When I was 16, we used to have classes in something called Personal and Social Education - now no doubt
rebranded as "21st Century Citizenship" or some other equally vacuous title. Our teacher for the classes was someone who I respected very much, which may be why one remark she made has always stuck in my memory. Being at that time possessed of an environmentalist streak (I'm still today a somewhat apathetic member of the Green Party) I was shocked when during a debate about charitable giving she said that she would never donate to animal charities like the RSPCA because those organisations that look after human beings should come first.

With hindsight, I can see how this was a perfectly sustainable anthropocentric position, though no doubt the likes of Peter Singer would argue otherwise. Indeed, her influential comment has informed my own pragmatic views on charities. As a wage-earning adult, I have only set up direct debits to charities that work in the developing world. My reasoning is that a pound spent there will go much further than a pound spent here in the UK. The same pound might feed a child in Africa for a day through Oxfam, but given to Cancer Research UK it would barely contribute anything to a project to find a cure that might work some time in the future. Do not get me wrong: domestic charities from hospices to medical research do enormous amounts of admirable work to support quality of life. Yet it is hard to think of many that actually save lives to the same extent and with the same per-pound efficiency as charities like the Red Cross or Oxfam do in developing world situations. This is because here in Britain we also have such a thing as the welfare state, which provides a basic safety net. Unlike in the developing world, nobody in the UK will starve, freeze to death, or die for lack of healthcare because society as a whole will supply these basic humanitarian needs.

This probably seems a coldly utilitarian attitude. But if it does, then it should offer a chilling perspective on modern Britain that I have decided that I have to adjust my principles and start supporting charities in the UK, because I am no longer convinced that the last sentence of my paragraph above holds true. Pragmatically, charities in the UK are no longer a nicety to support quality of life, but an essential to sustain it. Foodbanks are the most obvious example of this. They are an increasing feature of daily life for hundreds of thousands of people, and make the difference between malnutrition and even death for the poorest in our society.

The welfare state, which used to provide the basic safety net that is lacking in developing countries, is now so torn that thousands are falling through the holes. Benefits are no longer working; they have been cut and bureacratised to exclude and discourage those who need them: the cancer-sufferer who has been told he has months to live but has his benefits stripped by ATOS; the disabled person who has lost their benefits because their Job Centre advisor "misinterpreted" the paperwork in order to hit their sanction targets; the single mother who cannot work because the cost of childcare would outweigh any salary; the young NEET who cannot afford to go to college because taking the vocational training that might get him a job would remove his benefits.

The Tories would have you believe that most who use welfare are scroungers, and that benefit reforms are the necessary protection against the majority who cunningly exploit it. It is in this vein that the millionaire Tory peer Lord Freud suggests that the explosion in food banks can be explained by the law of supply: give more stuff away free and more people will grab it with both grubby hands, an attitude which sums up the Tory view of the welfare state in a nutshell. Those of us on the left, however, believe that their growth can be explained only by the law of demand: food banks are serving an increasing need that the welfare state no longer does. Now I am not naive. Based on personal experience I have no doubt that welfare is manipulated by many - but just not by the majority. The ones who need welfare most take it with humility and out of genuine necessity. Most families in poverty are already working, but are unable reliably to support themselves without benefits because the minimum wage is set too low or because zero-hours contracts make their working hours erratic.

This is why today - on the back of this article - I've decided to start supporting the Trussell Trust, the UK's biggest food bank charity. This has not been an easy decision, and not only because it radically reverses my previous principles. There are many on the left who would argue that by supporting this charity I am in fact helping those who want to see the welfare state dismantled. By passing the buck to charity, the state can abrogate responsibility for running a welfare system that the post-war consensus traditionally saw as essential.

I can appreciate the principle. However, I think it ignores the reality. The hope on the left is that if the cuts keep going for long enough, if enough people suffer, and if or when charities prove unable to take up the slack of the mighty state, then eventually people will see through the government's divide and rule tactics and its rhetoric of strivers and scroungers and demand change. The trouble is that this argument hinges on the belief that at some point the poor will start to fight back so that the government will have no option but to reverse its welfare reforms. This simply is not going to happen. The poorest in our society have no voice. Generally, they do not tweet; they do not write angry letters to their MP. Given that the police are more than happy to beat articulate students at the merest whiff of dissent, imagine what would happen were the unwashed urchins to take to the streets. The revolution that some commentators hope will bubble up if we can stick it out for long enough is not going to happen. The need is right here and right now.

Charity is the new reality in twenty-first-century Britain. It is up to those of us who pay our taxes to support what's left of the welfare system, but have a little bit of change to spare, to help. If this post probably seems horribly vainglorious, it's not meant to be. It is, instead, a sign of how far we've come since I sat in that classroom at the age of 16, and thought that charity begins abroad.

Labels: food banks, Politics

The Education Secretary Michael Gove has recently been complaining about Marxist professors at university, labelling them as the Enemies of Promise. At the same time, a new book about US universities has suggested that university campuses suffer from a dearth of right-wing perspectives as conservatives are chased out by angry socialists. As a card-carrying member of the Green Party, I guess I had better be added to the club - though I am not going to apologise or hang my head in shame, especially not to a hectoring education secretary who can’t even get his literary facts straight.

However, his comments did get me reflecting on my own teaching, and the ways in which it might or might not reflect my ideological presuppositions. Actually, like a good Althusserian, let’s be honest about this: ideology always affects every action, teaching necessarily included. Given this, the question is how does teaching become “left,” and is it necessarily a bad thing if it does?

It starts with the curriculum. Consider the following selection of texts that I have taught over the last term. My students have looked at Death of a Salesman, with its condemnation of that capitalist error of mistaking money for happiness; that same week I taught The Scarlet Letter, which condemns the hypocrisy of Puritanism – the same Puritanism whose work ethic underpins the American Dream by linking moral virtue to material success. We have examined Waiting for Godot, which draws on Sartre’s humanist philosophy to declare the death of god and the advent of secular values. My contemporary fiction groups have studied Things Fall Apart, a novel which invites us to adopt that empathetic perspective known as cultural relativism (a perspective one does not generally find in the pages of the Daily Mail); Achebe hopes we will understand how, seen in its own terms, a Nigerian tribal system in which children are ritually sacrificed might at least be comprehensible rather than merely “savage” behaviour that should be “civilised.” In a different way, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace suggests that in post-Apartheid Africa, black rape of whites may be a symptomatic recompense for the preceding years of racial and sexual violence enacted by whites on blacks. We have dealt with On Beauty, a novel which comically criticises a conservative art professor who wants to preserve education for the elite rather than for the masses.

As anyone else who has taught these texts will recognise, though, this picture is quite one dimensional. By definition good literature invites us to consider the tension between opposing moral values, to sympathise with realist characters who are trying to figure out the best but always imperfect way to negotiate an imperfect world.

So whilst Death of a Salesman is commonly held up to be a critique of capitalism, my groups also talked around a phrase from the end that seems to be Willy Loman’s epitaph: “he had the wrong dreams, all, all wrong”; it is not the act of dreaming itself but the extreme idealism with which Willy dreamt that was flawed. Indeed we anticipate that the son he leaves behind who presents the most optimistic vision of the future, Happy, will go on to live the American Dream of financial success. Waiting for Godot does not spare from showing us the bleakness of the world when traditional morality systems, such as religion, withdraw from it: it is in microcosm the picture of the broken society that conservatives love to lament. Things Fall Apart certainly hopes we will sympathetically understand why tribal people might behave as they do; but when white civilisation arrives, it is not seen as a wholly bad thing, bringing law to a land where women were previously beaten and children were killed to recompense for the crimes of their fathers. On Beauty balances its critique of conservatism by parodying postmodern theories of art and morality which suggest that there are no such things as truth or beauty – a fact which alienates the left-wing professor from the rest of his family.

A good curriculum – or a curriculum of good literature – does not automatically swing one way or the other, but balances uneasily on the centre ground (modern politicians should be well-familiar with the awkwardness this entails). Of course, that notion of what “good literature” is could itself be questioned and challenged. In my view expressed above, good literature is that which can be examined from two different points of view. The vision of Michael Gove – who would like the history curriculum to focus on Britain and ignore our role in the wider world through colonialism - would probably entail dollops of patriotic war poetry (without the awkward honesty of Owen and Sassoon), some Rudyard Kipling (excluding Kim), and a dosing of Shakespeare (preferably centred around Henry V).

To my mind, then, and implicit within most university English syllabuses, literature performs a function of perspective. Rather than pandering to our expectations, literature invites us into territories we would rather not consider, or would prefer to categorise as the domain of the other. Those who throughout history would have identified themselves as conservatives (with a small c) would have suggested women belonged as the “angel in the house”: the staples of the curriculum Jane Eyre and A Doll’s House would beg to differ. Some would argue that slaves, blacks, Africans do not deserve to be credited with independence of thought and personal autonomy: Beloved, The Colour Purple, Things Fall Apart show that is not the case. The lower classes fall beneath the notice of the ruling elite: Great Expectations shows how dangerous this might be.

Even though it is my contention that good literature shows us a spectrum of ethical values, the centre of that spectrum is often around those in society whom, without education, we would probably ignore. Thus whilst good teaching should acknowledge and refuse to settle on one point of view of a text, by default the fictional vehicle takes us on some uncomfortable journeys.

The question that extends from this, though, which lies behind Gove’s grumblings, is whether teachers should foreground this ethical process. Should we seek to explain just what values are being taught? Or let the literature alone do the teaching? Reflecting on my own practice, I am inclined to be overtly polemical.

This has been clearest to me in teaching critical theory. I am lecturing a full course at the University of Sunderland this year. On numerous occasions in lectures – usually when I start drifting away from my notes and start ad libbing – I have noticed myself adopting a strident tone. Teaching feminism, I got genuinely angry when telling my students the fact that should grab them by the throat and make them realise that feminism still matters: that within three years of graduating, before maternity leave and childcare come on the radar, female students in the lecture hall will be earning on average £1000 less than their male counterparts. I find myself continually reiterating the stranglehold of ideology, and reiterating Marx’s vision of how the economic base of society conditions the way we behave towards each other. In teaching deconstruction I presented my students with the binary of “immigrant” and “English” and invited them to show how the rhetoric of the right-wing tabloids falls apart as soon as one tries to pin down the national characteristics upon which it is predicated. In a lecture on race I spoke of how biology has proven that less than a tenth of one percent of our genetic material influences characteristics (such as skin colour) which might be identified as being “racial,” such that a black person and white person sitting next to each other might actually share more genes than two people seemingly of the same ethnic group; social constructivism has won the day, and down with anyone (anti-immigrant politicians in particular) who tries to tell you that racial integration is a bad thing.

Perhaps I should not have been so explicit. Perhaps I should simply have lit up my Powerpoint and let the slides and theories do the talking. Gove had some snide remarks to say about the academics who wrote a letter condemning his education reforms. He noted that the signatories teach “from a classical Marxist perspective”; study “how masculinities and femininities operate as communities of practice”; examine the “intergenerational ethnography of the intersection of class, place, education and school resistance.” Presumably, if classical Marxism is wrong, I should be serving up an equal dose of Thatcherism and explain how free market capitalism is a great thing (naturally I would have to conveniently ignore recent history if I did this). If masculinity and femininity are not gender roles performed in and affected by the communities people inhabit, I should be explaining that biology determines behaviour such that the women in the room should kindly get back home and dust the dresser. If the way intergenerational differences affect class and education is not worth studying, then I should ignore the fact that my students are paying £9000 a year for an education that their parents could in principle have got for free.

Well, forgive me, Mr. Gove, but I am not going to apologise for failing to offer a greater sense of balance. The reason we academics teach what we do is not because we have some secret agenda to turn our students into lifelong Labour voters. It is rather because we believe based on hard-won study that we are right. I am not going to say that racial differences are biologically determined when they are not. I will not imply that one’s biological sex determines that the only job women should do is bring up their children. I am not going to say that Marxist critics were wrong to highlight the power of ideology when we live in a society in which the poor single mother who suffers the biggest burden of spending cuts is represented as a “lazy scrounger” or a “benefits cheat.”

Like it or not, theory and literature have the capacity to change the world by opening our eyes to its sometimes messy realities. We are not the Enemies of Promise but the Idealists of Opportunity. Without feminist literature, women might not have the vote today; without Uncle Tom’s Cabin, black people would still be toiling the cotton fields of the deep South. These victories are good things. I stake my flag: I’ll shout from the lectern, and continue to march alongside those whose complex and tortuous lives literature invites us to live with.

Labels: Marxism, Michael Gove, Politics, University Life

This Saturday marks the seventieth anniversary of the Beveridge report, which established the modern welfare state. In the light of all that these reforms have achieved in terms of improving the health and wellbeing of the poor and serving social equality, it is shocking to discover a government report alleging the negative effect of welfare upon those who receive it.

The welfare state, the report writes, is:

a check upon industry, a reward for improvident marriage, a stimulus to increased population, and a means of counterbalancing the effect of an increased population upon wages; a national provision for discouraging the honest and industrious and protecting the lazy, vicious and improvident, calculated to … ruin the taxpayers.

This is not exactly a new viewpoint, even if the language is perhaps more strident and direct than one has come to expect from spinning politicians. Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, has recently argued that families on welfare should have their benefits capped at two children, that they should "cut their cloth" and not expect the state to pick up the tab should they choose to have more.

The Tory peer Lord Freud, Minister for Welfare Reform, has contended that the welfare system is dreadful, allowing lone parents and the sick to "have a lifestyle" on the backs of hard-working families.

Chancellor George Osborne has outlined plans for £10 billion of welfare cuts by saying that one "just can't balance the budget on the wallets of the rich."

As is now seen in the above-quoted government report, right-wing rhetoric turns the handle on the aged gramophone time and again, repeatedly suggesting the poor are exploiting the rich rather than the other way round, and condemning them for the improvidence of having children. A view which seems vindicated by the fact that the report quoted above is actually the Poor Law Commission of 1833.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

(Thanks to John Pemble in the LRB for this quotation.)

Labels: Politics, welfare

In announcing his new plan to cut £10 billion from the welfare budget, George Osborne has drawn an image that is sure to be repeated in some form or other in months to come:

So we are absolutely clear that those with the broadest shoulders must bear the broadest burden. But our conception of fairness, and this is perhaps where we differ from the Labour party, also extends to the welfare system. We also think it's unfair that when that person leaves their home early in the morning, they pull the door behind them, they're going off to do their job, they're looking at their next-door neighbour, the blinds are down, and that family is living a life on benefits. That is unfair as well, and we are going to tackle that as part of tackling this country's economic problems.

As a rhetorical move, the concept of the good neighbour heading to work whilst the bad neighbour sleeps behind the blinds is a useful if blunt one. The metaphor of the closed blind or drawn curtains appeals to some fairly basic domestic sentiments in us. The drawn curtain is the mark of our personal pride in the home, which is in turn the microcosm of our relation to the civic world at large. To not draw the curtain is to fail one's basic domestic routine, and in turn to refuse to enter fully into society.

Philip Larkin, that laureate of the same common man that Osborne tries to appeal to, knew this very well, repeatedly invoking curtains and windows as the mark of social decline or moral rectitude. Watt's concordance to the poetry counts 11 references to curtains.

Perhaps most infamously, the sad and solipsistic Mr Bleaney is defined by them:

This was Mr Bleaney's room. He stayed
The whole time he was at the Bodies, till
They moved him." Flowered curtains, thin and frayed,
Fall to within five inches of the sill.

It's the cumulative details here that do for Mr Bleaney. Tasteless that the curtains are flowered, a sign of his poverty that they have become thin and frayed but never replaced, but an indictment on his whole situation, his fatalistic decision to lodge in this boarding room at the Bodies, that they never fitted to the bottom in the first place. The trope is compounded by the fact that the curtains don't even fit the stanza; the line spills over into the next one, where Larkin imagines Mr Bleaney's view:

Whose window shows a strip of building land,
Tussocky, littered.

Perhaps one reason not to draw the curtains is because the prospect is less appealing than the lawns of a Belgravia mansion. In "I Dream of an Out-Thrust Arm of Land" Larkin switches the perspective. This time the poem looks in at his own mind, seeing it as it were from the outside of its own embodied house, his body. In this nightmare, he imagines that:

...the wind climbed up the caves
To tear at a dark-faced garden
Whose black flowers were dead,
And broke round a house we slept in,
A drawn blind and a bed.

The drawn blind figures the temporary sleep of the dreamer turned into the permanent sleep of death. Curtains are drawn at times of mourning, of course, and thus the state of one's curtains figures the state of one's decay, mental or physical. Implicit in George Osborne's image, welfare scroungers are realised as living corpses, feeding off the taxes of the living. They wither away behind closed doors: the early-morning sun of a commute to work would kill them. He did not say any of this, of course, but as Larkin knew when he invoked the curtain in his poetry, the incidental image invites the imagination to fill the blank space: What is going on behind the closed curtain? If nothing dubious, why keep the curtain closed at all? Then again, perhaps it is because there is nothing going on - because the owner is dead, because the owner may as well be dead - that the curtain is closed. The hermeneutics of curtains close in on themselves.

It is contrast, then, that "High Windows" evokes the uncurtained window as a metaphor for imaginative and social freedom. The poem starts in a pettily judgmental way:

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,

But it then swiftly flicks to see the absence of judgement - particularly the absence of religious vindictiveness in a secular age - as a positive thing: "I know this is paradise." It concludes:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

The light streaming in signifies opportunity, something that of course the benefits cheat does not pursue.

George Osborne might thus be pleased that his rhetorical flourish resonates with Larkin, who is always peering into or out through the windows of middle-England. He might be doubly pleased with the skewering of the decadents in "Femmes Damnees," which draws on a poem by Baudelaire:

The fire is ash: the early morning sun
Outlines the patterns on the curtains, drawn
The night before. The milk's been on the step,
The 'Guardian' in the letter-box, since dawn.

Upstairs, the beds have not been touched, and thence
Builders' estates, and the main road, are seen,
With labourers, petrol-pumps, a Green Line 'bus,
And plots of cabbages set in between.

The mention of The Guardian is ironic given the shape of things to come, though at this time being a working person's paper as much as a liberal's, the fact that it is lurking in the letter box signifies that the house's inhabitants might belong to the same group as the common labourers outside, those hard workers who have already been up for hours and delivered the milk. Yet before Osborne might get too cosy with this stereotype of the closed blind and the lazy scrounger, Larkin inverts appearances with a "But":

But the living-room is ruby: there upon
Cushions from Harrod's, strewn in tumbled heaps
Around the floor, smelling of smoke and wine,
Rosemary sits. Her hands are clasped. She weeps.

Osborne tries to play down the irony of being the millionaire chancellor who slashes benefits whilst perching his bottom on Al-Fayed's finest cushions. Perhaps he would do well not to typecast the poor based on the state of their curtains.

Labels: English Literature, Philip Larkin, Politics

In a controversial article that has been doing the rounds, Aditya Chakrabortty argues that by comparison with the India writer Rabindranath Tagore (whose 150th anniversary is this year) literary writers today have no time for politics. Where, Chakrabortty asks, are the Orwells, or Spenders, or Pounds of today? Perhaps only Arundhati Roy or Dave Eggers fall into the category of author-turned-activists that any rich literary culture should possess. English and American novels are, on the whole, "gutless."

The blame for this, he suggests, lies with the commercialisation of publishing and writing:

Literature too has been professionalised, so that authors now go from their creative-writing MAs to their novels to their relentless promotional work. Contemporary literary writers, it sometimes seems to me, are so tightly wedged behind their Apples that they have no time for politics. Unless you count signing the odd letter to the broadsheets as a political activity.

Labels: English Literature, Ian McEwan, political novel, Politics

Writing in the London Review of Books, John Lanchester offers a very perceptive and trenchant reflection on the value of Marxism as an explanation of the world economy today. Lanchester rightly observes some of the twenty-first century paradoxes that classical Marxism might struggle to explain. The welfare state in particular is a problem. For example:

Singapore is one of the most avowedly free-market countries in the world, regularly coming top or near top of surveys for liberalisation of markets, and yet the government owns most of the land in the country and the overwhelming majority of the population lives in socialised housing. It’s the world capital of free markets and also of council flats. There are lots of different capitalisms and it’s not clear that a single analysis which embraces all of them as if they were a single phenomenon can be valid.

A quite literally bigger problem is that the world's largest socialist state, China, has tripped over itself to provide the world with a surplus of workers who seem only too ready to be exploited as their products are exported. There has been and will be no rebellion of the proles at Foxconn.

Despite these awkward issues of modernity, I (like Lanchester) am repeatedly struck by just how easy it is, on the whole, still to see the twenty-first century world through a Marxist lens. When I teach Marxist literary theory, it is always a fun but remarkably straightforward task to think of real-world examples to explain key terms and concepts.

Take the idea of "alienation," for example, the principle that the bourgeois owners of a product are disconnected from the proletariat who produced it. In a feudal, pre-capitalist economy, Marx argues, we sympathetically know what labour value is intrinsic in the things we own: to put it simplistically, when I exchange five hens for that new set of horseshoes, I know the labour that went into producing my hens, and so I know the labour that my neighbour the village blacksmith must have put into making those horseshoes.

Yet in a capitalist economy, especially the globalised one that we have today, the buyer is alienated from understanding the amount of work that goes into the thing they buy. A buyer knows the price of a product, of course, but not the labour-value that is bound up in it. To show this, I ask my class where they bought the tops they are wearing. The usual suspects roll out: Topshop, Primark, Next. Then I ask them where their tops were made. Of course, no one knows. Then I ask them to look at the labels in the back of their tops and to find out. The results are usually surprising: of course China features heavily, but so to do Spain, South Africa, India and more. I point out that if they do not know where the product they own comes from, then it is highly unlikely that the factory worker who sews the button that holds the sleeve that attaches to the shirt they are wearing knows anything at all about how his sewing of the button will translate into a finished product on a discount rail in Primark.

Or Abercrombie and Fitch, for that matter - this being the retailer of choice for the wealthier student. A t-shirt from Primark might cost £10. One from Abercrombie and Fitch might cost £50. Materially, there is virtually no difference between them. Yet what justifies that higher price tag is the aura that accumulates around an object that has been marketed by the athletic, semi-naked young men who strut around Abercrombie and Fitch stores, turning a mere garment into a definition of lifestyle, of "cool." As Marx says of such fetish objects, "A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties."

Or extend this theory more abstractly, to think about the way that all products embody a certain value that is a combination of labour and perception. The bourgeois - the owning class, which is to say pretty much most of the Western world today - get rich by ensuring that the labour which produces those products is deferred to someone else. In canny capitalism, this someone else is, often and ironically, the consumer of that same product, who is seduced by the perception that actually they are getting better not worse value. Lanchester uses the neat example of automatic airport check-in:

Online check-in is a process which should genuinely increase the efficiency of the airport experience, thereby costing you less time: time you can spend doing other things, some of them economically useful to you. But what the airlines do is employ so few people to supervise the bag drop-off that there’s no time-saving at all for the customer. When you look, you see that because airlines have to employ more people to supervise the non-online-checked-in customers – otherwise the planes wouldn’t leave on time – the non-checked-in queues move far more quickly. They’re transferring their inefficiency to the customer, but what they’re also doing is transferring the labour to you and accumulating the surplus value themselves. It happens over and over again. Every time you deal with a phone menu or interactive voicemail service, you’re donating your surplus value to the people you're dealing with.

It is a valid cliche of intellectual history that the most elegant ideas are typically those which seem to slot easily into our normal pattern of existence, because they announce things which have been always already before our eyes. Freud freely admitted that he was not the first to discover the unconscious; all he did was nudge us acknowledge the truths of our own minds that we always, secretly, knew to be there. Darwin did not need to invent a machine to decode the genome in order to develop the theory of evolution; he merely spent some time looking at common finches and worms, and saw that their biology must vary according to principles of survival.

Similarly with capitalism, which might seem, in the era of the credit crunch, collatoralised debt obligation, and the trade deficit, incredibly complex. Yet look through a Marxist lens at the small details, the little incidents we all experience, and suddenly the world looks much simpler - even if it seems more resistant to fundamental political and economic change than ever.

Labels: Marx, Marxism, Politics

I suppose I ought to be celebrating a report from the New College of the Humanities that shows that 60% of the UK's leaders in business and government possess humanities degrees. Indeed, a massive 65% of our current MPs studied arts, humanities or social sciences; just 10% had a science, technology or engineering degree.

If I was being cynical, though, I could hardly think of a worse manifesto for the value of the humanities. Considering our current and recent leadership in the UK, one hardly feels optimistic about the extent to which liberal values have been instilled within them. Consider:

• The humanities encourage one to empathise with those of different cultural backgrounds. George Osbourne (History, Oxford) must have failed this lesson.
• The humanities reward creative thinking. Admittedly, there are some FTSE 100 banking chiefs who managed to do a lot of this in relation to financial accounting. Shame they lacked the other core humanities skills of reflexive or critical thinking.
• Humanities provide us with historical and fictional narratives about a troubled world, and so allow us to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. Unfortunate that Tony Blair (Jurisprudence, Oxford) never mugged up on his Afghanistan 101.

OK, so I'm being horribly facetious here. But at a time when we are led by a set of socially divisive and market-minded politicians, to herald the humanities as having inculcated a wide and empathetic view of the world in them seems hardly apposite, does it?

PS To be fair to the humanities, our present Tory leaders are acolytes of Margaret Thatcher, who perhaps indicates that it's the political background, not the degree, that determines a leader's view of the world. Her degree: Chemistry.

Labels: humanities, Politics, University Life

The strikes on November 30th are about many things, which lurk behind the superficial reason for action which is the failure to agree a new deal on pensions. In part, they are about whether working conditions in the public sector should be held to the same standard as in the private sector, where things such as salary-related pension schemes have long since been abandoned. In part, they are about the wealth gap between the 1% of executives on huge six figure pensions and the 99% of the rest. In part, they are about the cutting of the public sector in order to resolve a crisis created by the financial industry.

But to myself, having just returned from a picket to protest against changes to our Universities Superannuation Scheme, the fight is primarily about intergenerational justice. It is important to remember that many of those on the picket lines will not be badly affected by pension changes. Certainly everyone will have to contribute more salary as the cost of a longer age of living - and most of the unions, including our own UCU, have accepted this in their negotiations. But this aside, those already established in pensions will be largely unaffected. Those employees who are already in USS will still keep their gold-standard, final-salary link. Those in public sector pension schemes who are within ten years of retirement will still retire at the same age, with pensions at the same level as they are currently.

Our local union leader is already part-retired. He has pointed out that because his pension is linked to the higher rate of inflation, and is final-salary, then within seven years (assuming inflation stays around 5%) he will be "earning" as much through his pension as a junior lecturer just entering the profession will receive in salary (assuming that wages stay flat). What he is fighting for, then, is not to protect his own pension, but the rights of younger workers. In particular, he is fighting for the right to link pensions to final salary rather than career-average earnings. Why does this matter so much to younger members? If they have long and sustained careers, won't they still be well-rewarded in such a scheme? Well consider this. If a young woman enters the profession today, she might want to take a career break so she can have children. Such a break will dramatically affect her career average earnings. Younger women will have to face choices that women of an earlier generation had fought successfully to resolve, or so we thought.

Those of that baby boomer generation, like our local union leader, have lived through a post-war world rich in state entitlements and private sector growth: a free NHS, a public university education, rising house prices, a bulging stock market. For the generation under thirty, when they reach retirement, none of these things will exist to the same degree.

Many of the government's attacks on the deficit have been assaults on the young: the removal of EMA, scrapping youth unemployment schemes, tuition fees, and now the removal of gold-standard pensions. The government has claimed that cutting the deficit through changes like this is necessary in order to keep interest rates down, which in turn suppress mortgages and thus improves household income and overall welfare. This is fine, if you have a mortgage. But the average age of a first time buyer is rising steadily, now standing at around 38. Those under 30 face increasing rental costs, not decreasing mortgage costs. The government would argue, though, that long-term they too will see the rewards. But consider this. My parents bought their first house for around £10 000. They now live in a house worth £250 000. If someone around the age of 30 manages to buy an average house today, at £160 000, they would need to have that house become worth £4 million by the time they retire in order to realise an equivalent boom to that enjoyed by the older generation.

By the time they reach retirement, then, today's young can expect to be asset poor and, now, pension poor as well. They are bearing the burden of cutting the cost of the deficit now, and they will not live to see the rewards tomorrow. To those parents grumbling about having to sort out childcare because schools are closed, remember this: it primarily for these children of tomorrow that we are taking a stand today.

Labels: pension, Politics, strike, UCU

In 2004, for two months, I travelled across Eastern Europe, from the Czech Republic through to Turkey. As well as being the closest I came to a "gap year," one aspect of the trip was to look at those former Soviet Bloc countries that had recently or were shortly to accede to European Union membership. My overall impression emerging from the journey, which I chronicled in my journal East of Europe, was that the people of these countries were almost unanimously enthusiastic about European membership. Every major city had factories and outlets for major Western brands that would have been anathema under Communism twenty years previously. Shopping malls and supermarkets were springing up everywhere. Although the countryside was far less developed, it was clear that the iron curtain had been well and truly pulled back, and the eyes of the people were looking to the future in the West, rather than nostalgically back to the East.

At the time, the Iraq war was in full swing, and I was feeling a great deal of resentment about the vestiges of colonial militarism that impelled Britain's involvement in the conflict. The period of accession from 2004 to 2007 also saw the insular racism of the tabloid press and of the Conservative right-wing reaching fever pitch. Encouraged by the enthusiasm of Eastern Europeans, and wanting to dissociate myself from little Englandism, I was at my most highly pro-European. I even felt very strongly that Britain should join the Euro as soon as possible, to open our markets to the expanding economies of the likes of Hungary or Slovakia.

Fast forward to 2011, and I have seen that my earlier self was somewhat blinded by enthusiasm, and did not appreciate the problems of the European project that came about with this expansion of its territories and powers. This problem is illustrated by Slovakia and the leading role this small country is currently playing in the current Eurozone crisis.

The Eurozone needs all its member countries to approve changes to the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), in order to prevent the collapse of the Euro that has been precipitated by the troubles in Greece. At present, there are just four nations that have not yet signed the new agreement, with Slovakia being the most resistant. The centrist Slovakian Prime Minister Iveta Radicova is keen to sign. But to push the necessary bill through the Slovak parliament she needs the agreement of her right-wing coalition partners, the Freedom and Solidarity party (SaS). They are a small and relatively new party, and are using the issue in order to bolster their popularity among right-wing voters. If they refuse to ratify the bill in parliament as they are threatening to do, not only would this cause a crisis in the Slovakian government, it could cause the collapse of the entire architecture of the Euro.

The issue highlights the problems of the democratic deficit that exists in European government, about which the UK right-wing have long shrilled, and to which I have previously closed my ears. There is an inherent problem in democracy that political scientists have struggled to answer. Parliamentary elections are almost never decided by a single vote, and so no one voter has any ability to change the outcome of an election. Why, then, does anyone bother to drag themselves to the voting booth in large elections?

This question becomes progressively harder to answer as one moves up the scale of government. In a parish council election, my one vote just might make a difference. I may even know the candidates at a personal level, and feel obliged to vote out of friendship. In council elections, I may vote for a local councillor who particularly appeals to issues on my doorstep. In parliamentary elections, in principle (though probably not in the mindset of most voters in practice) I vote first and foremost for a local MP not for a national party, and at the constituency level my one vote just might be sufficient to tip the balance in their favour.

But in what way does my vote count at a national level? No person in the UK voted for a coalition (this would be impossible, since one can only cast one vote in the first past the post system), yet this is what we got. And if this is a paradox enough, in what way can my vote be said to count at a European level? I voted for a European MP, in a parliament which is modelled along the same grounds as a national parliament. But the Slovakian issue illustrates that this parliament is essentially a sham, that pretends to connect voters in individual countries with Europe as a whole when in fact it is individual, national parliaments, voted for by an electorate within those countries alone, which make the most crucial decisions.

No vote I could cast for has any way of influencing the direction of Europe at the present time. Potentially, the decision about the future of the Euro - and in turn the future of the European Union - rests with a minor party, in a coalition government, in a comparatively small country. No vote for any member of the European Parliament, left or right wing, can influence the decision of the SaS, which is appealing purely to its own local voters in threatening to defeat the bill. In much the same way, Nicholas Sarkozy in France is unlikely to support a renationalisation of the French banks, because he is up for re-election next year. In the UK, the right-wing of the Conservative party, which had agreed to put European issues on a back burner in the interests of the coalition, now sees the Euro crisis as an opportunity for immediate renegotiation of our European treaties.

This, then, is the problem of the democratic deficit. This moment of crisis has led me to recognise that actually, economic problems can only be legitimately dealt with at a national level, where people have the opportunity to vote for a government which is thereby licensed to cut public spending by the same electorate who will suffer from that decision. Whilst I remain largely pro-European, and accept that Europe's economies benefit by being joined together, I am, with the benefit of hindsight, glad that the UK remains detached from the Eurozone, where such a connection between a country's voters and European decisions cannot practically exist.

Labels: democratic deficit, European Financial Stability Facility, European Union, Politics, Slovakia

On the day that students hope to pass their A-Levels, let us remember that today also marks the failure of Higher Education in the UK, as the next cohort of A-Level students will be the first to pay for their university education under the new tuition fee regime. I have blogged many times about why the government's plans for universities are flawed, so I will largely hand over to Stefan Collini in the London Review of Books, who provides an acute dissection of the bloody mess that is the Higher Education White Paper. Each of the "subjects" below were the originally intentions behind the Browne review proposals. Each of them, though, has failed in its implementation. The quotes are Collini's.

Subject: Decreasing costs for taxpayer. Grade: Fail.

The original intention of the Browne Review was to find a way to square a circle: allow more students to attend university, whilst decreasing the cost to the taxpayer. We will come to the former issue in a moment. But with respect to the latter, it seems clear that the immediate costs to the taxpayer will actually increase. As Collini points out, it is strange that the supposedly independent Browne review managed to recommend slashing public spending on universities just before the coalition announced its own spending plans. But it is a disaster that, ultimately, the government's reforms will actually increase public spending:

We now know that when the decision was taken to replace the block grant with a loan system, the Treasury (presumably the real driving force behind the change) calculated that the initial expenditure on loans would more or less match current expenditure on the teaching grant if the average fee were no higher than £7500. But the Treasury had assumed that the Office for Fair Access (Offa), which oversees universities’ admissions policies, had the legal power to dictate how much a given university could charge, ensuring that fees would be kept down to the desired average level. But Offa has no such legal power, as its director was obliged to ‘remind’ the government. A great many universities were setting fees of £9000 (as anyone could have told the government they would). It slowly dawned on the government that not only was the scheme not going to reduce expenditure; it was actually going to be a lot more expensive than the present system. Whether one is broadly in favour of the new fee regime or not, there can be no denying that the policy-making process in the last eight months has been a shambles.

Subject: Increasing university funding. Grade: Fail.

The above would be just about acceptable if it were to mean that universities would be better resourced than they can be through the public purse. Although there are problems with the government's fixation on world university rankings - and especially the American model - in its interpretation of what UK universities can achieve after they are effectively privatised, nevertheless any increased income to universities can only be a good thing. Except this will not happen. The government has claimed that the new regime will see university income increase by 10% by 2015. This seems unlike, as Collini points out:

Willetts has proudly maintained that this policy does not represent a cut to universities, but a boost to their income of around 10 per cent by 2015. It’s just that from now on, he says, the money will be ‘channelled’ through students. But by 2015 the Treasury won’t have recouped a penny of the money it will have given out in loans since 2012, so that this 10 per cent rise must therefore be an increase in government expenditure on higher education above the cost of maintaining the present block grant (even though a loan is an asset not a cost in accountancy terms). After 2015, some students will start to pay some of their loans back, at varying rates, when they start to earn more than £21,000. On the most optimistic figures, it will take 30 years for the Treasury to recoup 70 per cent, at most, of what it provides in loans each year (other economic analysts think the government will never recover more than 50-55 per cent of the amount loaned). And the official figures are based on the Treasury’s assumption that the average fee would be £7500, which even the government must now realise will not be the case. Whatever else is said in favour of this policy, it cannot be maintained that it represents a saving in public expenditure in the short or medium term, even though in the longer term it does amount to a significant shift from public to private funding.

Subject: Increasing access for students from poorer socio-economic backgrounds. Grade: Fail.


As a consequence of the increase in the up-front cost to the treasury, the government had to row back on its plans to allow universities to accept unlimited numbers of fee-paying students. Rather than lifting the cap on the total number of students able to go to any one university, the government has actually had to maintain it, only allowing some flexibility at the "margins." At one margin, universities which set significantly lower fees will be allowed to take more students. At the other, universities will be able to take any number of students with top A-Level grades, so-called "gold dust" consumers. Collini states the consequences of this rigged-market approach very well:

In keeping with its wholly phantasmal conception of competition, the White Paper declares confidently that the new system ‘should allow greater competition for places on the more selective courses and create the opportunity for more students to go to their first-choice institution if that university wishes to take them’. But the two parts of this assertion must be in contradiction: if there really will be more competition for the most sought-after places, then by definition opportunities for applicants to get their first-choice places will be reduced, not increased. The actual effect of the changes will be to make the distribution of resources for institutions match more closely the distribution of A-level scores. Just on fee income alone, students at institutions with an AAB offer or better will be better resourced, by quite a long way, than students at institutions with lower entry requirements. This is a naked example of the use of state power to entrench hierarchy in the name of ‘market principles’. By effectively ruling that a large number of universities must charge considerably less than the level it has legally permitted institutions to charge, the government is constructing a system that is bound to reinforce existing social inequalities.

Subject: Allowing universities autonomy. Grade: Fail


Universities have long cherished their autonomy from government policy, being the one public space where research and discourse can be conducted free from the requirement that they give immediate returns on investment. Collini speculates that this is why the government has been so keen to bring universities to heel, as it dislikes the idea of the funding public institutions which do not necessarily have a direct or quantifiable impact on the economic wellbeing of the nation (as if economic wellbeing is the same thing as being of social value). This autonomy looks set to be removed, as government will be able to set recruitment priorities and access requirements, despite the fact that it is primarily students who will be paying for higher education in the long term.

This plan is designed to produce a rigged market in which the ‘top providers’ will do well and there will be the usual race to the bottom at the lower end. The government has introduced de facto price controls, laying bare the hypocrisy in its proud affirmations that universities are ‘autonomous’, that admissions are ‘a matter between the student and the university’, that the government cannot dictate what fees universities set and so on. And it has done this after universities have already set their fee levels for 2012. Universities believed the system would operate by one set of rules, but now they have been told the rules have changed, and that some of them will be punished for decisions they were forced to make by the government’s own rushed timetable.

Subject: Exam Preparation. Grade: Fail


It is worth noting that most of the government's failure in the test of university reform derives from its lack of careful revision. Revision, that is, of the Browne Review.

The usual way for government reviews to work their way into government policy and then into legislation is this: the initial review will outline the general scope of what needs to be improved and the government will announce a consultation period based on its findings; Parliament and other interested parties (such as universities and students) will have an opportunity to make their comments heard, which will then result in a White Paper being set before Parliament, for further discussion; Parliament and the House of Lords will then draft and redraft legislation, putting the White Paper into practice.

However, the government decided to ignore this usual revision timetable. The government announced that it "accepted" the recommendations of the Browne Review, then legislated for its recommendations to be put into practice, telling universities to set their fees under the new proposal; only six months later did it publish the White Paper which contained the fine discussion of the legislation long since announced. Except it turned out that the White Paper did not just formalise a process that had already started. Instead, it quite radically changed its direction. As the government realised that universities were setting more or less maximum fees in an attempt to recoup their cut in central funding, the White Paper added all sorts of qualifications and provisos, such as effectively reinstating a cap on student numbers - something the new marketplace in tuition fees was originally going to see lifted. This led to universities setting fees and putting in proposals to maintain access, without knowing how the final scheme would work.

The government - led by "two-brains Willetts" - seems a bit like a student who has sat up all night cramming for one exam, only to realise the next morning that the exam in front of them is not the one they were expecting to sit. The government intended its reforms to facilitate a free market in higher education, which, they dogmatically assumed, would automatically entail increased quality and value in teaching as students were enabled as "consumers." But in the final test, they have set a policy which is anything but a free market, which restricts student numbers and sets the burden of payment not primarily on students (though they will be impacted in the long run) but on the public purse. The government has failed, ultimately, to realise that some things - such as education - simply are not marketplaces, but need to be publicly funded.

Labels: Browne review, higher education, Politics, tuition fees, University Life

Some part of me wants ironically to celebrate the recent comments of Conservative MP Philip Davies, in which he argued that disabled people should be allowed to work for less than the minimum wage. It reveals that for all the folksy charm exuded by the Conservative party leadership, the party remains rooted in free market ideology, with an accompanying disregard for social welfare.

In a Commons debate, Davies argued that:

Given some of those people with a learning disability clearly, by definition, cannot be as productive in their work as somebody who has not got a disability of that nature, then it was inevitable given the employer was going to have to pay them both the same they were going to take on the person who was going to be more productive, less of a risk...My view is that for some people, the national minimum wage may be more of a hindrance than a help.

This is a comment that on many levels rejects the best social policies implemented by the previous Labour government.

The Disability Discrimination Act compels employers to make reasonable allowances to the working environment so that employees with a disability are able to work at a comparable level to those without. Davies' assumption that the market should determine what it is willing to pay for labour - with anyone with a disability automatically less valuable than anyone without - is a hideous extension of Thatcherite liberalism. I notice that, unsurprisingly, Dominic Lawson, son of Thatcher's former chancellor, has now written an op-ed in The Independent in support of Davies.

Disabled people ought not to be seen as cheap or inferior labour. With a bit of thought and through the legislative encouragement of the state, employers can make adjustments to ensure that disabled people can offer equal labour-value to anyone else. Of course, there will always be a limit to the changes employers can make, and some jobs for which some disabled people will always be excluded. But the laissez-faire economic attitude that says we should not even worry about trying to place disabled people on an equal footing in the workplace is fundamentally immoral.

Then there is the issue of the minimum wage, something the Tories reviled when Labour introduced it in the 1990s. They fed us scare stories about how it would decimate employment. In fact, the minimum wage has had little impact on overall employment, other than to prevent the exploitation of low-skilled workers and to ensure that work pays sufficiently to allow people to live in economic security. The minimum wage is precisely that, a living minimum. Would Davies be happy to work for, say, £4.00 an hour, earning £100 a week? No disabled person should feel compelled to do this.

Finally, there is the assumption that people with a learning disability "clearly, by definition" cannot be as "productive" as those without. But learning disabilities come in various guises; they do not automatically entail a lack of productivity (as if such a person is a broken machine).

Can someone with Down's Syndrome really be incapable of working in a workplace where they have to face the public? Might someone with dyslexia not actually learn to transcend their disability (I know of two university English professors who have dyslexia)? Might someone with autism not actually be superior in jobs with require mathematical or logical thinking? History is littered with examples of people with "disabilities" who have turned these to their advantage, or for whom the disability is just a small part of a whole person who has excelled in their chosen field: the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash, the artist Alison Lapper, the physicist Steven Hawking.

If Davies' vision is followed to its logical conclusion, the market should be allowed to freely discriminate among those people it has conventionally regarded as weaker, less capable, or more awkward workers: ethnic minorities, women, those with disabilities. Perhaps Davies would prefer it if women were allowed to work for less than the minimum wage - acknowledging the "disablements" caused by their childcare demands that have, traditionally, led employers to discriminate on gender grounds. Perhaps Davies feels that black people should be allowed to offer their services for a less - acknowledging that employers are doing them a favour by employing a group (allegedly) prone to crime and violence. I am sure, in fact, that even Davies and his Conservative ilk, much though they loathe the human rights act and discrimination legislation, would vouch for neither of these things.

Why then should employers be allowed to discriminate against someone with a weaker body or a differently constituted mind? It would certainly be a good thing to get more disabled people into work. But doing this should not require the individual to adapt to the exploitations of the market, but the market to change its notion of what constitutes a "productive" human being.

Labels: disability, minimum wage, Philip Davies, Politics

Terry Pratchett's controversial film on assisted suicide, which featured the death of a British man, Peter Smedley, at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, has only confirmed my belief that legalising such supported deaths would be a moral and humane thing to do.

As was invoked often in the film, the European Convention on Human Rights enshrines both the right to life, and the right to liberty and self-determination. Fundamental human rights do not act independently of each other, but intertwine, often in complex - sometimes conflicted - ways; witness the recent tension between those celebrities who claim a right to privacy, and those in the press who claim the right to free expression in publicising their affairs. In a similar way, campaigners against assisted suicide argue that legalising it would infringe upon the individual's right to life by encouraging people to take their own lives because the option of a "good death" is available, when they might ordinarily continue to want to live, perhaps in comfortable hospice care or supported by loving families. But surely the right to life also entails the right to a certain quality of life, something implied by the coexistence of other rights such as the right to liberty or freedom of thought. It is not enough simply to live, biologically; one also has the right to live a good life, emotionally. As part of this, the right to express oneself and act freely as an individual surely includes the right of the individual to choose when to die.

Looking at the rigorous manner in which assisted suicide is carried out in the Swiss system, it seems clear which is the worse scenario. With numerous legal checks and the opportunity for the individual to pull out of the process of assisted dying at every stage, the risk that legalising assisted dying would encourage suicide seems slim. This is something borne out by the Swiss case, where there was no evident increase in the suicide rate, whether conducted by the self or in clinics, after the legalisation of assisted dying. Indeed, one of the most telling statistics in the programme was that 70 percent of those who register in preparation for a death with Dignitas ultimately do not choose to pursue assisted suicide; it seems that the very existence of this option allows many people to go on living happily in the knowledge that, if it their feelings change, they may also end their own life in a guaranteed, humane way.

Currently, whilst the lack of legal assisted suicide in the UK is said mainly to protect the right to life, its absence seems more seriously to infringe upon the right to life which is powerfully intertwined with the right to liberty of conscience and action. Whilst the risks of legalising it upon the right to life seem slim and not substantiated by the Swiss case, the humanitarian inadequacies caused by not legalising it are evident. In Pratchett's programme, we witnessed two men paying £10 000 to travel to Switzerland in order to receive a gentle death of their own choosing. This expensive option is not available to those who are less wealthy, and a democracy surely has to embrace a democracy of dying, as well as of life choices, and allow anyone regardless of income or character, to have that opportunity available. If our National Health Service embodies the right to universal care, those same values of universality - regardless of social status - ought to be extended to the right to death as well. Indeed, it is precisely because we have a supportive, public health system in which individuals will be treated as long as possible, regardless of their predicted outcome or their ability to pay, that their decision to opt out of that healthcare support can be made freely. Their decision to die will be determined not by a guilty feeling that the state is unwilling to continue to treat them, but by their overwhelming wish to die despite knowing the healthcare opportunities that are available for them.

Again, I understand those campaigners who argue that the state should not imply that it would like actively to help the terminally sick or disabled to die, because this suggests to the disabled or sick person that they are an unvalued nuisance, that the state would prefer to kill those whose ongoing burden is too costly. Those who invoke Nazi genocide as the logical extension of state-sanctioned dying are clearly going too far, but I can appreciate the principle behind such views.

Nevertheless, again on balance it is preferable for the state to protect the individual's right to self determination. In Pratchett's programme last night, both the men who killed themselves did so against the wishes of their families. The pressure on the suffering self to live through that suffering in the hopes of a cure or continued happiness, is immense, deriving from deep-rooted - and admirable - cultural values of heroism against the odds. There is also a selfish aspect for families, a fear of seeing their loved ones go peacefully with themselves left behind to cope with the more difficult bereavement and loss. But these external pressures, which the two charismatic men in the programme happened to be able to resist, are again why the state needs to make available the possibility of assisted dying. The fact that families, quite naturally, may tend to pressure the individual not to die, ought to be balanced by alternatives which enshrine the right of the individual to stick to their own view against the wishes or opinions of the majority immediately around them. Such an alternative can only exist at a dispassionate, non-familial, state level.

The worst case I can imagine is where someone is no longer in a position to kill themselves, but the family refuses to assist them in their desire to die. The state regulates how families must behave after the death of someone who can quite literally no longer speak for themselves; families must respect the wishes, will, financial settlements of the dead person. But the state does not at present protect the right of an individual who is similarly voiceless and helpless in the immediate run up to their death. The moment one is dead, paradoxically one has more state-protected rights to exercise their free will than in the moment before.

This knowledge is what leads to the dissatisfying scenario we have at present, where individuals with degenerative neurological diseases - such as Pratchett's own Alzheimer's - are forced to enact their own deaths before they might ordinarily be ready, whilst they are still cognitively and physically capable of doing so. Fearing that there may be no family members or doctors willing and permitted to help them die after they become too ill to express their own desires, people take their own lives before it may be their ideal time. All deaths which end early, in car accidents or illness, in degenerative diseases or in suicide, offend our sense of the natural time to die. By legalising assisted dying, the state does have the opportunity to step in and prevent one type of premature death. Ensuring that people can choose when and how to die will help to ensure they will only go when the time is right for them.

People should be able to choose when and how they die, regardless of their ability to pay; they should be free to choose between ongoing, free healthcare leading to a natural death, or the immediate release of assisted suicide. In the twentieth century, the maturing humanitarianism of the British state developed universal welfare and healthcare; in the twenty-first century, it is time to recognise that the state is sophisticated and adult enough to facilitate a democracy of dying, as well as of life.

Labels: assisted suicide, Choosing to Die, euthanasia, Politics

It is twelve months since the coalition came to power, but on this anniversary, I feel that this also marks my own political coming-of-age, from my more naive kind of adolescence.


My teenage years correspond with the election of New Labour in 1997, the first major political event that I understood would affect me directly. Before then, all the turbulence I had lived through as a younger person - Thatcherism, the collapse of the USSR, Black Wednesday - had been filtered through my family. My abiding memory of the coup against Boris Yeltsin, for example, is not of the event itself. It was of accompanying Granddad to buy a newspaper, something he never ordinarily did. I felt it was important, because he must have done; but I did not discuss the events in Russia in any informed way. I knew of the recession of the early 1990s not through statistics about inflation, but because my dad had bought our family's first computer one week, then was out of a job the next. By contrast, in 1997, I remember sitting on the school bus listening to the news reports on the radio, and knowing that something had happened that would alter my world directly; I also knew that come the next election, I would by then be old enough to vote.

Beginning the New Labour years as a teenager, though, I recognise now that this period corresponded with a kind of idealistic immaturity on my part, lasting until the coalition's election last year. Over the past decade, I shouted at the news on a daily basis, angered by New Labour's failings on the environment, on PFI, on taxation; I blustered at the affected charm of Tony Blair, and the machinations of spin; and, of course, I marched against tuition fees and the Iraq war. There had to be a different way, an alternative, a party that would govern by principles of fairness, not the populism of the focus group.

So when I came of voting age, I turned repeatedly to the Liberal Democrats, with the belief that they were a party founded upon ideals that I agreed with: utilitarian, progressive, secularist. The more academic I became through university, the more I felt their methods were not dissimilar to mine: thinking through the prism of evidence rather than ideology, conscious of history but not blinded by it. The evidence of the present says that our possession of nuclear weapons is no longer necessary, and I welcomed the Liberals' courage in wanting to do away with Trident, rather than maintaining it as the last vestiges of our Imperial prowess. The evidence showed rehabilitation was better than prison, and this is what the Liberal Democrats stood for, not some Tory right-wing fantasy that criminals are somehow genetically different to the rest of society and so should be locked away for a jolly long time. The Liberal Democrats seemed to aim for government by reason, not by retrospect.

Yet throughout this time, for all my loud antagonism to New Labour and preference for the Liberal Democrats, the constant whisper in the background was that no party offered a genuine alternative. I was told that there was no difference between the left and right wing. Every party governs from the centre. The Tories too would have done much the same on Iraq, on fees, on the privatisation of healthcare.

It now appears that the whispers spoke a truth that ran deeper than I then suspected. With the coalition government, it seems that not only are the sides of red and blue actually two shades of grey; the yellow of the liberal Democrats turns out to be politically monochrome as well. This has been the first, nasty lesson I have learnt. In our area last week, there were no elections for local government. Had there been, though, I would certainly not have ticked the Liberal Democrat box as I have in the past, in what I previously considered to be a thoughtful, genuinely alternative vote.

I have learnt more advanced lesson as well. The divisions between the three parties are ideologically and practically very slight. But I reflect now that precisely because of this, I should have read the New Labour years more patiently and moderately than I did, and thought more about some of the subtleties to be found in the ebb and flow of politics within a government's time in office. In a way typical of adolescents, I felt everything during those years of my political maturation must be cast in black and white. PFI in healthcare was a bad thing and should be stopped. Tuition fees were wrong.  School league tables were a farce. Green policies were trumpeted but never implemented. There are some aspects of the New Labour years which, even now, I still see in such absolute terms. With the Gulf War, I was told, I was either with the Blair-Bush axis, or against them. I was and remain against.

But I now recognise that even if the parties themselves had few wholesale ideological differences during the New Labour years, there were still patches and shades where different colours did come through. New Labour did develop the Sure Start programme to help social mobility from a young age, a programme the Conservatives are slowly eroding. PFI may have put the public health system in a devilish relationship with the private sector, but new hospitals did get built. Class sizes did go down, teacher numbers did go up, education did improve. Patients continued to die in hospital corridors, but patients also were increasingly likely to survive cancer and surgery, had to wait less time for a minor hip operation or knee replacement.

As historians will no doubt tell us in hefty books to come, the thirteen years of New Labour's rule were a political epoch. It is one which aptly mirrors my own growth: I began those years as a teenager, I emerged on the cusp of middle age. I realise now, then, that politics is for the long term, and that across that term ideals have to suffer, get bent or twisted. The media, operating on a daily cycle, are always exposing the hypocrisy and failures of the immediate moment; no daily news headline runs with the words, "On sudden reflection, over the last two years..." What matters most in politics, though, is not the disputable headlines of the day-to-day, but the definitive changes of the year-to-year.

This is the lesson I have learnt, then: political patience. Whether my patience will last over the next four years of the coalition so that I emerge ready to vote Liberal again at the next election we will have to wait and see. At this stage I somehow doubt it. Living and working in a university environment, my sector is crumbling into dust under the misguided hammer of the coalition's policies. I doubt that the edifice of higher education will have been sufficiently restored over the next four years, over the long term.

Labels: coalition, Politics

Sometimes, for all that the government tries to spin and control the release of news to the media, two stories coincide to reveal its underlying direction.

Today, Stephen Hester, chief executive of state-owned bank RBS, receives a pay settlement worth around £7.7 million, assuming he meets share price targets (which he will, assuming the stock market continues naturally to trend upwards, something entirely beyond his control).

Today, a review recommends that police pay be cut, whilst the Association of Chief Police Officers warns of up to 28 000 job losses. The latter is likely to be scaremongering. But, the maths speaks for itself.

Front-line police starting salaries are £22 000. Stephen Hester earns £7.7 million. That makes Stephen Hester worth the work of 350 police officers. Can we, the taxpayer, can they, the government, really believe that one banker is worth that number of people working to preserve social order?

Labels: Politics

Further to my discussion of the fallout upon the arts from the explosive Browne review of university tuition fees in UK Higher Education, there is an interesting debate going on in the US Chronicle of Higher Education, sparked by English Professor Robert Watson, about whether the arts and humanities actually make money for universities (subscription only Chronicle article here; free reprint from UCLA here). This debate may well have lessons for the UK.

In the US, high student tuition fees have long been a feature of the education system. And, with the recession and budget cuts, funding streams are likewise being focused on business-friendly courses, and diverted from arts faculties. The view of the President of UCLA bears uncanny similarities to the tone of Browne's report, suggesting that the arts must be sacrificed for more applied subjects:

Many of our, if I can put it this way, businesses are in good shape. We're doing very well there. Our hospitals are full, our medical business, our medical research, the patient care. So, we have this core problem: Who is going to pay the salary of the English department? We have to have it. Who's going to pay it in sociology, in the humanities? And that's where we're running into trouble.

As I pointed out in my response to Browne last week, there is plenty of evidence that arts and humanities graduates enter work and, armed with allegedly useless degrees, actually contribute a great deal to the economy. Thus if universities have a role in wider economic life, arts and humanities departments merit public investment, regardless of the local fiscal demands of staff within universities. However, what struck me in the US debate were the details about how much arts faculties actually contribute to universities' internal economies.

Responding to his President, Robert N. Watson, Professor of English at UCLA, did some sums for his university:

Based on the latest annual student-credit hours, fee levels, and total general-fund expenditures, the humanities [at UCLA] generate over $59 million in student fees, while spending only $53.5 million (unlike the physical sciences, which came up several million dollars short in that category). The entire teaching staff of Writing Programs, which is absolutely essential to UCLA's educational mission, has been sent firing notices, even though the spreadsheet shows that program generating $4.3 million dollars in fee revenue, at a cost of only $2.4 million.

This corresponds with evidence at the national level:

Of the 21 units at the University of Washington, the humanities and, to a lesser degree, the social sciences are the only ones that generate more tuition income than 100 percent of their total expenditure. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, recently cited a University of Illinois report showing that a large humanities department like English produces a substantial net profit, whereas units such as engineering and agriculture run at a loss. The widely respected Delaware Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity shows the same pattern.

Useful courses such as medicine are not propping up liberal arts courses that are quaint accessories in a market-driven university. Quite the opposite, in fact: with their comparatively low infrastructure overheads, arts courses actually make money for their universities, making more from tuition fee income than science and medicine courses can from business spin-offs or research grants.

Given that Browne's higher education funding shake-up will approximate the US system, we can expect a similar scenario to pertain in the UK. Thus the case of the US should provide us with a pertinent warning: to lose public funding for arts courses now, in favour of science-based degrees, as Browne recommends, will be to risk the closure of departments that in future could actually generate income for universities.

There are other similarities too. In the UK, higher education looks set to suffer around 75% cuts from its block funding grant from HEFCE. Because the sciences can secure more funding from research grants, much of the HEFCE money goes on supporting less research intensive courses, often within the arts and humanities. Thus it is these courses that will suffer most as vice-chancellors tighten their belts, especially if there is a lag between the HEFCE funding cut and the increased tuition fees that should make up the difference. Now replace HEFCE for "discretionary budget" in Watson's report, and the parallels between the US and UK are clear:

Yet because the discretionary budget in humanities goes almost entirely for teaching staff, across-the-board cuts hit our instruction especially hard. The dean of humanities' office at UCLA warned a few months ago that the proposed budget would require programs in this division — already the leanest in staff per faculty — to fire most of their lecturers and teaching assistants, making our curriculum unsustainable.

In quoting the above, I am aware that I seem to be walking headlong into a trap. If public funding of universities is to be slashed, and if tuition fees from popular subjects like English can actually make money for universities, surely this is the best possible argument for raising fees and enabling a higher education marketplace. If students really want to study English at £7000 a year, let them. The English professor can keep his job, supported by his students, whilst public research funding can be targeted at those subjects with the most obvious public benefits, namely science, technology, engineering and medicine.

However, the example of the US illustrates precisely my core point about the Browne review: that to see universities through the eyes of the businessman is to risk ignoring those more subterranean features that make arts and humanities degrees attractive to students, to employers, and to the wider economy. Once a degree programme in the arts and humanities is slashed and burned in funding cuts, it will be unlikely to rise from the ashes. Thus if we absolutely must to enter a higher education marketplace and indebt our young for the basic privilege of learning, we have to make sure that we maintain an open mind with regards to the types of courses we make available to them. As I said in my response to the Browne review, it is naive to assume that the arts perform no economic function in the UK. Likewise, the UCLA President appears to have automatically - and wrongly - assumed that arts faculties prop up the sciences, when the reverse is the case. If university and government leaders simply follow business hunches without looking at the evidence, they will cause UK universities to eliminate arts courses which could actually prove popular and moneymaking in a higher education marketplace, and which are already significant contributors to the wider economy.

Labels: Browne review, English Literature, Politics, University Life