End Of Year Awards | Page 4 | Fab forum

mr. Sun king coming together said:

Joe and Skye's votes (should they participate) will be worth 3 points

My picks are worth 2 

And your picks are worth 1

There's been a lot of civil unrest in the UK in the last few weeks, ahead of a parliamentary vote to remove a cap on fees (it got passed this week). The crux of the disagreement was because one of the ruling coalition parties here (Liberal Democrats) campaigned during the May general election to abolish fees altogether, but they turned out to be a bunch of principle-free hypocrites once they gained office (they're the minority party in the coalition and have no mandate to do what they're doing – it's their leaders who pushed through the changes).

It's pretty shameful behaviour, and I support the (non-violent) protests. Fees of £9,000 a year will counter up an 80% slashing of the teaching budget of universities, moving the burden of funding higher education from the state to the student. It's not a debt I'd like to have accumulated to go with my (pretty worthless, as it happened) degree, and I feel for anyone graduating with that level of debt.

What it boils down to, though, is that the UK's current right-wing political leaders are hell-bent on shrinking the state and putting everything in the hands of private companies. The net result is normally higher prices, worse services and a lot of very rich people profiting from something that could be funded more cheaply and efficiently through general taxation (or, in this case, partly through a graduate tax). We saw it in the 1980s and it's coming around again – once they're done with higher education they'll move on to health care, transport etc, and there's no way back once it's all in the hands of the private sector.

That's how I see it, anyway. Apologies for going off-topic.