Student Inflow/Outflow

This is something I guess been aware of since when I first moved to southern England in 2005, but has come home more to me now that for much of my time I am living in West London.  For some reason around where I am living are lots of educational institutions from primary school right up to universities and so simply travelling to work I see a cross-section of our being-educated public of all ages.  Of course, for the moment all of them, even the university students are on their summer holidays (though universities seem to be all Americanised now with semesters rather than terms and they have always had vacations rather than holidays).  However, I noticed that this did not seem to make the university campuses any quieter, in their place are literally thousands of young people who seem to range from about 12-16 years old.  Saying that I have seen some Chinese students who look about 9-10 years old.  That might be the case, I imagine a British mother would be loath to send their child 8,000 Km for the summer, but I might be wrong.  Anyway, the bulk of them seem to be teenagers.  The nationalities I can make out have included French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and some East Europeans, I am unfamiliar with East European languages so could not tell you whether they were Poles, Czechs or Russians, perhaps from the Baltic States.  It is heartening that the immigration policies that threatened to kill the language school trade in the UK have been bent sufficiently not to choke off this important industry.

Anyway, each university seems to have been colonised by a one or more language schools run by energetic young staff in bright teeshirts for the summer.  I guess this works well for all concerned.  The school gets a purpose built teaching space and accommodation with a convenience store and cafes that all universities seem to have and the university presumably gets lots of fees at a time when the campus would normally be empty.  It also seems to employ lots of young graduates as organisers and language teachers at a time when any jobs that can be created especially for people under 24, are desperately needed.  Though I did not really notice it at the time, I now realise I have witnessed the same occurrence in Hampshire and Devon too.  Madly I had forgotten the two students who lodged in my house last year, I somehow put them in a different box, perhaps because I was only seeing one of them rather than large clusters and generally I am not in areas where students or tourists go.  I guess that it is simply the draw of London and the scale of the operations in the capital that make it more apparent, maybe simply my route to work.  One point to note is how uniformly dressed so many of these students are, fitting in very much with what Niall Ferguson was saying in his series earlier in the year, that a teenager from Beijing now is a replica of one from Madrid in the clothing and electronic equipment that they have.

I have no idea how much it costs for a 14-year old to be sent from Beijing or Madrid to London for a number of weeks, I guess they come for a fortnight, perhaps it is more.  From what I can ascertain and referencing the other examples I now recognise I have witnessed, they seem to get teaching in English all morning and then trips out to the standards of British tourism, everything from Bath and Stonehenge to Windsor Castle and the London Eye.  Shepherded around I guess they never really encounter the London beyond the campus bounds.  It is probably a good thing.  Students are never particularly popular even with 42% of British 18-year olds attending university and these groups are certainly noisy as any cluster of teenagers is.  What is apparent is their wealth.  Sending anyone from China to the UK costs money and these students all seem to have the latest smartphones and fashions.  I guess it is something that only the rich middle class parents of various European countries could afford and that is rather alarming, because it shows that even the UK's middle class is lagging behind its neighbours and the Chinese in what is affordable to do.  This is of course no surprise given that the real incomes of 90% of the UK population have slid in the last 40 years.  Perhaps it would have been affordable in 1975 but not now.

I would like to think that in western Paris or western Madrid there are hundreds of British teenagers there for a fortnight or a month and being drilled in French or Spanish (let alone western Beijing learning Mandarin) mixed in with some sports and some sight-seeing, but know it is not happening.  How do I know?  Well simply because I read 'The Guardian' newspaper.  It is not the font of all knowledge but if you want to get inside the heads of what the Europeanised (and this is what marks 'The Guardian' out from 'The Times' and 'The Daily Telegraph' which are pretty Little England in attitude) middle class aspires to be doing you read 'The Guardian'.  I can see no features on packing your 14-year old, let alone 10-year old off to Paris for the summer (unless it is to relatives) to learn a foreign language. 

Partly, as I have intimated above, it is the cost: the fact that the British middle class is falling in terms of disposable incomes because very few in Britain are willing to insist on a greater share of the prosperity that heads of companies are clearly benefiting from and did not even before the credit crunch was allowed to happen.  I know that these days the middle class holiday is camping in the UK, something once left to the unimaginative and those with no money to go abroad.  The other factor seems to be the 'parent fear' that has taken parents by the throat and sends them into hysterics the moment they lose eyeline with their child let alone mobile phone contact.  More examples of this were revealed to me this week with accounts of a colleague at a child's birthday party with mothers running around frantically the moment one of their children was lost in the crowd (given there were 50 children in attendance, that was no doubt easy).  The middle class has never relished packing their children off to holiday camp the way that their US equivalents have always done, they have never trusted anyone to look after their children and even their trust in teachers has slumped, hence the terminal state of even term-time school trips.  The upper class, of course, have been happy to bundle their children off into the care of others almost from the moment they are born and certainly once they turn 8.  Even if somehow, middle class real incomes rose, you would never see the equivalent of what I witness with French children (France is nearer to where I am living now than Yorkshire) happening with their British counterparts.  The woman in my house worries over the 5-minute walk it would take her 9-year old son to reach school and has already ruled out him going on any trips which involve him sleeping away from home, not that she or I could afford to pay for him to go.

Does it really matter if there is an imbalance in the flow of teenaged language students?  Is it not better for the British economy that more are coming into the UK, spending money here, rather than it being balanced up by an outflow.  The cost in my view is human.  If we go back to Ian Duncan Smith's speech earlier in which he encouraged British employers to take on more British young people, the retort from the CBI was to ask why would any UK company want to do this when it could employ better qualified East Europeans with a real work ethic compared to ill-qualified British people with an attitude of looking out for what they can get from a company.  I have no desire for British young people to be compelled to forelock-tugging lackeys, but it does seem that there are skills that they are not getting to compete with people from other parts of Europe.  It is not only people from Eastern Europe, apparently around 300,000 French people live in London alone, more than the entire population of Southampton; 123,000 Poles over the age of 16 live in London with 398,000 in other parts of the UK. 

Now, I know many people from other parts of the EU returned to their home countries when the recession kicked in and we have not returned to the figures of 2007, but it does suggest there is something that enables such migrants to get work in the UK.  It may be that they are cheap labour, but even then 16 year olds have always tended to be cheaper to employ.  One clear thing is that the migrants have the confidence to get up and come into the UK and find work in a language which is not their own.  How many British 18-year olds or even 21-year olds with a degree in their backpack do that?  A key challenge is that they do not speak the language, another is that often they have not ever been in another country, these days, not even on holiday let alone to study.  It seems ironic that the Conservatives (and New Labour who are/were minimally different to them) with their occasional forays into attempts at discrimination, are in fact further reinforcing the conditions that hamstring British young people.  They have pandered to the tabloid media which have hyped up the fear that a child out of your sight is being abused by a paedophile.  They have allowed companies to distort the distribution of profits so whilst bosses' salaries have rocketed the real incomes of 90% of employees have continued to slump unabated.  Thus, they have engineered and are sustaining a situation in which a 14-year old from France or Spain or even China is getting the intellectual and personal skills to find work across the world and yet their British counterpart is closeted at home learning nothing beyond the distance between their home and the park.  Thus, when I see another coach disgorging a fifty or so teenagers ready for some weeks of language school, I do feel depressed knowing that if I was in one of the other capitals of Europe I would not be witnessing the equivalent with British students.

10 Years of the Blair Party

Today I am widening my scope to look at UK politics. In May 1997 the current prime minister, Tony Blair came to power. This followed 18 years of rule by the Conservative Party (11 years under Margaret Thatcher; 7 years under John Major). From when Thatcher came to power in 1979 the political 'centre' of British politics was moved firmly to the right. In line with New Right thinking especially in the UK and USA we had privatisations, high unemployment, dismantling of trade union powers, monetarist economic policy and so on. The Labour Party which had regularly been in power in the years before (1964-70; 1974-9) now found itself in the wilderness, weak and divided as the population got high on 'get rich' policies and popular nationalism, especially at the time of the Falklands War in 1982. If Winston Churchill (National coalition prime minister 1940-5; Conservative prime minister 1951-5) was in politics today, with his belief in a mixed economy (i.e. part state-run) and the National Health Service, he would be seen as being politically to the left of the current Labour Party.

John Major had put an additional 'small man' populism to the mix. He spoke to the 'ordinary' people of Britain to put a human edge of Thatcherism. This did fine for him, but at the end of the day he lacked the strength to keep all of his party behind him and the population wanted someone with more glamour, not as scary as Thatcher, but someone more inspiring than their bank manager. Blair offered that. However, he did take on elements of Major's populist mantle and certainly in the early days of the Blair regime, I was happy to talk of 'Blajorist' politics. However, overall, Blair had a vision all of his own.

So, to get back into power, Labour re-invented itself as New Labour. When the leader John Smith died of a heart attack, the young Blair became leader in 1994. Smith had already taken steps to 'modernise' the party and take account of the fact that the political scene had moved from the post-war Attlee consensus (named after the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee 1945-51) to the Thatcher consensus in which private property and profits were king. Blair kept this up and took it much further. He was successful becoming prime minister in 1997 with a huge landslide; at 43 he was the youngest British prime minister since 1812.

So, Blair was successful at getting Labour, or certainly New Labour into power and keeping it there up to the present day. My argument, is, however, that it is not the Labour Party that is in power, but the Blair Party. Many countries have political parties and ideologies focused on one man (I think Thatcher is the first woman leader to have an -ism named after her, but I might be wrong), there were Leninist (after Vladimir Lenin leader of USSR 1918-24), Stalinist (after Josef Stalin, leader of USSR 1924-53) and Maoist (after Mao Zedong, in Chinese names, the surname comes first; leader of China 1949-76) forms of Communism. In French politics there have been Gaullist parties (named after General Charles De Gaulle, French prime minister 1944-6 and 1958; president 1958-69) and in Argentina Peronist parties (after Juan Peron, president of Argentina 1946-55 and 1973-4 and to some extent his wife Eva Peron made famous by the musical and movie 'Evita'). My argument is that we have a Blairist party and political parties in his image may follow in the coming decades.

So what is the Blair Party? Politically New Labour has little connection with the Labour Party of the past. It resembles more a Christian Democrat party of continental Europe, something like the CDU of Germany. Its allies, or certainly Blair's are farther to the right, such as Silvio Berlusconi in Italy and George W. Bush in the USA.

Other characteristics are that as with (early) Gaullist and the Peronist party, there is a real focus on the leader, he is the source of all knowledge and vitally, of attitudes. His errors are excused rather than criticised. Throughout his term as leader, Blair has been characterised as a 'control freak'. He dislikes any rivals to his glamour or his power. The late Mo Mowlam got a standing ovation during a speech by Blair to the 1998 Labour Party conference, for all her work in Northern Ireland. Blair was clearly visibly annoyed at the attention switching from him. He had stolen a lot of the credit for Mowlam's work in Northern Ireland and she was subsequently marginalised in the government. It was very reminiscent of what happened to Sergei Kirov in the USSR in the 1930s. In 1932 Josef Stalin was well established as dictator but Kirov won support for a policy of reconciliation towards Leon Trotsky. Stalin was embarrassed by the support and applause Kirov, head of the Leningrad branch of the party, got at conference. In 1934 Kirov was found murdered by Stalin's henchmen. Fortunately Mowlam was only politically murdered (unlike Dr. David Kelly, but more on that in future). So, the first trait of this kind of party is the focus on the leader rather than policies and that has been the case in the Blairist party.

Unlike other British prime ministers of the 20th century, Blair has made religion a central part of policies. He is Church of England and his wife is Catholic. There is nothing wrong with that, we live in times when faith has come to the fore. More alarming is his installation of the representatives of more extreme elements of the Catholic Church, with which even Catholics are often unhappy, such as Ruth Kelly (as Education and later Local Government Secretary) known to be a member of Opus Dei, which whilst not the sinister organisation as portrayed in 'The Da Vinci Code' certainly has values that pre-date the 20th century and would alarm the bulk of the British population. Out of his faith comes a strong sense of family, with four children, Blair has more than the average number in the UK. His family-friendly policies are both in step with current trends in the UK and have done a lot to help those on low incomes. However, such policies have jarred with some of the pro-feminist attitudes of the Labour Party of recent decades.

Control of the media is another trait of these personal political parties. New Labour has been renowned from the start for its 'spin doctoring' and manipulation of the press. Blair has also made use of the less democratic elements of the British political system. Loads of legislation has been extended in scope and duration by using the 'royal prerogative' (actually exercised by the prime minister) which means such changes are not debated in parliament; Blair has used it more than any of his modern predecessors.

Now some people would accuse New Labour of being 'fascist'. I think we need to be more careful in how we designate it. I certainly agree that its attitudes are not those of a democratic party. I would suggest looking at a couple of other historical examples to find parallels. The first is the authoritarian regime of Austria 1934-8, i.e. before Nazi Germany took over the country. It was run by Kurt Schuschnigg. His predecessor, Englebert Dollfuss suspended elections and other political parties, leaving his Christian Social Party in control. Once Dollfuss was assassinated, the regime became stricter. It borrowed elements of fascism, but was founded on a Catholic, nationalist, authoritarian basis, which was opposed to Nazism. The other example is the Vichy regime in France 1940-4. This was a government that ran central and southern France after the country had been defeated by Nazi Germany, though its zone was occupied by the Germans in 1943. The regime was headed by Marshal Petain and again was nationalistic, authoritarian regime, focused on the Church with the slogan 'Work, Family, Country'. In May 2001 Blair said "Here in Sedgefield in 1983, in a supposedly traditional Labour constituency, I learnt, thankfully, that others felt exactly the same, who believed in the values of hard work, family, patriotism ...". Given that we know Tony Blair can speak French, he should have been more careful to avoid the parallels with certainly non-Labour and non-democratic creeds.

Other characteristics New Labour shares with such authoritarian regimes include, pushing through legislation on identity cards (I know they are common elsewhere in Europe, but in the UK they smack too much of wartime and dictatorships); the introduction of house arrest and curfews for people who have been released by the courts but who the government has suspicions about; the introduction in the 1990s of internment camps such as Campsfield House in Oxfordshire where asylum seekers are imprisoned (often having fled such treatment in their own countries) without being charged with, tried for or sentenced for any crime and where those held have fewer rights than an imprisoned criminal (for example they have no right to toothpaste, shaving foam, etc. that people in normal prisons do, it has to be brought in by volunteers) and the promotion of single faith schools which divide the society further and encourage racial and religious unrest.

Now, I do not think we are in danger this week of Blair not giving his farewell speech as he steps down from office, but rather saying he has decided to become prime minister for life, however, there has been a flavour to the whole New Labour term in office which has tasted more of regimes that have limited democracy rather than strengthened and promoted it. These are regimes that have looked to the past, to society's shaped by Church perspectives rather than modern, liberal, let alone Socialist values (the Labour Party was once a Socialist party). I guess that I am out-of-step with what the 'modern' population wants or maybe I am just paying attention to this rather than the football results or soap operas. Anyway, this week marks the decade of the Blair Party in power.