Politics to me is that process of coming up with a worthwhile goal and persuading your fellow citizens to pursue that goal.
Do something!
Shut down the mines, regenerate the docklands, abolish the GLC.
It might not make the world a better place, but at least we’re ACTING.
We’re changing things.
We’re striving to create a better world.
We’re agreeing to work together to evolve as a society.
That’s what’s missing in modern politics.
I love education.
I love learning.
I’m immensely grateful for the education I received – paid for by the State.
BUT, 35 years later, the student loan system combined with an ideological obsession with ‘fairness’ has corrupted every higher education institution in England and Wales.
University education used to be for the wealthy and the gifted, but now it’s got to be for everybody, because that’s ‘fair’.
They want millions of young people to study at university. They rig the job market to make it really hard for people who haven’t got degrees to get good jobs.
But this is a fantastic distraction.
Here is something grotesquely ‘unfair’.
My godson left university last year with £100,000 of student debt.
He got a First.
What glittering opportunities are there open to him 12 months later?
He’s joining the Navy.
He could have done that at 16.
The British political class is trying to save itself,
but nobody in politics is proposing to DO anything.
Something that will change the social order.
Something that will dramatically alter the way we live.
Something that will acknowledge the huge changes in technology that have taken place over the past 25 years.
Something that will stir up political energy.
Something that will challenge the privileges of a detached, complacent and ‘educated’ political class.
I like reading history.
Henry VIII did a bold thing in 1536.
He announced the dissolution of the monasteries, because they were corrupt, because being a monk or a nun didn’t really work any more, and because the money was need to spend on other things.
Henry VIII knew that you can’t reform institutions that have lost sight of their original purpose.
You have to just close them down and then wait for new ones to emerge that reflect the needs of a new era.
Henry was bold, vengeful and revolutionary.
Education is not a business.
Universities are not commercial enterprises.
To burden young people with debt in return for a promise of better employment prospects was immoral.
I’m inspired by Henry VIII.
I propose the dissolution of ALL the universities in England and Wales.
That’s not a move against education.
It’s to rectify a tragic political error: the repackaging of education as a consumer product.
The voters will be energised to support or oppose it.
It will be disruptive!
It will be joyous!
It will be a ‘fair’ judgement on those people who created a system that has enslaved our brightest and the best and perverted the idea of education for profit.
Vincent from Final Grade Calcs
Framing student debt as something done to a generation rather than chosen by it is the part that usually gets lost in arguments about repayment thresholds. What strikes me alongside it is how much of the system asks students to make consequential decisions using numbers nobody ever taught them to read — right down to what one module mark does to a final classification. I built a final grade calculator for that far smaller problem, and how many students had simply never done the sum was the genuinely surprising part.