes to the debts students now have built up. You won’t hear such honest from May. All you can expect from her is lies.
All the Tories will give us, by contrast, is more poverty, more starvation, and all to give more money to the rich.
We can stop them.
For peace, a just Britain, and an end to Tory poverty and misrule, vote Labour on June 8th.
The Robbins Report and the Expansion of University Education
March 16, 2016The expansion of higher education and its extension to students from working class backgrounds was a policy that had its origins in a Conservative government. This was the Robbins Committee formed by Harold MacMillan’s government, which produced a report in 1963. This argued that higher education should be made available to everyone, who had the ability. They were assisted in this by the massive growth in secondary education, and the growing need for an educated class of technicians and workers for industry. The Labour party under Harold Wilson was also planning to found 40 new universities.
Sullivan, in his The Development of the British Welfare State, writes of this
Into this maelstrom of political activity, emerged the Robbins Report in October 1963. Its most important recommendation was that ‘courses in higher education should be available to all those who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so.’ In effect, this was to mean two things. First, that all candidates with good enough A-level passes would be eligible (thus satisfying the ability criteria). Second, however, it meant that local authorities would be committed to funding all candidates accepted by higher education institutions. For the recommendations of the Anderson Committee that all students in higher education should be grant-aided had been implemented while the Robbins Committee was sitting.
The implications of the Robbins proposals were momentous. First, the report assumed a 50 per cent increase in the number of higher education students by 1967, turning into a 250 per cent rise by 1980. As the bulk of these were to be in universities, new universities would need to be built. As the need for technological development was recognised by the committee, the Colleges of Advanced Technology, (CATs) were to be translated into universities. (p. 148).
Among its conclusions, the Report stated ‘But we believe that it is highly misleading to suppose that one can determine an upper limit to the number of people who could benefit from higher education, given favourable circumstances.’
‘[J]ust as since the war more children have stayed on at school for a full secondary education, so in turn more of their children will come to demand higher education during the 1970s…’
‘This in itself is … no guarantee that the quality of students will be maintained if there is an increased entry. There is, however, impressive evidence that large numbers of able young people do not at present reach higher education….
‘The desire for education, leading to better performance at school, appears to be affecting the children of all classes and all abilities alike, and it is reasonable to suppose that this trend will continue…
Finally, it should be observed that fears that expansion would lead to a lowering of the average ability of students in higher education have proved unfounded. Recent increases in numbers have not been accompanied by an increase in wastage and the measured ability of students appears to be as high as ever.’
(From Margaret Jones and Rodney Lowe, From Beveridge to Blair: The First Fifty years of Britain’s Welfare State, 1948-98 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002) 125).
It’s to SuperMac’s credit that his government did open up university to people from the working classes. Since Margaret Thatcher’s time, the Tories have increasingly wanted to shut it off to students from poorer backgrounds. Higher education has been privatised, funding cut, and student grants abolished. Instead they’ve been replaced with loans, which have escalated to exorbitant levels beyond the ability of many students to pay as free education has been abolished. Bliar’s government took the step of introducing tuition fees nearly a decade ago now, but it was Cameron’s coalition government that raised them to £9,000 a year. And many universities have been pressing for further increases.
What this means is that graduates and former students now live with considerable debts, to the point that they may never be able to afford a mortgage. This is despite Nick Robinson, one of the Beeb’s newscasters, leaping about the TV studio trying to convince everyone that student loans were going to be free money, because you didn’t have to pay them back if you didn’t earn a certain amount. Robinson’s enthusiasm for student loans is only to be expected. He was, after all, the head of the Federation of Conservative Students at Manchester University, and another link between the Tories and the BBC. When Bliar was discussing introducing student fees in the 1990s, there was considerable concern that this would make university too expensive for poorer students. The result would, in the view of one university spokesman, be that universities became a kind of finishing school for wealthy former public school pupils.
I don’t know if that’s quite happened yet. There are still many thousands of pupils willing and eager to go to university. However, with tuition fees rising to the tens of thousands and no funding available for those from lower or middle class backgrounds, it does seem to me that the Tories are aiming at taking us back to the situation before 1963. Four decades of Thatcherism is undoing SuperMac’s work, and higher education is being increasingly selective on the basis, not of talent, but of wealth.
Which is what you’d expect from a government led by toffs.
Vox Political on the Tory MP Who Claims He Cannot Afford a Mortgage
February 14, 2016Mike over at Vox Political last week post a piece on the sad case of the Tory MP for Stockport, William Wragg. Wragg had appeared in the Guardian complaining that his MP’s salary of £74,000 was too small for him to afford to buy a house, and so he had moved back in with his parents. The Graun was not impressed by this claim, pointing out that in his constituency there were flats available for rent for as little as £110 a week. See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/02/10/tory-mp-forced-back-to-live-with-parents-by-high-house-prices-he-claims/.
Nick, one Mike’s commenters, said
You need a income of £75000 a year to secure a loan of £300’000 so if he avoids London he should be able to manage it
Having said that a bank would not give him a mortgage as his job is classed as insecure as a mp and he would have to provide professional qualifications as a fall back like lawyer etc to secure that type of loan
This is what I believe to be accurate at this time of writing. A genuine loan today is only advanced to those that have on paper a better then average chance of paying the loan back within the 25 year time frame on a scale of 3 times a single salary and 4 times a joint salary plus a 10 percent deposit.
This looks to me like another Tory attempt to ingratiate itself with the very public who’ve been hit hardest by their policies by claiming, ‘Oh, look, it’s affecting us too! We’re all in it together!’
Except we’re not. Young Master Wragg does have enough money to afford a place of his own, depending on where he chooses to live. Very many others aren’t so lucky. Furthermore, any sympathy people may have for him should be weighed against the fact that Wragg is one of those responsible for the mess.
I am very definitely not sneering at people, who go back to live with their parents. It’s happening to a whole generation, both here and in the rest of Europe. In Italy, for example, it’s actually quite common for young people to live with their parents until their mid 30s because of the difficulty in getting suitable housing. Many of the young people, who are forced to move back in with their parents are graduates. Saddled with enormous student debts and faced with a lack of affordable housing, they frequently have no choice but to go back home to Mum and Dad.
Wragg’s whining follows a story a few weeks ago in the Torygraph, about a very middle class couple, who were also complaining that they could not afford houses in London. They got the same amount of sympathy, for pretty much the same reasons. It was the middle classes whining about poverty in the same newspaper, that had showed precious little sympathy when prices started rising and the working poor couldn’t afford roofs over their heads.
And Wragg’s party are the root cause of this. Way back in the 1990s, Maggie Thatcher removed the limits on mortgages. Up till then, banks would only lend a maximum of seven times a person’s income. Older people can remember that the process of getting a mortgage was long, complicated, and featured earnest interrogations with one’s bank manager. This was too much for Maggie, bursting with enthusiasm for Hayekian free trade and monetarism. It was regulation strangling free enterprise. So she got rid of the limits. The result has been that the cost of mortgages has shot up to the point where large numbers of the population cannot afford them.
Other factors contributing to the rise include the growth of the ‘buy to let’ market. Among those boosting this were the usual Tory suspects, the Daily Heil. This has always been fixated on mortgages and the interests of the small investor, and so Viscount Rothermere’s and Paul Dacre’s esteemed organ should share some of the blame for inflated house prices. The situation has also been affected by higher executive salaries vastly surpassing everyone else’s, to the point where they and only they can afford to live in parts of the country like London, and the purchase of properties in the capital by foreigners, especially multimillionaire Chinese, simply as investments without any intention actually to live there.
And so Wragg has found himself slightly affected by the policies his party has inflicted on everyone else. If he had any decency or recognition of the ultimate origins of this crisis, or indeed any genuine sympathy with the other victims, who are in far worse need than him, he would protest against the legislation that has caused this. He would also be opposed to Osbo’s proposed legislation, which will do nothing to increase the amount of available housing, but simply create another housing bubble.
But I doubt that he ever will. Wragg is, after all, a Tory, and a presumably looking to Cameron and Osborne to help his career, a career that could get cut very short if he defies them. And I’ve no doubt that as a member of the middle classes, he fully supports the gentrification programmes that have seen working and lower middle class people evicted from their homes, which have then been pulled down, or converted into luxury flats.
And I also don’t think he’s uttered a peep about the Tory policies that have meant that the number of affordable homes are being cut, and those that remain are, at 80 per cent of the market price, hardly affordable.
But hey, he’s had to move back in with his parents. So he’s just like us. We’re all in it together … except we’re not.
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
Weak and Wobby May Does Massive U-Turn over ‘Dementia Tax’
May 22, 2017This also shows how much pressure and desperate the Tories are feeling from a resurgent Labour. In her manifesto four days ago, ‘strong and stable’ May said that she intended taking the value of people’s houses into consideration when assessing the amount they would be charged for their social care. This would lead to people having to take out ‘equity release’, in which their houses would be sold and the money used to pay for their care, while allowing them to remain as tenants.
Florence, one of the great commenters to this blog, has pointed out just how nasty this policy is in a comment she posted to an earlier piece I did about it. She wrote
Equity release is not the same as insurance. Using equity release to pay for care is already available and has many times been shown to be the worse possible use of a house for the elderly. They are essentially unpaid mortgages where the interest accrues along with the original debt, so any capital increase in value is eaten up by interest and charges. The resident can be forced out of the house at any time. Instead of banning these deals the May cabal want to force us to use them.
Insurance will only be available to the young and fit or through workplace schemes. No one will insure a retired person.
Not surprisingly, large sections of the population did not welcome having the government force them to sell the homes they saved for throughout their lives. With the result that May has now made a U-Turn so fast, that she’s left skidmarks in the road, if not in her underwear.
It’s a very quick U-Turn indeed, as only this morning various Tory talking heads were appearing on breakfast TV defending it, saying that the Tories were showing resolve in coming to grips with Britain’s aging population. Now she’s telling everyone she’s going to put a cap on the amount they will be expected to pay. Even though her ministers, like Jeremy Hunt, have been saying all week. She’s also gone on the offensive – and to me, she’s always been very offensive – and accused Labour of scaremongering.
But, as various people on social media have noticed, it’s May herself who appears scared. Or ‘frit’, as the former Leaderene used to say in her native Grantham patois.
Mike’s posted up two videos of her speaking, stating that her own fear is evident from her body language and tone of voice.
One person has posted a picture of a backbone, with a note beside it saying ‘Wanted for Theresa May’. Marcus Chown also posted a photograph of a jelly, to show how weak and wobbly May is. Chown’s a scientist and science writer, who’s written for New Scientist, and published a book on the Cosmic Background Radiation, The Afterglow of Creation, far back in the 1990s. But you really don’t need the Hubble Space Telescope or Jodrell Bank to see how desperate May and her fellows now are.
She’s now telling everyone that she’s going to keep her new promise to cap charges for social care. And the Daily Mail, like the Tory lapdog it is, has issued an article hailing her as an ‘honest politician’.
No, no she isn’t. Not remotely.
Among the various promises and pledges she’s broken are her support for ‘Remain’, which has now definitely been ditched in favour of Brexit; her promise to raise National Insurance contributions from the self-employed; she claimed she wanted to put workers in the boardroom – that went very quickly; and her stated resolution not to hold a snap election. Along with a pledge to reduce the sugar content in children’s foods.
See http://voxpoliticalonline.com/2017/05/22/dementia-tax-u-turn-theresa-may-is-a-weak-and-wobbly-conservative-in-chaos/
As Mike states in his article, it’s not a complete list.
In fact, May’s party lies frequently and shamelessly. Remember when David Cameron, May’s predecessor, was telling everyone that the Tories would ring-fence NHS spending against cuts? How he, IDS and the rest of the Tory faithful claimed they were trying to protect the NHS for New Labour’s closure of hospitals up and down the country? These policies were ditched almost as soon as Cameron got his foot in No. 10. As was his statement that his would be the ‘greenest’ government of all. That was ditched along with the little windmill outside his house, and replaced with a huge support for fracking and other environmentally destructive policies.
And May’s new pledge about capping the Dementia Tax is, in my opinion, another lie, from a party of liars.
Tags:'Remain', 'The Afterglow of Creation', Boardrooms, Brexit, Children, Conservatives, Daily Mail, David Cameron, Dementia Tax, Elections, Equity Release, Florence (Commenter), Food, Fracking, Green politics, Houses, Hubble Space Telescope, Ian Duncan Smith, Insurance, Jeremy Hunt, Jodrell Bank, Labour Party, Marcus Chown, Mortgages, National Insurance, New Scientist, NHS, NHS Funding, Self-Employed, Social Care, The Elderly, Theresa May, Worker Managers
Posted in Astronomy, Environment, Health Service, Hospitals, Industry, LIterature, OIl, Politics, Science, Television, The Press | 4 Comments »