Heffer.. you read it.. LOl…

If Cameron does as he suggests he will then we will have a very different political landscape after he leaves office. It appears to be some form of Americanisation, where voters are empowered to make decisions more often than choosing their MP once every 4/5 years.

My preference, in light of the recent expenses scandal, is the recall mechanism. This is the same principle that saw Gray Davis reelected as governor of California in 2002, only to lose the confidence of the voters in 2003 and allow the election of governor Schwarzenegger. Had we had similar mechanisms in this country you can be sure there would be far more ‘victims’ of the expenses scandal and we would have had dozens of recall elections held across the country.

I’m not entirely sure where he stands on many issues, but he has plenty of ideas for political reform that I absolutely welcome.

“But let us not forget that a re-elected Brown administration would do more or less the same, anyway.”

I disagree.

But first, let me qualify.

As regards the past, your analysis of New Labour is correct. It has been woefully inadequate in actualising a “leftist” alternative, and it did indeed perpetuate the Thatcher settlement, arguably (as you imply) bringing it to its apex.

But the future could well be different. As Will Hutton argued in last week’s Observer, Brown actually gets economics. He knows that cuts in a recession (beyond what is absolutely necessary to avoid defaulting loans and losing credence with international credit markets) will make the recession *worse*.

Cameron – and his team – preach voodoo economics. They want to cut because they would slash the state in the good times. The recession is an excuse for them to slash away. They will make the recession worse in the process. Brown, however, would probably not.

The irony is, after 12 years of New Labour bullshit, nobody can believe that Brown might actually better than Cameron in terms of economic recovery, if nothing else. This, incidentally, is entirely Brown’s fault to a large degree.

More thoughts on this: http://thebadconscience.com/2009/07/29/letting-the-tories-win/

And perhaps the most significant thing of all is that our Dave (who is a Good Thing, being, like all persons of taste and quality, a Charlie Haden fan) cannot name a single execrable and reactionary thing that their Dave will do in office that a re-elected Brown would not…

I think Heffer el at are deliberately trying to get his, and his audiences, blood up with a ‘there all Reds’ bit of Right Wing paranoia. The truth is, Cameron will not perform anything like the way in Government that he does in opposition. Either he will have a ‘change of heart’ or he will be removed, without to much hassle.

Call me Dave was elected because he was young, had nice hair, was extremely rich and reminded the rank and file of their grandsons. Once elected he turned on that same core vote with a vengeance. He gave a fuck about the environment, he wanted ‘compassionate Conservatism’ and he intended to stand up to big business. In other words, the very things the pissed soaked, rancid blue rinsers hate. Have we all forgotten about how much he was hated almost as soon as he became leader? Have we forgetting how the rank and file turned on him whilst the Tories were flat-lining in the polls?

Once he had softened the face of the party, brought a more youthful look, a bow to the ‘pink vote’ here and a bit of judiciously applied greenwash and viola! The new model Tory Party up and running for the new decade. Most of all, he had two things;

A lurch to the Right. Dave would have reverted back to flim-flam man for a multi-national and out of Politics had it not been for a mixture of his ‘cut inheritance tax speech’ and Brown’s bottle going (seems a long time ago).

And the collapse of the economy.

Had the Labour Party had a lead by now, Dave would have been history.

The Tory voters and activists are quite happy with Cameron leading them because they are screaming ahead in the polls. The greenwash has gone and the ‘nice’ things are back in the appropriate boxes, but the seething Tory underbelly is still there. Muted response to the expenses scandal, while Labour got a mauling, the Coulston affair not even moved the needle on the dial. The Tories want to win the election by hook or by crook. Ask yourselves this question have you met a Tory voter who believes in Global Warming? Either in real life or the ‘bloggersphere’ (‘cyberspace’, so 1990s)? If so, they are very few and far between. Or compassionate Conservatism for that matter? Try the Daily Mail comments section on what they feel about life in general. They haven’t gone away, they just don’t express their views out in public forums too often.

Down the pub, for example? ‘Yeah, I would vote for Cameron, just as long as he keeps his promises on the gap between rich and poor an his commitment to International development for that matter’

No? Not a conversation I hear either. Tax cuts (income tax) for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor is what I hear, Cameron better deliver or he will be ‘spending time with his family come the Autumn.

Jimbo, whilst your post is a bit too all-over-the-place and the idea that Cameron will be out on his ear if he doesn’t proceed to make the tax and benefit system even more unequal within 6 months is silly, you have some good points.

Then again:

“Ask yourselves this question have you met a Tory voter who believes in Global Warming?”

Yeah I’ve met a fair few who are pretty concerned about it. And Tim Yeo, former Tory Minister and on the environmental audit committee, msot certainly thinks that climate change is a massive threat.

I’m not fan of the Tories, but work a little harder…

I think I am with the consensus here – a Tory govt won’t be that different in most ways. The fruit-cakes on the right are about as representative as the nutters on the left.

Europe is their big problem though. Even if what they are saying is popular, it sounds crazy.

I think the bourgeousie constitute a little more than “a minority of wealthy people”.

I will be satisfied if he brings ID cards and related projects to a halt, if only temporarily. The economics isn’t going to make all that much difference. Whether the budget slashing comes with relish or with pain, it will happen, Labour or Tory. And the numbers won’t be that different in the end.

Heffer’s premise is analogous to those on the left who argue that what we have seen over the last 12 years has not been a Labour government. Of course it was; what else can you conceivably call a government entirely made up of Labour politicians?

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, shits like a duck – it’s a dog?

The only thing that New Labour policies had in common with THE Labour Pay is he name – without the “New” part!

I don’t know if you are as old as am, Dave – or younger, but one thing I remember is hat a Labour party would never have apexed Thatcher policies. And Blair/Brown have done that – with the foreseen consequences.

We have to give Brown slight amount of leeway in that the world economy went tits-up and you can’t blame him for that – well not all of it.

Brown and Blair advocated all those fucking taxs cuts – Dave-boy will do the same – one problem – with all those tax cuts you have to start borrowing, the cash begins to run out. So, from there on in you have to look at some fancy accounting to make the books look good – and they did for quite a few years – no more boom and bust.

Brown and Blair wanted and still want a service economy – and all those that can’t work in that economy to flip burgers or anything else, the Tories will carry on Purnell’s idiotic policy review and will send out of work engineers to work at ASDA to stock shelves.

Backing The Labour party is a commendable thing – backing New Labour is working your arse off for a bunch of idiots who are – in effect that duck that wasn’t mentioned.

@3: “As regards the past, your analysis of New Labour is correct. It has been woefully inadequate in actualising a “leftist” alternative, and it did indeed perpetuate the Thatcher settlement, arguably (as you imply) bringing it to its apex.”

“Inadequate” seems an unnecessarily negative word, as New Labour was not meant to be a particularly “leftist” alternative but an electable and mainly centrist platform. Should we consider Google “inadequate” for not making cars? I’d love it if Google made cars, but perhaps they should be judged against what they actually set out to do.

“Brown actually gets economics. He knows that cuts in a recession (beyond what is absolutely necessary to avoid defaulting loans and losing credence with international credit markets) will make the recession *worse*.”

Economics is a dismal science. I say that as someone who has great respect and affection for the study of economics, but it’s true. Very little is “known” in economics, at least as other disciplines use the term. I believe it would be more accurate to say that Mr Brown “knows of a well-regarded theory which says…”, or in short, “Mr. Brown hopes …”. We may look back and laud him for his efforts, or denigrate him for merely encouraging stagflation. There are examples of spending during recessions working, and examples of the same action not working. ‘Getting economcs’ does not give him, or anyone else, a sure vision of the future.

And yet look at New Labour it’s in a mess, I was informed by the TUC yesterday that Labour is to hand over welfare payments to a group of insurance companies, they will be handed the NI stamp to invest to use this to pay welfare, so removing this from the government, according to people this will allow the government to wash it’s hands of thinks like pensions, because you will need to have insurance. Brown came out with a cracker Insurance is what will drive the UK in the financial sector which will make the UK great.

Fiancé is what Drives Blair and Brown making money through money is all thats left, we cannot even build a power station anymore according to brown we are not trained , so money will make the world go around, if that the reason for Labour then why not invite the masters of money to run the country, the Tories . Are the Tories turning red or even pink well if you place them next to New labour they are alsmost blood red.

@9

The UK population also effectively asked for a service economy, because it has brought about higher average wages, and because we no longer have the skill set in place to return to an economy based on manufacturing and engineering – because those same people don’t want to train to do them. I’m going to hazard a guess and suggest you don’t have engineering quals yourself (I am a scientist and have worked as an engineer, but now am a labour market specialist, so I have a certain expertise).

We might hanker back to days when we were dependent on manufacturing, and I think everyone agrees that we’ve gone too far to a service economy, and we need a vibrant production sector to expand somewhat, but just ask the Japanese and Germans how a greater dependence on manufacturing export has helped them in this recession.

I don’t want to get into another dreary debate about engineering skills, partly because I’ve been involved in too many STEM initiatives recently, partly because this is the wrong thread, but mainly because certain opinionated posters will probably show up and start waffling on.

Surely this is confirmation of the two cheeks of the same arse line. Chuka Umunna on CiF let slip about his Tory friends who he holidays with. It’s the professional political class that has emerged, with bugger all to distinguish between ‘em. The ‘old’ left has been usurped (despite being more attuned to the public’s attitudes) and I reckon the ‘old’ right die-hard Tories are being marginalised too, with a more paternalistic (in appearance : one of New Lab’s worst legacies, among many bad ones has been the elevation of surface over substance) Tory party coming in. Of course they’re all bleeding Thatcherite.

Oh, and as for Brown ‘getting’ economics as Hutton curiously insists, he’s bound to be right occasionally-even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Personally, I don’t think his current position is correct (apparently neither do Mandy or Darling…). By Hutton’s logic, if I stockpile highly flammable materials in my house in a thoroughly careless, unsafe way, and then spend my time playing with matches, when the whole edifice goes up in flames, I should be congratulated for then saying, “Ooh,lummee, look, a fire. Must get the fire brigade out. Some hoses squirting water, y’know something along those lines, ought to do. Let’s set up a commission to explore the variety of hoses that are out there, to report back to a panel, which will then make provisional recommendations to a special committee.”.

Hmmm.

Is this not a juncture when the word ‘post-industrial’ should enter the conversation?

Britain didn’t and doesn’t have an option about becoming a “service” (tertiary-dominated) economy. To have an industrial revolution (we had ours quite a long time ago now, after all) you have to educate your populace to a higher level than when you’re subsistence/mercantilist agrarians. Higher education for the hoi-polloi leads to higher expectations among them, which leads to a self-bootstrapping process.

As industrialisation continues and other nations industrialise behind you on the curve, the fact that your whole population has now been educated to a point where it has realistic aspirations toward human dignity has a directly chartable effect. It pushes you out of competition in the primary and secondary industrial sectors, by pricing you out of it; places that can still exploit the workers as badly as our plutocrats’ ancestors did in the 1830s will always be cheaper and thus more effective at industrial production and the economics of scale.

The only rational response to this is to educate as much of your population as possible to the point that they are able to actually realise “middle-class” expectations. That makes a thriving knowledge economy [1] theoretically possible. It does, however, have consequences; it means you (as one of the haves) must accept that they (the have-nots) are real people. The Tories are not famous for this level of intellectual honesty.

As a result, when our industry was firstly dying and then being actively euthanised by Thatcher’s hired men and troopers and by Scargill’s stupidity, we were in the process of moving away from universal education and health policies towards the re-stratification of society into those with prospects and those without. This recession is going to highlight how absolutely fucking stupid that was: a resounding triumph of short-termism and privileged entitlement over common sense and principle. Unfortunately, this story is fairly typical. Britain is the miner’s canary of industrialism; we hit every pocket of toxic economics first and which way we fall tells those who come behind us how to not make that mistake. The number of times that our political classes have avoided the mistake can be enumerated on the fingers of one foot.

We are not an industrial nation. We need to stop pretending it is something we could be again.

[1] “Service economy”:- adding “value” without actually making or doing anything but powerpoint slides and really big lunches. This business model is otherwise known as “PFI Consultancy” scaled up into an entire national economic base. The risks inherent in doing this without actually preparing your populace for innovation should be fairly clear after 12 years of New Labour: the suits get vastly rich and your service delivery ends up ethically and financially bankrupt.

John Q,

The first half of your analysis is spot on, but the second half seems to contradict it. I agree it was both necessary and, in effect, inevitable, that we would move to a more educated population and that it would have corresponding effects on those who were unfortunate enough not to find themselves in that position.

If I get what you’re saying, then you’re arguing that, whilst presiding over the transformation of our economy, the Tories did not do anything to help those that they knew would lose out. If that’s the case, then I entirely agree.

As an aside, John, you yourself are part of the service economy, and whilst you may be advertising the quality of your provender (are your lunches really big?), I think you do many parts of the many industries associated with the service economy a disservice. Not all of it is shafted at the moment.

Ken @16:

Thank you. Last couple of times I brought up post-industrialism that part of my comment was ignored in the subsequent threads.

If I get what you’re saying, then you’re arguing that, whilst presiding over the transformation of our economy, the Tories did not do anything to help those that they knew would lose out. If that’s the case, then I entirely agree.

Not really. I’m saying that the Tories in the 80s started a mode of thought, which said ‘only those who are already bringing up their children as middle class by 1985 are worth bothering with; anyone who hasn’t made it by then is clearly inferior stock”. This is because they really do think in terms of intrinsic differentials of personal validity depending on how much of a thieving bastard your great-great-grandad was.

It became apparent that extending a real education to all children at the national expense, i.e. the only thing capable of bringing us into the Internet era with a sustainable economic model, would take too much money away from the things the Tories wanted to spend money on; themselves, their children, quangos, business bailouts (after all, nationalisation is bad) and so on. So they redefined public works as ‘service delivery’, using the language and mentalities of free market economics. Problem there being that free market economies do not deliver services, they sell things. Public services are supposed to have been paid for already; you put in money, you get out services free to all at point of delivery. In the market, you put in money and you get out more money. The last two British regimes have both attempted to run public service like a business and have spectacularly failed; because you can’t.

The cohort born between 1965 and 1970 had the highest prospects, and delivery, of upward mobility of any UK generation ever. No cohort since has been presented with such opportunity. These are the people who are the parents of Generations X & Y, frequently lambasted as “not wanting to work for anything”. Guess why; their parents were taught to think that they rose on merit, when in fact they surfed a short-term, artificial economic bubble sustained by North Sea fossil fuels, bloody stupid privatisation/de-regulation, and an artificially inflated land market boom.

The creation of the communications market as it now exists was real wealth creation; new things, needing making and doing, that created actual wealth. And most of that went to places other than Britain in spite of the fact that Tim Berners-Lee was one of the people who made it happen. You’ll notice that he was working at CERN in Switzerland; an economy that had to go heavily into the tertiary sector a very long time ago, and which as a result understands why you spend more on your kids than your army.

Basically, as Penny Red recently described in detail, that cohort and their political masters (Thatcher, Blair) stole their material success from their children.

As an aside, John, you yourself are part of the service economy, and whilst you may be advertising the quality of your provender (are your lunches really big?), I think you do many parts of the many industries associated with the service economy a disservice. Not all of it is shafted at the moment.

Well, we do have an “Irish Portion” button on the till for regulars we like.

Okay, two serious things: one, I was clearly referencing a trope of modern corporate culture that is familiar to anyone who reads Dilbert. Consultancy, particularly management consultancy, is mostly a fraud. PFI consultancies are actually a fraud.

Secondly: I work in the domestic service industry. That is, I provide services to people who actually live here. That is at most 30% of the tertiary industrial sector; basing a national economy on tertiary industry means being an international business consultancy.

You provide experts who you lease out; you have a nation full of experts because you took the capital your country accumulated by being first on the industrial ladder and churned it into educating your entire populace as hard as possible in math, science, engineering, communications and business skills. You put all the money you possibly could into ensuring that you had no underclass to pay for in the future, that secondary industry workers were re-trained and re-employed, that all regions received ample local investment, that you had the smartest and most future-minded population on the planet, that you had all the technology start-ups you could possibly found being created by your people.

… Oh, wait, no, we spent that money on a whole bunch of other stuff, mostly typified in one way or another by Gulf War II, the deregulation of the banking industry and the epic bail-out that has been poured directly into private pockets due to the ‘too big to fail’ trope. As a result, none of the above is true of Britain, and that can be directly laid at the door of Thatcher’s education policies and their continuance by Major and Blair. You don’t bring in Uni tuition fees if you want to remove the class barrier for qualified careers.

When we talk about a national economy based on tertiary industry, that means we’re talking very specifically about exporting knowledge and expertise in order to import real things which the people further back on the knowledge curve are mass-producing, cheaper than we could make them. Play your strengths; you’ve been this l33t for longer than them, leverage that sophistication to create worth as well as value.

When we talk about the domestic service industries such as the hospitality trade that I work in, we’re talking about supplying services to the people who live here; the people who do the knowledge exporting, and are therefore able to pay for the services I provide. What I do is not an export: you can’t have a national economy that exports nothing unless you are self sufficient, and we haven’t been that since 1700.

John, I agree with much of your analysis (just to reiterate, my expertise is the labour market, and specifically the labour market for graduates).

This:

“When we talk about a national economy based on tertiary industry, that means we’re talking very specifically about exporting knowledge and expertise in order to import real things which the people further back on the knowledge curve are mass-producing, cheaper than we could make them. Play your strengths; you’ve been this l33t for longer than them, leverage that sophistication to create worth as well as value.”

is an absolutely spot-on explanation of what we should be doing. However, much though I don’t actually like rather a lot of the financial services industry from an ideological point of view, even those bits actually do that, and, in fact, we were (and are) rather good at it until (or despite) some people got carried away by their own cleverness and greed and made a pig’s ear of things. And the rest of the world sees that we are rather good and innovative at it (currently a double-edged sword, mind), and it’s likely to be a cornerstone of our economy as it has been since well before a bunch of German merchants in the 13th century seeking to establish an international trading monopoly saw London as the perfect place to start (The Hanseatic League, thanks for asking.)

This: “You don’t bring in Uni tuition fees if you want to remove the class barrier for qualified careers” in particular is the thorniest of thorny issues.

Yes, we did squander the money that should have been used to fuel the necessary expansion of higher education. The Tories did get round to doing it, belatedly and in the teeth of opposition from their own party, many of whom could never accept losing the ideological battles of the 60s that led to the creation of the rebricks. It is important to remember the first formal participation targets were set by John Major’s government after 1992, and that New Labour were not, and never were, the architects of current HE expansion.

However, that money being squandered, and the expansion still having been necessary, how then was it to be funded?

An important point to remember is that we send the smallest proportion of our young people to higher education of any developed English-speaking country in the world.

“The cohort born between 1965 and 1970 had the highest prospects, and delivery, of upward mobility of any UK generation ever. No cohort since has been presented with such opportunity. ”

Sadly, it is starting to appear that you are right.

There are quite a few people both in the current administration and, actually, in the Opposition, who would agree with pretty much all you’re saying and want to try to do something about it. The question is, having screwed up a bunch of opportunities, how do they do it?

Because, politically speaking, the argument for greater skills in the economy has nowhere near been won, perversely enough. Not when you have a powerful body of opinion stating that we send too many people to university, not when people still fervently oppose diplomas or similar workbased qualifications, and not when the CBI and similar organisations think that their paying for skills training for people to work for them is an unacceptable burden to place on business.

In short, how do we convince the mainstream of the Tory party, that today’s young people deserve the chance to become more skilled? Because they’re the ones we have to get at – yes, lambast Labour for not getting things in order (although the main mistakes were made before they arrived), but whilst it’s cathartic, that ship’s sailed.

Ken @18:

My academic training was in history; hence my inclination to take the long view, and my willingness to discard the rhetoric of industrial politics when analysing post-industrial realities.

However, much though I don’t actually like rather a lot of the financial services industry from an ideological point of view, even those bits actually do that, and, in fact, we were (and are) rather good at it until (or despite) some people got carried away by their own cleverness and greed and made a pig’s ear of things.

While this is true, it’s true to only a limited extent. There was always going to be a limit to how much we could leverage “value enhancements” which were, pragmatically, completely fictitious. Vince Cable, who should know, has recently referred to marketeering as functionally equivalent to playing the geegees. He’s right, and anyone who’s been paying attention since the frickin’ Tulip Boom in Amsterdam has known this. (Hat-tip for the Hanseatic League reference, btw)

How many people have pre-existing capital accumulations necessary to be a significant player in the stock market? Not many. That’s not a basis for a national economy; that’s a recipe for entrenched plutocracy. Hey look…

It is important to remember the first formal participation targets were set by John Major’s government after 1992, and that New Labour were not, and never were, the architects of current HE expansion.

What expansion?

Re-branding the polytechnics was propaganda, not improvement. The point about sending more people to university is that it uses the traditional definition of “University”: i.e. somewhere that teaches you how to think, research, innovate and improve, not somewhere that teaches you how to apply practical and thoroughly understood techniques in a known field. That’s what polytechnics are for; you make electricians (rather than electronic engineers) in them. Polys are not, in any other country, cut-rate universities; they’re a higher education system with a distinct purpose and techniques.

In order to achieve what I’m talking about we needed to be investing in education to the extent that at least 60% of the population was receiving the kind and quality of education that is nowadays associated with post-graduates studies at strong universities, not the kind that is associated with USA “colleges”: which is what we’re actually doing. Don’t buy the rebranding; that was a cover story all along. Look at the things taught, how they’re taught, and how they’re resourced. Look at the distinction between a focus on knowing answers to questions (vocational) and a focus on framing and answering questions (academic).

To do this, we needed, and will still need, to elevate the basic assumption of education for all in our society until it includes teaching most of our total number of people how to think things that are genuinely new. The problem with the innovation race is if you pause to trade on what you already know, you lose. I recently described the determinants of civilisation conflict as these: what do you know, how well do you learn, how fast do you spread the word. With the Internet we can do the last one better than any previous generations. However, we are not anything like good enough at step two to sustain post-industrialism.

The underlying social truth is that the changes in education policy 1984-2008 are an explicit attempt to reverse the work which had doubled the number of people getting an actual university education. They were a knowing attempt to maintain a functionally stratified social order which could paint itself egalitarian for the press releases. And then they started expecting us to pay; I got the last generation of actual grants, and had I had to borrow (this was before tuition fees, remember) I couldn’t have gone to Uni at all.

There are quite a few people both in the current administration and, actually, in the Opposition, who would agree with pretty much all you’re saying and want to try to do something about it. The question is, having screwed up a bunch of opportunities, how do they do it?

Radical priority shift. That’s really all there is to it. The people in charge have a vested interest in ensuring their children are the people in charge in 20 years. When we briefly had a functioning left wing in Britain, they tried to re-prioritize the nation and largely failed because they were still paying for World War II. We need a ruling body which cares about everyone’s kids, and not just those of the ‘civil’ middle classes and upwards: I believe Russel T. Davies recently made the point for around five hours.

Not when you have a powerful body of opinion stating that we send too many people to university, not when people still fervently oppose diplomas or similar workbased qualifications, and not when the CBI and similar organisations think that their paying for skills training for people to work for them is an unacceptable burden to place on business.

Once again, this is about sociological priorities. Businesses don’t want to have to pay wages at all, let alone realistic ones; profit margins would be so much higher if we could just own the workers as well as their work.

The Establishment want to stay established. Those at the centre of the Great Machine have a clear vested interest in sabotaging their own economy; provided they think short term. The children of the sixties stole prosperity from their own kids in the hopes the music wouldn’t stop too soon; well, the music stopped.

The only way to cause real improvement is by stopping people making short-term decisions. Speed of technological development is now sufficiently high that you can’t say “In 20 years, the next big thing will be…” and win. That’s how traditional capitalism frames long-term thinking.

Instead, I would propose this model: “In the next 150 years, one of two things will happen; either we will have a Malthusian catastrophe, planet-wide, which switches off the lights on the industrial revolution altogether, or we won’t. Assuming we don’t, economics is going to be ever-more dominated by knowledge and innovation versus efficiency of production, because of the progress of automation. Therefore, the only viable long-term strategy is educate everyone. And ideally, move all the industry into orbit, where power is cheap and you are not polluting your only viable biosphere.”

I still cling to my belief that we will wise up and avoid the catastrophe, but if Cameron and company get in without someone hitting them with a clue-stick, I’m buying some stocks of tin cans and a windmill.

In short, how do we convince the mainstream of the Tory party, that today’s young people deserve the chance to become more skilled? Because they’re the ones we have to get at – yes, lambast Labour for not getting things in order (although the main mistakes were made before they arrived), but whilst it’s cathartic, that ship’s sailed.

I hope I didn’t imply Labour had started this. Quite the reverse; Labour started the original attempt to bootstrap Britain into the 21st century, and the Tories and New Labour sabotaged it.

If you’re thinking about the next Tory administration; they’re largely irrelevant. Nothing they can do to affect the skill gap, not with 20% of the country under-educated, under-skilled, under-privileged and in an average of over 10k of debt each. There are still going to be over 2 million unemployed in five years time; the rich and the white-collar middle class (those with the educations Thatcher bought them with our money) will feel the recession is over inside the next two years. The rest of us will still be living in it for at least a further three; if nothing else, land prices haven’t fallen even close to far enough to bring realism to the UK land market.

In terms of getting some long-term thinking into government, the Tories and the Labour party are both irrelevant. One has no purpose or ideology besides “protect the children of the already-rich” and the other has no ideology at all any more. Neither has had an actual idea, as opposed to an ideology, since 1979.

We need alternatives; actual alternatives, if we are to avoid economic and social collapse. I am not convinced that we’re going to be offered the chance.

Do you know your history at all?
“the Stupid Party governed Britain in the twentieth century for more years than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ruled Russia”
Not True, count how many years the communist party were in power for, 72 years. The conservatives in power, 57 years.

John,

(By the way, from your autobiographical info, I suspect we’re very close in ages – no need to tell me about grants)

“What expansion?

Re-branding the polytechnics was propaganda, not improvement. The point about sending more people to university is that it uses the traditional definition of “University”: i.e. somewhere that teaches you how to think, research, innovate and improve, not somewhere that teaches you how to apply practical and thoroughly understood techniques in a known field. That’s what polytechnics are for; you make electricians (rather than electronic engineers) in them. Polys are not, in any other country, cut-rate universities; they’re a higher education system with a distinct purpose and techniques.”

I fear you’re straying into ideology rather than reality; whilst I’m strongly sympathetic to the former, I have to deal with the latter.

The sector expanded – by the definitions I work with, the polys were ‘higher education’ already – and the new universities got a lot bigger. The fact of the matter was that although polys were not considered by other countries to be cut-rate universities (arguable, by the way), they *were* here. Something had to be done about it, and at the same time we needed to radically increase the proportion of people with an HE-equivalent qualification. The solution was obvious – although it should not have, at the same time, eviscerated the training system for trade skills and techniques, which is what also happened.

“The underlying social truth is that the changes in education policy 1984-2008 are an explicit attempt to reverse the work which had doubled the number of people getting an actual university education. They were a knowing attempt to maintain a functionally stratified social order which could paint itself egalitarian for the press releases.”

Sorry John, I don’t agree. It simply doesn’t match up to any of the data or research I’ve done in the field, it doesn’t match to the experiences of the people I speak to or deal with, it doesn’t match to the experiences or beliefs of the people I work with charged with implementing policy, and it doesn’t match the ideology of those I know charged with formulating it. Unless I, and everyone I know in the field, is engaged in a colossal mass delusion (and whilst I am capable of deluding myself about a number of unlikely things – including that England might win the Ashes this year – I doubt that some of the very smart and experienced academics in the field I know are also similarly misguided), it isn’t true.

“We need alternatives; actual alternatives, if we are to avoid economic and social collapse. I am not convinced that we’re going to be offered the chance.”

I agree with most of that, but I don’t think the alternative is economic and social collapse, more the deeply unsatisfactory continuation of things going on much as before, along with the certain knowledge of opportunity wasted.

Although I disagree with some of what you’re saying, I admire the way you get it across, though, John. Pleasure debating with you.

@ 12

The UK population also effectively asked for a service economy, because it has brought about higher average wages, and because we no longer have the skill set in place to return to an economy based on manufacturing and engineering – because those same people don’t want to train to do them.

Wait…what!?

The UK population asked for a service economy? When – where?

As for brought about higher average wages – sweet fucking Jesus! Those fantastic wages, am I correct or incorrect in that the average debt burden is 10k in the UK? So you have all this wonderful wage-speak and people are in greater debt – lovely, where is that extra disposable income?

You have, as you should know because you are some sort of advice-giver to woeful grads – a great number of those grad coming out of uni and going into what work?

If we didn’t have the Thatcher idealism whereby the whole of the Tory voting public were scared to death that unionism would return – we could, with a bit of insight, have a sustainable industrial economy with the jobs that this would bring.

There is, as many a left-winger knows, a great social aspect to working. Friendships are built and sustained for years – while we have the idiotic welfare system as is all that is doing is not only keeping the poor;poor but bringing about social poverty.

The British can innovate – and I may be biased – better than anyone if they are given the tools and the freedom to do so, and this from a Marxist like myself.

As I have read a lot of what you and John have said – I have to wholeheartedly agree with him in that we should ready the UK work force through education, and extend that to what we used to call poly’s – we need trained kids who know, not only that this is an ‘on’ button, but what goes on inside that machine to produce whatever it does.

That is why I campaigned for Blair – I really did believe that he meant “Education, education, education” – more fool me!

I am not, for one moment, saying that automation isn’t a great idea – I advocate it as much as any. If we have one man/woman running a machine that produces 30,000 units a day – great, make the machine the efficiency product.

There are a plethora of business opportunities out in the wider world – it is the vision of those who will not invest in those opportunities that is lacking.

Britain was once a country of opportunity and in seeing the markets out there – albeit while Empire building we performed some horrific actions of subjugation the building of the market brought about many-a-thing we still see today.

The reality is that, today, the UK can build an industrial base once again. Yet – while you have the mindset that simply putting money in a system and expecting it to be a wealth provider long-term you are a fool. There has to be a foundation and as the establishment has it now that foundation is not just built on sand it is sand that stands upon a lake of water.

Electronics, internet, vehicles that run on batteries innovated in the UK and built here, wind power, solar power, wave (fuck me this is the Isle of Britain) power – all can be both utilised and sold – IF the governments and industry work toward that – which they are not.

Some insist that there cannot be a new industrial revolution – I disagree. Will it cost money? Of course, but the benefits both in sociological terms and financial terms are great.

The only real problem you have with all that – is that either Tory or New Labour will be elected – and they are the same in idealistic thinking. We need an alternative to this – THAT is what needs to be said to the people of the UK, and alternative to the status quo that will bring down the whole country. The Tories will not get us out of this, no matter how much you agree with the slashing of public services. It was and is still the case that bankers and the finance system got us all into this mess. Land prices, house prices need to fall so far it is mind blowing – if they do not the next recession, and that is only a couple of years away, will be worse than this one because we really won’t have exited from this one.

Will that motivate the UK population to look at an alternative, it could – but the creaking problem with that isthere could be a massive swing to the right rather than to the left.

@22: Perhaps I missed something, but why do we want to go back to an industrial economy?

Will, argument from incredulity is a poor gambit.

“You have, as you should know because you are some sort of advice-giver to woeful grads – a great number of those grad coming out of uni and going into what work?”

Woeful? Most of them would be smart enough not to assume I’m a careers adviser. I’m not. I do know the answer to your question, though, because that’s my field.

As it happens, about a third of working graduates start their careers in a job that doesn’t require a degree – higher for those in non-vocational subjects – but mainly because they have no prior work experience. Once they start to attain that work experience, the proportion drops off rapidly until about 15% of a given cohort at any one time are in roles that don’t require degrees. Interestingly, they are generally no less happy with their university education than those who are in graduate level roles, because many did not aspire to a ‘graduate job’, and because many are in the kinds of jobs they wanted to do – in fact, one prominent non-graduate job is ‘Member of Parliament’. Or ‘blogger’.

The real benefits in financial and social terms of university education seem to kick in after 30, but unfortunately, it’s hard to get the work done (because it’s bloody hard to get a representative cohort) – it’s been done for STEM grads, but not quite so effectively for arts and humanities – although the aspirations for this group are often different and not so financially orientated.

Unfortunately, for reasons of both access and sensationalism, media reports on graduates tend to focus on that small, young minority who don’t do very well initially. Next time you see a ‘we have too many graduates and it’s not worth going to university’ report – which will probably be in August or September, as they’re popular this time of year – I can guarantee two things. The person they interview will be inexplicably photogenic, and they’ll be under 24.

Oh, and modern graduates are not ‘woeful’. In general, the standard of debate on political blogs is ‘woeful’. Modern graduates are much better than that.

Ken @21:

Thank you

Ok, two things: firstly, I am not going to dispute that the enlargement of the total number of people entering higher education is good. Birmingham University, for example, has a lot more people at it than twenty years ago.

Secondly; I didn’t realise that the culture of perceiving polys as lower-class Universities went back before the 80s. I had (clearly inaccurately) mis-interpreted that as an artifact of 80s social propaganda rather than a pre-existing social perception.

Regarding ideology, or at least an idea: yes. There seems from what you’ve said to have been something fundamentally wrong with how we approached the theory of further education dating right back to the first drives towards expanding its remit in the fifties and sixties. When I talked about other countries, I was thinking of: Switzerland, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Japan, South Korea (as those are the ones I know the history and politics of best). Every system listed is different, but in each one there is a recognition that two types of advanced training are needed to make a working economy: training in applying modern techniques and knowledge, and training in discovering or creating new new techniques and knowledgeg. They are not different in quality but different in function. Innovation attracts greater prestige; that is, I would argue, a function of its wider impact rather than bias.

If, as it seems, you’re saying that this was not what Britain built its Polytechnic institutions for, then it simply moves my understanding of when our flawed model of education began further backwards in time.

I agree with most of that, but I don’t think the alternative is economic and social collapse, more the deeply unsatisfactory continuation of things going on much as before, along with the certain knowledge of opportunity wasted.

The Malthusian reference is explained in more detail here but boils down to this: we’re post-industrial. Soon, the nations one step behind us will be as well. That moves the ‘making things’ game right out of the West and into what’s now the BRIC nations. After them, as they slide into a service economy, it’ll be Africa doing all the making. And we’re on an exponential population curve with no end in sight, and facing a realistic prospect of biosphere resource depletion within the next 150 years. When everyone is post-industrial, who’s making things?

My fear is that the world as a whole cannot support another 2 billion people going through the industrial process that we did. Just the Wesern nations doing it has pretty much spent us into the red; now we’re at the over-draft limit, but there’s a lot of poor people out there who want what we’ve got. Where does it come from?

My hope is that we wise the hell up, start seriously spending on education, healthcare and more education, and move industry into orbit.

Will Rhodes @ 22:

I am not, for one moment, saying that automation isn’t a great idea – I advocate it as much as any

My problem is that I see it not as a good thing but as an inevitable one. It’s the only way to make anything once the education level of your populace is high enough that even the poor expect basic human dignity and a fair remuneration for their labour. Paying people a fair wage makes human-intensive manufacturing unprofitable. That’s why people outsource to India, China and Brazil. So the problem isn’t that we ought to automate; the problem is that we (by which I mean post-industrial nations, of which there is currently Britain) have no option if we are to continue doing anything with more economic value than jargon creation. Otherwise, we are committing the species to a permanent situation of people knowing their being paid shit and exploited; and as Louis XVII found out, that’s not a long-term sustainable situation. And these days, poor countries own nukes.

Kentron @23:

Firstly, we can’t by traditional definitions (in excess of 60% of your population work in primary and secondary industry). Secondly, because if your economy doesn’t actually make anything at all it relies entirely on leveraging pre-existing wealth. We’ve gotten away with that since WWI and it’s starting to come crashing down in the last 20 years. This recession is going to underline how bad an idea it is to have a ‘value-added’ economy when the value you’re adding is fictitious and based entirely on ‘consumer confidence’: our single biggest export and biggest import in the boom years was money itself. Risky; as has been proved.

Ken @24:

The real benefits in financial and social terms of university education seem to kick in after 30

I’m 32. I spent my 20s working as a telecommunications design engineer (I would remind the reader that my degree was in Medieval History). I was earning more than twice what I earn now, and came out of my twenties in debt (I had got into and cleared over 30k of debt before it all unravelled), the wrong side of a nervous break-down and 9 months ill-health unemployment (got no benefits at all) and I now work a manual skilled job with zero prospects of capital accumulation (because I work for someone else). I sincerely bloody hope my history degree starts to pay off soon.

Of course, that’s a deliberately biased view of my life. I made some duff choices (buying a house because an IFA told me I could afford it when I really, really couldn’t), I worked in an industry and for a company that genuinely consider people to be a resource rather than humans with agency, and my history degree is the foundation of a capacity for systematised analytical thought which has now led me to political and social activism and has provided the theoretical background for a charity project that I’m now working to start. Get back to me in ten years

John,

Ah, I have a few extra years on you then, being closer to 40 .

Of course, I am speaking firstly of the general rather than the particular, and secondly of purely financial returns.

Even the guys at the Dot/DfES/BIS/whatever it will be called tomorrow agree that measuring educational outcomes in terms of pure financial reward is deeply unsatisfactory, but it’s done because it’s much easier than quantifying satisfaction, and because a lot of people do put a great value on it.

Unfortunately, a feeling of self-worth and satisfaction doesn’t pay the bills, of course. In practise, the salary premium for male holders of degrees in history is not very high, but it does, as you rightly point out, give you an excellent foundation for systematised analytical thought and that is valuable in itself. Hope you’re a late bloomer!

Oh dear, Ken.

The real benefits in financial and social terms of university education seem to kick in after 30, but unfortunately, it’s hard to get the work done (because it’s bloody hard to get a representative cohort)

So we are to look at grads as coming into their full fruition after the age of 30, after 14, 15, 16 years of employment experience? Interesting that you say that and then condemn ‘the media’ for saying that they condemn grads at all.

If 30 is the magic number what about all their learning that they have forgotten? I am sure some can retain all that they have learnt, but I still find it hard to get my head around a grad being of great worth if only they have work experience. I think you lost the whole argument by saying that some attain the great hights of going into parliament – one of the problems we have is that far too many in parliament are careerist politcians who don’t have any ‘real world’ experience at all. Not all, of course.

As I have a daughter who has been through the university system – I really can, because of experience, say that some of the grads are woeful, really, really woeful. How some of them get jobs is quite beyond me.

But, of course, I have to bow to your greater qualifications in getting these unbelievably fantastic grads into jobs, even if the pay off isn’t until they are 30 years old.

Will, tell you what. How about you continue to misread everything I’ve written because you don’t like your worldview being challenged, and I’ll ignore you?

“I think you lost the whole argument by saying that some attain the great hights of going into parliament – one of the problems we have is that far too many in parliament are careerist politcians who don’t have any ‘real world’ experience at all. Not all, of course.”

This is hilarious comedy point-missing. Since we’re keeping score, you ‘lost’ the whole argument by failing to understand that I was pointing out that by MPs own criteria of ‘success’ for graduates, they themselves are failures in the employment market.

Unfortunately, you didn’t read my comment properly. Never mind. I think we’re done now.

Ken @26:

In practise, the salary premium for male holders of degrees in history is not very high,

My second day at Uni a Business and Accounting student said to me:

“What do you say to a History graduate at the height of his earning potential?”

I wanted to do history because I was good at it. I wanted a job as a network engineer because in 1995 the Internet was cool. Being a history grad didn’t stop me getting one, but only because I taught myself to code.

Even the guys at the Dot/DfES/BIS/whatever it will be called tomorrow agree that measuring educational outcomes in terms of pure financial reward is deeply unsatisfactory, but it’s done because it’s much easier than quantifying satisfaction, and because a lot of people do put a great value on it.

Yah: this right here. We tend to assess a person’s worth, in this culture, based on their consumption capacity rather than their production capacity. This is why earnings are considered a good ‘measure’ of someone’s early training.

Education should, I would argue, be assessed based on skill delivery rather than knowledge delivery alone: and I would also argue that eventual earnings would only be a reasonable index if all jobs available to those of a given qualification paid the same. As it is, were I to be a well-educated person who wanted to run a charity, because I’m good at it and the work needs doing, then my degree becomes “worth” not much at all. If I wanted to do an identical job in terms of skill (corporate management) the worth of the degree becomes very high. The degree hasn’t changed. Why has the cultural assessment of its worth changed?

What the assessment based on earnings actually does is assess to what extent their school and university experience caused a person to make culturally celebrated choices. Becoming a City trader is culturally valued more than become a teacher or research chemist, but the skills required… We’re pricing the cheese based on last century’s chalk costs.

On the other hand, you work in the field, and I don’t; what do you think of that view?

John,

“Education should, I would argue, be assessed based on skill delivery rather than knowledge delivery alone: and I would also argue that eventual earnings would only be a reasonable index if all jobs available to those of a given qualification paid the same. As it is, were I to be a well-educated person who wanted to run a charity, because I’m good at it and the work needs doing, then my degree becomes “worth” not much at all. If I wanted to do an identical job in terms of skill (corporate management) the worth of the degree becomes very high. The degree hasn’t changed. Why has the cultural assessment of its worth changed?

What the assessment based on earnings actually does is assess to what extent their school and university experience caused a person to make culturally celebrated choices. Becoming a City trader is culturally valued more than become a teacher or research chemist, but the skills required… We’re pricing the cheese based on last century’s chalk costs.

On the other hand, you work in the field, and I don’t; what do you think of that view?”

Well, as a well-educated person who does happen to be senior in a charity because I’m good at it and the work needs doing, I agree with you!

You’re absolutely right in pin-pointing why an assessment of the value of education in pure financial terms falls down. We’re merely attributing a market value, which may not even be equivalent to the value *society* itself would actually place on the work – after all, in this assessment, a good physics teacher is worth less than a mediocre solicitor, yet we badly need more of the former, and we’ve plenty of the latter.

If it could be done effectively, I’d simply ask people with their qualifications if they feel it was worth it. This approach has been taken by some of the more in-depth analyses of graduate employment by the likes of Elias and Purcell (their work is well worth seeking out, although I’ll declare an interest right now as a collaborator in some of it).

You would then avoid issues such as history graduates, who are generally perfectly aware of the fact that the study of history is not likely to make them financially wealthy, being seen as not having achieved as well as law graduates, when the historian may be delighted with the disciplines they have learnt, the personal enrichment that their degree has brought them and likely had different aspirations in the first place.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to do properly, and, more pertinently these days, expensive. So, it’s hard to get evidence for the effectiveness of qualifications when nobody can agree what ‘effectiveness’ actually means, (in fact, there are arguments about ‘qualifications’. And ‘evidence’), and even when people do temporarily agree, then it’s slow and expensive to do the research.

Still, we have to try.

in this assessment, a good physics teacher is worth less than a mediocre solicitor, yet we badly need more of the former, and we’ve plenty of the latter.

I’m familiar with the pitfalls in attempting to attribute causation to a correlative relationship but I think this one is very definitely causal.

We have so many lawyers because law was a socially rewarded profession long before teaching was. Teaching was the preserve of the clerk’s son, the scholarship boy, the boy with ideas above his station. Professionals were clergymen, doctors, lawyers, merchants, and bankers. So those trades are valued unrealistically highly because the people with such jobs are, well, One of Us!

Later, teaching was the preserve of women, so the trend was persistent. Kids point their heads where society is telling them too. The golden age of scientific education was when the news was full of hard-science and hard-tech improvements every year. It was when scientists and code-breakers were Winning The War! It was also the era which produced the mad scientist and his death-ray as the ultimate villain; for an instructive view of social mores, examine the different lives Lex Luthor has led since the Golden Age.

Society today is telling people to be: famous for not actually doing anything, an entertainment personality, a violent criminal, a merchant bankerlarge-scale fraudster, a lawyer,a salesman or an accountant. Those are the professions we reward disproportionately highly compared to their contribution to their society. Full-time parenthood, teaching, medical care and free science are about the least well-rewarded activities any adult could go into. Any wonder so few are choosing to doom themselves to a life of relative penury and occasionally actual penurious drudgery, when our society tells them at every advert break that these jobs are not worth doing?

John, you’re right in essence, but, without coming over too ‘argument from authority’, I deliberately chose physics teachers because I’ve been doing some work for an organisation who I won’t name, but they’re an institute with a keen interest in physics, examing part of this very issue.

The whys and wherefores are hard to pinpoint – I think you’ll enjoy reading up on Establishment views of science, particularly in the 19th century, and some of the debates Matthew Arnold was involved in (suffice to say, sciences were supposed to be a hobby only for gentlemen – to actually make a trade of science and engineering was considered terribly vulgar, and the head of the army, the Duke of Cambridge, was famous for his hatred of innovation in general and of science in particular. Unfortunately for our WWI troops, the Germans were not constrained in the same way).

Anyhow, after that digression, the basic reason we don’t have many physics teachers is because we don’t have many physics graduates, full stop. There appears to be a complex mix of gender reasons (subjects that are done mostly by women, which now include the biological sciences and law are rising – the few subjects that are still male preserves are falling in numbers), issues to do with available skills (anything that contains a lot of maths is unpopular, with the odd exception of, er, maths), issues of opportunity (there isn’t a lot of UK physics for physicists to do), and issues of reimbursement (especially for experienced physicists, the rewards of doing something other than teaching with your specialist skills are so much higher, it is an extremely difficult job for schools to retain good physics teachers when the petrochemicals, telecomms and consultancy industries will happily take them, pay them a lot more, and not give them such demanding clients to deal with.)

You’re right about the professions, though. Of course, our university system effectively came about for training the clergy, and law was a part of that. But I suspect we are on the verge of an extremely enjoyable, but entirely off-topic, exploration of the history of the UK education system – something i confess to be outside my area of expertise.

sciences were supposed to be a hobby only for gentlemen – to actually make a trade of science and engineering was considered terribly vulgar

Until the advent of, for example, Imperial College. Yes.

Your fuller survey of the converging reasons why physics isn’t attracting many students is, clearly, better than my limited one. Not only do you have more data but you’re examining more aspects of the picture.

I am focusing here on why so few children want to be a scientist or engineer or something else of actual value when they grow up, versus how many wanted such careers in 1970. Children between 1930 and 1970 were presented with a sociological view that valued scientific achievement and technological innovation, along with public works, very highly indeed. They were prestige careers. We no longer value public works at all as a society, and we value scientific achievement solely by its patent exploitability, which is why entrenched capital interests dominate the funding (and thus the direction) of modern science.

People are taught at school that the thing to be is in business, hiring scientists and engineers. One of the ways this is manifesting is that people don’t take physics, so they don’t graduate in physics, so they can’t teach physics, so there are less good physics teachers, so less people take physics, ad infinitum.

Basically we’re agreeing, but I’m focusing on the social reward metric aspect and you’re focusing on a nest of converging factors which have led to hard science becoming socially deprecated (see Ben Goldacre on that subject).

[33] FWIW, ISTR people moaning in the 1960s that too many kids were choosing the arts (and social sciences) rather than the sciences. Perhaps the people doing the moaning, then as now, were all Charlie-clones.

Manpower planning is pretty much impossible. A free labour market would require the abolition of all closed shops, including that of lawyers and doctors, which ain’t gonna happen. And how the heck do you plan for technological change such as the mushroom growth of IT?

[32] Ken, do you happen (as a result of what you’ve been doing or otherwise) to know if the gap between what physics graduates earn in teaching and other jobs is greater in the UK than in the US and/or Europe? Would it really matter if most of our future physisicsts came from “less developed” countries, for example? (Given that apparently young Brits don’t want to do it much…)

@33

There are couple of engineering subjects whose numbers have actually fallen since the 60, and chemistry has suffered in terms of numbers, but what has actually largely happened in STEM subjects is that about the same number of people want to do them as have always wanted to do them, but many other subjects have become vastly more popular. There are interesting theses to be written on the extraordinary rise in popularity of psychology degrees and the effects this has had, for example.

@34
The standard of science degrees in, for example, many parts of Eastern Europe is often very good, and pragmatically, I have no particular beef with where our future physicists come from (and if I did, I think it’s a bit late to worry about it). I don’t have a good knowledge of comparisons between teaching earnings and private earnings outside the UK, I’m afraid, but talking to colleagues in the US, they have the same worries about science teaching as we do.
Because physics graduates are suited to working in some of the most globally lucrative industries, though, I guess that there will always potentially much better rewards for the best ones outside education than in it.