In the second instalment of 10 facts about Craig Murray, I talk about tuition fees.
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Excellent.
Excellent idea! That could be a real vote-winner, for young people. For older people, will the Workers Party reinstate the subsidy for Open University fees in England and Wales, so that they aren’t over treble those in Scotland?
good!
(the last tiny bit was not 100%)
But straight to the camera. Casual yet authoritative enough.
Close shot.
Thank you.
As Chomsky repeatedly stated, universities certainly don´t rely on tuition. It is a means of class warfare. Which has become overly obvious with the power exerted by alumni and donors over the campus protests.
And considering the expense on “defense” being absolutely harmful in the long run as any economist will admit the state has much better things to invest into such as education.
“Casual yet authoritative enough.”
Yes this struck me too and would agree generally. I liked the little flabbergasted laugh/chuckle – came over.like you had a moment were you enjoyed the daftness of the counter-argument privately, a possible indicator that you mean what you say and have thought this issue through to an adult settlement in your own mind.
I am no expert in the provision or financing of tertiary education but it seems to me that to make the students pay so much as debts, seem indicative of the entire anti-human neo-liberal program. The fact that is not the case in Scotland allows the the devolved government of Scotland to claim a significant electoral asset – the policy itself and the fact that Scots who attend Uni in Britain will see the this and remember it.
Are these clips being posted on social media etc?
A vid from Blackburn has just gone up on the Not the AndMar Show on utub
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZV67y2cDTI&t=1028s
Shows the candidate on the street in the constituency talking and meeting with members of the public, apparently unsupervised. A particularly intense encounter with a young motorist who grilled the candidate whilst the motorist’s passenger obscured his face with his own hand lol! The candidate responded well under pressure, assuming a fluid and expansive response – I felt the worlds collide, even though I watched remotely.The scene ends with the candidate and the motorist (now out of the car) doing what seems to be some sort of Tick Tock type thing but there was no dancing. This encounter was genuinely entertaining and the candidate is to be commended for sheer doggedness. I have a young friend, very like the young interlocutor that the candidate converses with, and I note my friend is intense when he asks questions in a very similar type of way as this young motorist was here. I suggest if the candidate can keep this level of intellectual and emotional engagement up, nobody can say the candidate did not try
View moves to campaign headquarters and a little bit about the logistics of the campaign. The entire length contains several references to the other independent candidate and on the subject nationally. The street scenes are full of the tooting of passing car horns and shouts of encouragement, let’s hope these translate into votes but more importantly word of mouth coverage and hopefully recommendations etc
“but there was no dancing.”
May be the candidate ought consider to do some dancing too for his campaign. People like dancing.
As an old Cuban joke goes (I know jokes are usually Tatyana´s responsibility):
“Maximo Lider is giving one of his endless speeches: “Comrades, we have a problem with productivity. You are dancing too much and working too little. So from now on I ask you to remember this: “trabajo si, rumba no.” And repeat after me: “Trabajo si – rumba no – trabajo si – rumba no – trabajo siii – rumba nooo”…
Tatyana has a spoiled sense of humor, AG.
Sometimes completely unusual things make her laugh. She doesn’t giggle at a funeral, but still.
Ask her how she once visited the “Moon of Alabama” and read in the comments a call for moderators, a completely desperate call and a request to get rid of the troll (the complaint was about a completely dirty action), but even in this Tatyana found something so funny that it’s still a memory brings lols for half a day.
The fact is that the unfortunate commentator added at the end “This is sick!” and it occurred to Tatyana that that was an unnecessary clarification. That was a really unhealthy thing, but damn it, why did they clarify? Or were they afraid that the moderators might have a different opinion?
So your rumba joke brought to Tatyana’s memory a completely indecent Russian joke about a severe frost in the forest, and a group of men trying to help each other warm at least the most valuable part of the body while they move towards the camp, and a call to March in Step! so as not to turn a rescue mission into a homosexual orgy. Sorry 🙂
Since our Tatyana has such a fine sense of humour with a tendency to the indecent, I’ll give you a smutty joke from my days as a teenage schoolboy, about 60 years ago. Back then we had a Queen, her husband was known as the Duke of Edinburgh and the National Anthem was called “God Save the Queen”, an appalling militaristic dirge that I refuse to sing. The Russians have a much better anthem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9RwYPsVpfM
The joke mentioned the Prime Minister and US President of the time, but I’ll update the names to ones that most people today will recognise. Most teenage boys are obsessed with monitoring the increasing length of their most important bodily part, and the joke goes like this:
Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and the Duke of Edinburght are standing at the urinals during a break in a long and very boring international conference.
Blair: “Look at mine! 7 inches!”
Clinton: “Pah, that’s nothing. Look at mine, 10 inches!”
D of E: “Here’s mine, 20 inches!”
Blair and Clinton, together: “God Save the Queen”!
🙂 🙂 🙂
Thanks for the joke, Neil!!! Great one! I like it 🙂
Looks like it’s a popular international jokes trope. We’ve got modern variation of it:
Scholz, Macron and Zelensky in the same position.
Sholz: “Mine is 5 inches”
Macron: “Mine is 10 inches”
Zelensky: “Biden’s is 20 inches”
I watched how in a neighboring country a comedian joked funny jokes, danced and even played the piano (with his penis).
Apparently he was very good at attracting investments and voicing texts written by copywriters. He organized his own media company and appeared on every screen in the country. He got the main role in the TV series “Servant of the People”. The plot of the series was simple and unpretentious: an ordinary school teacher, by chance, becomes president and improves life in the country in every possible way.
There was war and ethnic cleansing in the country, so our brilliant comedian once said that he would run for president. That he will end the war. That he can find a compromise. That he is ready to stand on his knees asking for peace, if necessary.
Guess what happened when he was actually made president?
Now he travels the world raising investment for the military-industrial complex and poses for cameras looking like he has a single khaki T-shirt and doesn’t get a penny from the billions of dollars in cash flowing generously from the pockets of Western taxpayers (and his expensive property is apparently appeared by magic).
So I’m very careful when I see populism like this.
All these songs and dances are aimed at young people.
They take to the streets and say, “We are the power here,” selling their country for glass beads, European singing competitions and Nuland’s cookies.
Young people are addicted to TikTok and have not read Golding.
They get swastika tattoos, pick up bats, and persuade others that there is nothing wrong with Nazism, that there were good guys in the SS. And they call it all freedom – the freedom to choose the one who danced for them better than others.
I’d be glad if Mr. Murray didn’t dance, didn’t sing, and generally stayed away from the piano.
Tatyana we need you in Blackburn, it is terribly hard to impress the urgency to help to those who are into chatting on prominent blogs.
Chatting has never changed much, I prefer to meet people in the flesh.
Dont think Craig does much dancing, he is better as a stand up speaker, joking included.
No hustings as yet, the public is not allowed to scrutinise the candidates, one wonders why
Fees have had a devastating impact on universities.
The obvious is that education is now a business transaction: some students – not all (not the best) – believe they are buying a degree rather than paying for tuition. But all now expect more tuition. Yet student numbers are rising dramatically, especially MScs from overseas, while staff numbers are not keeping pace. So students get less, and staff work to the point of collapse. Everyone notices this, including the MSc students, who then tell their friends, which will soon mean that income source will fall away.
The huge numbers of students (more than 200 in some units) mean we cannot set exams as we once did. Multiple choice is the only realistic option, that and coursework that can be marked by a computer. Thus we have some students handing in AI-generated work to be marked by an AI machine. This strikes me as madness.
A more subtle effect is that the best students no longer stay to do PhDs, at least in STEM. They can take jobs of £40K or more, which with a debt is far more attractive than the £17K or so stipend. The impact of this is that to vastly reduce the number of young people able to work as academic staff, because a PhD is really an apprenticeship. Universities now increasingly rely on recruiting from overseas. It also means we have far fewer PhD students to help undergrads in (e.g.) labs – so the PhDs we do have are overworked and, again, undergrads get a worse service.
And fees are just ONE reason why HE in the UK is badly broken.
Getting rid of tuition fees was one of the 10 pledges Starmer made in order to get elected as Labour leader and which he then abandoned once in post. (“Clever politics”, according to the British commentariat.)
Great video on Craig electioneering on ‘Not the Andrew Marr Show’:
https://www.youtube.com/@nottheandrewmarrshow/videos
Not to mention that in the whole of the UK, the government used to pay the tuition fees for all UK citizens before 1998!
Whether it’s appropriate for so many people to study at a university, instead of some other kind of vocational training, is debatable. That we should educate/train our young people, is not.
There weren’t any tuition fees to “pay”, the state simply funded it all.
Not only that, they even paid you a grant to cover your living expenses, books, etc. The grant was means-tested according to your parents’ income. In my case (The Scottish Education Dept) there was a minimum grant, set at one-sixth of the full grant, no matter what your parents earned. On top of that, they even paid my rail fare from Scotland to England, where I was studying (maths at Warwick). I think the rules might have been different for English local education authorities.
So no student debt at all.
It is such a mundane point, it is hard to see it as the rawest form of social engineering, which it is
Neil your experience is the point. To focus on the cash side of tertiary education devalues the academy as an independent or semi-independent in the body-politic. Townsman’s main point concerning the necessary status of education for the young is beyond dispute. Yet it has been turned into a racket, where academic qualifications are equivalent with secular power.
Just before Mubarak got the heave-ho, I watched an interview with him, where he attempted to leverage a person he was talking about (maybe one of his offspring) who was “better because they had a phd”. He sounded very ignorant, demonstrating an almost superstitious Panglossian belief that these letters “phd”, “Dr” etc constituted some kind of inherent value. It was the talk of a wealthy parent, thinking this stuff buys a good life and demonstrating that the person he spoke of had showed they were better than the others, more noble. He sounded pathetic but creepy – proper colonial comprador language
It reflects the overall commercialisation of society, everything is a “brand” with a life cycle in the public sphere, the final reduction becoming clearer as it translates in to the individual’s access to resources, over the course of a life. This view must grind on parents who understand the game
“better because they had a phd”
This is still a very popular belief. My Mum e.g. thinks so, unhappy I never chose an academic path to may be gain a chair at some university one day (like some of my friends did). Which would of course be mighty awesome now because with that income I could finance this very blog´s operations e.g. So the notion of “being better” is often one of parental care.
This is the one handed down from the Medieval idea of becoming a lawyer or a doctor or an academic (lawyer/academic connected with the rise of the power of the state in the Middle Ages and the Catholic Church, after the rise of science the doctor/engineer joined the group of privileged.) So these contain the promise for a good life. Which is most parents’ hope for their off-spring.
p.s. actually engineers were respected ever since. So that doesn´t belong there.
No, it wasn’t all. And it wasn’t government but Local Authority funding. The students with the wealthiest parents didn’t get a grant, nor were their tuition fees paid. But there were not many in that category, and the tuition fees were minimal. Most students got their fees paid and a partial means-tested grant.
The problem came when Cameron put through the massive raise to £9500. The academics went mad at the thought of all this money. The vice-chancellors paid themselves massive salaries, and as organisations the unis invested in expensive new flashy buildings, all of which required the maintenance of the massive income. And by consequence on the much higher fees paid by foreign students. Now the high risk big financial move, foolishly undertaken, is going wrong. The government makes difficulties about the visas, calling them “immigrants”, and particularly they’re trying to get rid of the Chinese. So who’s going to pay the 18K for a foreign student? There isn’t any way out, as you can’t go back to the low finance model which existed before.
“The students with the wealthiest parents didn’t get a grant, nor were their tuition fees paid.”
There were no tuition fees, just as there are still not for state secondary education, except for students from other countries.
Staunch defence of the Workers Party and George Galloway by Matt Kennard of Declassified UK.
Interview with PoliticsJoe.
“The Mask has Slipped: How the war on Gaza has destroyed our political system”
https://youtu.be/ymCaO45Zxo0?si=bdxS-dN8oEMvpcbs
(Discussion of the Workers Party begins at 47m 40 mark)
Thanks Greg – it was a chance remark by Matt Kennard several years ago that got me thinking about politics after a life time of ignoring it. Probably led, amongst other things, to me commenting on this website lol
thx!
I will spread that.
p.s. one Andrei Martyanov of course contests the idea the US being the most powerful empire of all time.
He mocks this as Western POV.
3 years ago I would not have considered his argument. I do now.
As – yes – Noam Chomsky on the documentary “Manufacturing Consent” (1996) famously commented, FINANCIAL TIMES, the only paper that is telling the truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXsPU25B60
3 hours.
I assume there is no way to auto-create German subs for that Kennard piece on YT – ?
You may get subtitles in German (and many other languages) from downsub.com. Download the file in SRT format which can be used with the VLC media player. Hope this helps!
What English dialect is that with Kennard?
Born in Jamaica apparently AG. I do not how long he spent there but it might explain the unusual burr in Mr Kennard’s accent.
You are very observant. I only vaguely noticed it.
Hi AG,
That’s a pretty standard working-class London accent. Something rarely heard in British media circles and particularly not at the Financial Times, I’d imagine.
Can’t help on subtitles, I’m afraid.
Hi Craig
I like the videos but if I may make two minor suggestions:
– youtube automatically makes subtitles / closed captions. These are particularly important for the deaf, hard of hearing, and those whose English is not the first language, but it appears that newer generations use them a lot too by default. The closed captions youtube has at the moment are pretty good (only a few minor mistakes) but it’s missing punctation which is important to make sense of the sentence.
– The video in “landscape” but the part of the video with content (you talking) is portrait. There is a large area of the video which is only black margins at the left and at the right of you. Consider those viewing this on their mobiles, the actual video of you talking will be tiny because it needs to accommodate the large black video margin. If you could crop the “black margins” that will be better.
Good luck with your campaign.
Are Universities a good idea.
I do not think so. I did not got to university . After attending some eight schools over a ten year period.
I left Wilson secondary modern school aged 15 gaining mostly grade 5. So a real dunce.
I started an craft engineering apprenticeship for 3 years This involved doing production work and learning on the job. We used to get one day a week at technical college
I worked as a machinist and fitter , fork lift truck driver , store man for some 15 years. But having bought a home computer in 1980 I taught my self to become a computer programmer, One job I had was at a University my impression of it was it was like a holiday camp , socializing seemed to be the most important thing on the agenda. My step daughter went to university she said they hardly new the teachers it did not lead to a job connected to the subject that she did not learn . Her partner also went to university on a computer course . I completed the core project for him he did not learn to program and it did not lead to a job connected to the course.
I agree that university fees are a con trapping people in debt. But also wasting 3 or more years when they could get some good work experience. But if every one wants to be a manager then we have to hope the immigrants will do the work that needs doing.
“I agree that university fees are a con trapping people in debt.”
But, more importantly, normalising the idea of being in debt. The whole idea of being permanently in debt as normal is relatively new. When I was growing up, debt was still something for emergencies, to be avoided and paid off as quickly as possible. If people wanted something, they saved up for it. I suspect some bright spark at a bank thought, “why are we paying out interest on people’s savings when we could persuade them to buy what they want right now with money borrowed from us and then they would be paying us interest instead?” and thus the credit card was born. as the thin edge of a very large wedge. I still remember the slogan, “Take the waiting out of wanting!”
Take the waiting out of the wanting, that’s a good one Bayard. As I performed the lol, my brain offered potential memories of hearing, seeing the advert but I am not sure whether these are real. That surely is the power of slogans – even if you haven’t heard it you think you have. If you were poor back then many folk I knew said that going to money lenders was the same as going to the dogs. Then the inversion came and everyone is set to take the wait out of the want.
Bayard , I knew a fella who lent to the poorest families. I asked him how he dealt with awkward customers. I believed him when he said he just used persistence, no coercion. He would take a tiny repayment as proof of good faith. He must have have been an astute psychological observer. He suggested to me such nominal repayments made the borrower feel like repaying the rest of the loan. He said he had found very few non-payers amongst his clients, some would feel a sense of obligation whilst others would wish to maintain access to his micro-credit facilities, which left about 10% of folk who didnt pay. He said this enough to maintain a very healthy profit. He lived in a big house with a great life or so it looked to trades like me lol