Enjoying 'Fresh Meat'

Comedy based on a university campus seems to enjoy a revival every decade or so.  I remember 'A Very Peculiar Practice' (1986-8) which ran while I was studying at the University of Warwick and was apparently based on occurrences that had happened there as the author, Andrew Davis, had studied there.  In particular the American vice chancellor and the incompetent doctor who served the university's medical centre and was still doing so while I was a student, were referenced.  Previously there had been 'The History Man' (novel 1975; television 1981) by my old friend Malcolm Bradbury, set at the fictional university of Watermouth apparently modelled on Brighton, though Lancaster University, the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia where Bradbury taught have also been cited.  That story was as much about the sexual and political mores of males in the 1970s as about university life.  Also worth mentioning is 'The Comic Strip Presents - The Summer School' (1983) shot at the University of East Anglia.

I saw the other day that David Lodge's 'campus trilogy': 'Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses' (1975), 'Small World: An Academic Romance' (novel 1984; television series 1988) and 'Nice Work' (novel 1988; television series 1989) has been re-released.  Like Bradbury, Lodge has long worked in universities.  A lot of this fiction pokes gentle fun at places which most of the population never went close to.  With the rise in the level of eighteen-year olds attending university from 6% at the time 'A Very Peculiar Practice' was showing to 42% today it is probably to be expected that with them coming more into the experience of young people and their 'helicopter' parents that a university would be the basis for more situation comedies in particular.

Last year actually saw two university situation comedies.  The first was 'Campus' which had been piloted in 2009.  It attained very low viewing figures and it was easy to see why.  Rather than using the university setting as a microcosm to reflect on wider society as these other stories had done, it was specifically about the interaction between academics and their very particular concerns such as research profile, issues that mean nothing to students let alone the large mass of the population.  It was as engaging as a comedy about the teaching staff of Eton would have been.  In addition it was simply not funny, despite being produced by the same team as the far more successful 'Green Wing' (2004-7) hospital situation comedy; it certainly lacked the wit of Bradbury or Lodge.  Interestingly the biggest impact (if true) is that I have been told that Brunel University (located in West London rather than Bristol as you might have expected) removed a sculpture of the word 'Brunel' made of free-standing red plastic letters as in 'Campus' the university featured, Kirke University, had something identical. 

The second university situation comedy of 2011 was 'Fresh Meat', also shown on Channel 4, but to a much warmer response.  One reason for this is that it came from the perspective of six students sharing a house.  Unlike many portrayals of universities on television, this was up-to-date given all the news about first-year students being unable to be accommodated in student halls and being farmed out into houses.  It seems to be set at Manchester Metropolitan University.  It features a cross-section of students studying geology, dentistry and English literature including the rather rebellious Vod (Zawe Ashton) who looks like a classic lesbian but is straight and geek Howard (Greg McHugh); more mainstream sometimes almost couple Josie (Kimberley Nixon) and Kingsley (Joe Thomas) as well as the upper middle class 'Oregon' (real name Melissa, played by Charlotte Ritchie) and upper class J.P. played by stand-up comedian Jack Whitehall who makes much play of his social class in his comedy.  There were criticisms about the fact that sex featured so highly in the series.  However, I feel that this reflects reality.  Back in the 1980s 40% of students graduated as virgins but we live in different times and with 34% of UK boys and 38% of UK girls having sex before 16 in 2008, this is not surprising.  In my day even when people were not having sex they were still angsting about it and I doubt that has died out.

The show is contemporary in approach in most things.  The classes it shows are far too small for the size that is actually the case certainly over the past decade.  However, at least it moves a few increments on from most drama series which show all universities, no matter how modern as having a kind of Oxbridge supervisory system that even Oxbridge no longer has. 

There is of course the staff-student relationship between 'Oregon' and Professor Tony Shales, something which seems to be compulsory for any story featuring universities to include.  Whilst I may be tired of that kind of relationship being portrayed I have to confess I have worked with two women who have married their lecturers and whilst in and around universities knew at least three male academic staff who had married or had long-term relationships with particular students.  The one aspect that all television dramas about universities seem to miss that these days with more mature students (officially defined as students over 25 in UK or 26 in continental Europe), though with fees their numbers are dropping away, it is more than likely that an academic will encounter single or divorced students their own age which seems far more likely to spark a relationship than them chasing 18 year olds.  However, I have never seen such a relationship shown in the media.  The closest is 'Educating Rita' (play 1980; movie 1983) and in that case the sexual relationship was ruled out primarily on social class grounds

'Fresh Meat' does address concerns of contemporart students, showing the revival of student radicalism in these 'Occupy' times but this sitting alongside the usual worries about grades and relationships. The fact that most of the characters come from comfortable middle class families if not upper class ones accurately reflects the UK university system which has seen a stagnation in working class recruitment since 2002.  The real growth in attendance in universities has been among the less capable siblings of middle class people who would normally have gone anyway.  The characters of 'Oregon' and J.P. are reflective of those who go to university but Vod, Josie and Kingsley do not come from impoverished backgrounds either.  'Oregon''s attempts to appear more ordinary than she is, much to Vod's changrin is again spot on target.

It is not a laugh out loud series, more one in which you go 'yes, that is so true', things like the friends you try to get rid of and the boy/girlfriends from home who cling on to students yet believing they are more 'real' than anyone studying at university.  The issues around parties remain pretty much the same as they always have been.  In some ways the series is a more grounded version of 'The Young Ones' (1981) but in my view is both entertaining and engaging.  Channel 4 has sensibly decided to keep 'Fresh Meat' live on its 4OD service and I recommend you go and watch it there: http://www.channel4.com/programmes/fresh-meat/4od

Rioting And Reaction

David Cameron should be proud of himself, it took Margaret Thatcher two years before her government faced rioting and yet his policies to throw us back into some Edwardian-style society and shut off opportunity for all of those people who are not already in the elite he moves in, meant he had his first riot just six months after coming to power.  In addition, it was a political riot, one directed at the policies of the government, rather than, as with many riots in 1981, focused on local friction with police behaviour.  The riot was not extensive, only 56,000 people (150% more than had been expected), primarily students protesting about the raising of fees for the young people reaching university age in the next few years.  It was primarily focused on the Conservative Party headquarters in Millbank in central London.  There were acts of vandalism and rioters got on to the roof of the building.  However, overall 14 people a mix of rioters and police were hospitalised and 35 people arrested, which is very small scale compared to riots in London of the 1980s and 1990s.  However, this may be just the beginning.

Interestingly, in contrast to the G20 protest last year, at which the police went in very forcefully and murdered a passerby, and even when compared to the original round of protests against student loans, famously in 1989 with mounted police riding down student protestors, some of whom later showed the hoof marks on their shins when they had been trampled by the horses and images of students being clubbed by batons, the police response was very low key.  This has angered Conservative Party members as there was no police protection of their headquarters as the focus had been on the nearby headquarters of their coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats.  I imagine this was due to the earlier protests outside the house of the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg.  Police have been criticised for under-estimating the scale of the disorder and not bringing in a large enough force.  They had, however, protected Whitehall ministerial buildings, which in the past have been a target.

I think there are a number of reasons for the nature of the response.  First, the weather was terrible on the days either side of the riot, Wednesday 10th November.  If it had been as bad that day I doubt we would have seen even 20,000 protestors and it is unlikely rioting would have started.  However, it was sunny and dry.  There is a clear correlation in the UK between good weather and rioting.  The second thing is, after the criticisms the police received after the murder of Ian Tomlinson (a passerby not even a protestor) by a police officer during the G20 protests in April 2009, they are probably a little more careful and the aggressive policy of hunting out the protestors and breaking them up or even 'kettling' them was avoided.  Perhaps the police saw students as being 'different' to the G20 protestors, though the bulk of them were ordinary people, not revolutionaries.  On Wednesday the police reacted rather than being proactive.  However, I think, at the next large scale protest they will being encouraged by Home Secretary Theresa May, who in effect, unlike with other constabularies in the UK, heads the Metropolitan Police, to take a more aggressive line and certainly to put a ring of officers around the Conservative Party headquarters.

There is another more mischievous explanation for the Metropolitan Police's reaction, particularly in leaving Conservative Party headquarters unprotected.  On 20th October the government announced cuts of 20% in the police budget.  I have not seen the figures for the reduction this is likely to mean for the size of the Metropolitan Police, but we can make some estimate from looking at other constabularies.  The Greater Manchester Police employ just over 13,000 staff (this includes all uniformed and plain clothes police and all civilian workers in the constabulary), the West Midlands Police, almost the same.  These two constabularies reckon they will have to shed 3,100 and 2,100 employees respectively, i.e. between 16%-24% of their workforce.  Not all the losses will be uniformed officers, but some will have to be.  If the same ratio of job losses is applied to the Metropolitan Police with a little over 52,000 employees then it means laying off something between 8,300 - 12,500 employees.  Given that it is argued that Britain continues to face potential terrorist attacks which most likely would target London and with the crime rate always rising as unemployment climbs as it is at present, you can see why the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Paul Stephenson, might feel that it is the worst time to be cutting the police service so severely.

Thus, perhaps next time there is the risk of a riot, the Metropolitan Police will say, 'well we would love to be able to protect Conservative Party headquarters' but unfortunately the cut-backs mean we cannot spare the officers to do so'.  This shows how the government's widespread cuts hitting at all parts of public service, are to a degree politicising sections of that service which normally would never come close to protesting.  The last time the UK had a police strike was in 1918, but it seems we may be on the path to another one.  Firefighters have struck more often, but usually on a localised basis, but already, only six months into Cameron regime we are seeing strikes of the nature that the Labour government of 1974-9 only experienced in its closing months.

Now, looking beyond the immediate issues of the likelihood of more rioting and the challenges for the police in dealing with it, are there bigger political moves behind all this?  Of course, we know from the early 1980s, groups such as the Socialist Workers' Party (and back then Militant Tendency) believe that a revolution will only come about when the bulk of the population, even those who typically cannot tear themselves away from watching 'The X Factor' to even answer the door, are so angry with the government that they strike and riot.  I have always felt this was a delusional policy, the British are far too passive a bunch ever to even protest on the scale we have seen in France over the past two months, let alone something more active.  British society is incredibly divided and people tend to blame others on their level or specific groups like students, the unemployed, single mothers, immigrants, asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, gay people, people from the North/the South/Scotland/Ireland rather than the government.  We have already seen the rumblings of race rioting which was another aspect of the 1970s and 1980s (and the 1950s and the 1910s...). 

What I think is more likely is that there will be a counter-reaction by the state.  A riot on the scale of the Poll Tax Riot of 1990 would play right into David Cameron's hands; it would be what the 11th September 2001 terrorist attacks were for George W. Bush, they gave him carte blanche to strip citizens of so many civil liberties.  Cameron in many ways takes the policies of Margaret Thatcher and drives them in harder and faster.  So, as Thatcher used the rhetoric of 'the enemy within' applied by dictators commonly to Jews, Socialists, Communists, also Catholics and Freemasons, and during the Miners' Strike of 1984-5 allowed police to pick up people driving around London simply on the suspicion that they were going to attend a coal mine rally, I can see this coming with Cameron, but even more harshly.  I have often commented how Tony Blair's govenment steadily eroded civil liberties in the UK.  Blair is the link in the chain between Thatcher and Cameron, advancing their agenda rather than reversing it; Major and Brown were barely hiccoughs in that process.  If Cameron cannot fund a larger police force, then he will use legislation, he will encourage the public to inform on their neighbours (something we have been encouraged to do for a number of years now) and given the restriction on prison spaces, other limits to personal freedom will be introduced.

A sub-headline on 'The Guardian' frontpage of Thursday said 'Both sides warn of 'more to come''.  Already 'sides' are being outlined.  Winter is not the time for rioting, but come April and beyond, especially if there is a hot summer, then I think we will see disturbances that will make 1981 look tranquil in comparison, partly because this government has unsettled not only those usually at odds with the state, but also very quickly, those like the police and firefighters, who generally we loyal to the state but now feel they are being stabbed in the back.  The government reaction, with the ground so well prepared by Blair, will be harsh, and with the cutbacks, will probably have to involve the military.  I do not think Cameron is an idiot, he may be evil, but no fool.  He must know that you cannot destroy the hopes of so many people and expect them to accept it passively.  Thus, I believe, as Thatcher prepared well in advance for the Miners' Strike, he is readying to oppose civil unrest and use the opportunity to suppress civil liberties that little bit further.  He believes he is right, because, as I increasingly believe with every passing day, he is bent on reshaping British society to something resembling the fixed hierarchical model of a hundred years or more in the past.

The Death of Opportunity 2: Cutting Off Chances in Further Education

Now having been unemployed for five months these days I spend most of my time in a 2Km radius of my house with occasional trips out of the town for job interviews.  I interact with very few people: the woman who has been assigned my case at the Job Centre, a couple of staff in the Post Office and a few others in a couple of supermarkets in short walking distance of my house.  Consequently a lot of my input has to come via the internet or the newspaper.  I view the BBC website for news and I buy one or two copies of 'The Guardian' per week, so my media intake is pretty restricted, though giving how alarming so much of it is, I probably could not take much more.  Call me weak, but at the moment I could not stomach any content which told me that people of my kind are lazy and bringing down British society.  Someone offered me a copy of the 'Daily Mail' in a cafe the other day and I turned it down warning her that she would just hear me shouting at it: I would rather gaze out at the people walking by in the wealthy town I had been called for an interview in.

One columnist I read in 'The Guardian' is Polly Toynbee.  I welcome her articles, even if I do not always agree with them all, because she has such a broad scope and each week seems to shine a light into a corner of the socio-political landscape that many others are overlooking.  I disagreed with her when she advised Gordon Brown to step down before the last election, but now see that she was probably right.  It should not have made any difference, but in our society which makes more out of the style rather than the substance of what politicians are saying, it might not have meant Labour winning more seats, but it may have done and it might have strengthened the chance of a Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition rather than the one we ended up with which is busily taking the UK back to the 18th century in terms of social division and making it into a replica of Greece in the 1970s in terms of its economy.

Toynbee's column reminded me that in my recent posting about the rapid destruction of higher education, i.e. universities, in the UK, like many commentators I had missed the greater damage that was being done to further education, i.e. education for pupils 16+ though also often encompassing vocational and skills training for older people.  Whilst higher education has expanded rapidly in the past 15 years, it still impinges on far fewer people than further education.  Toynbee's argument is that damaging this sector, and other elements of education I discuss below, will shut off far greater opportunities for people than even the damage being down to universities.  I find her argument convincing.  Last year I looked at how despite the efforts of the Blair Party to increase social mobility in fact they had pretty much failed:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/08/death-of-opportunity.html  I had detected a resurgence among the privileged and that has obviously continued far more vigorously now that David Cameron is in power. 

It is interesting to note that if they had lived under the regime Cameron is imposing, previous Conservative prime ministers Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and especially John Major would never have got the opportunities that they did and would never have got close to the top of the Conservative Party let alone becoming prime minister.  Cameron is vigorously pursuing a social counter-revolution, not only seeking to turn back equality gains of the 1960s but even, it seems, of the 1910s.  There is an assumption by many that the current public expenditure cuts are only temporary measures and sometime after 2015, presumably with the deficit reduced, things will ease.  This is an utter mistake.  Cameron would have pursued his New Right destruction of the state even if there had been no deficit.  Cameron has no intention of ever restoring the welfare state and other branches of government to anything close to the level he has found them in.  People's lives are being wrecked right now in order to fund the huge salaries and bonuses that Cameron's friends in the City are receiving and to supply all business with a low waged and compliant workforce that it lusts after, so as to make even larger profits.

What Cameron and his cronies are doing now will damage the UK long after Cameron has died of old age.  In the 1990s, as in the 1960s, it was recognised by all the leading political parties that the UK was falling behind not just European but global competitors because it had a poorly educated and trained population.  You only had to work in the civil service in the 1990s to see how many Spanish and Danish people were in senior positions to know the UK was not generating enough intelligent people to hold those positions; we sent fewer than half the civil servants we were entitled to, to the European Commission and had to make up our quota using people from states like Sweden and Austria at the time outside the EU.  That is just a tiny example.  You can look at the fact that so few UK utility companies are now owned by British companies.  Now, I am not prejudiced, I would not say: no foreign ownership of companies in the UK (something interestingly even the BNP and UKIP have not argued), if they are better than UK companies, then it is a factor of capitalist market competition that they should win.  It is just that the UK hampers the chances of its citizens by offering so few of them the chances to be educated and trained to the level needed to run successful companies.  I know people say that successful business people are born and not made, but on that basis why are MBAs so popular to study?

The recognition of this need led to the expansion of higher education.  However, no business is simply run by the high level executives, it needs educated, trained and skilled people at all levels and this is something, which even in my recent writing, I have failed to really emphasise in the way Toynbee did so well last weekend.  The Labour government's attitude to boosting training at all levels has been almost covert, and, at times, ambivalent.  Notable is the sharp cutbacks in the mid-2000s funding to 'lifelong learning', i.e. training for people who were adult learners, often seeking to retrain or raise their skills.  The funds were shifted to 16-19 training provision.  There was an attempt yet again to resolve the problem of the British looking down on vocational training, but yet again, pretty much as it did at regular intervals in the 19th and 20th centuries, the vocational diploma is seen as a failure.  Vocational training always fails due to snobbery, parents 'want better' for their children than to be trained to be skilled rather than academic.  This is because, unlike, say, Germany, which I think all of us would acknowledge as still very successful in industry, there are never technicians, engineers, let alone workers on the boards of companies, rather people who studied Classics at Oxford.  In addition, UK companies always want the state to simply train students to be able to work in their particular company, as if they should be designated like citizens of 'Brave New World' (trained for one specific purpose and discarded when no longer wanted).  This is incredibly short-sighted.  Unlike, say, German employers, who see that a pool of skilled workers is better to be able to draw from and induct into your way of working, rather than a pool of untrained workers who you then have to train up to basic levels before even getting them to engage with your company.  In the UK this obsession that a worker must be locked into your company for as long as you need them and no other method is acceptable, has really hampered the development of an educated workforce at all levels.

Even with the governments of Blair and Brown which seemed sympathetic to greater opportunities, not only for the high flyers but also the middle-ranking people who fill up so much of any company, there were challenges in raising the training levels of British workers.  Now that is going entirely out the window.  This is going to impinge on not only the quality of British companies, but also, as with all of these things, the prospects for millions of people.  Toynbee noted things that too many have forgotten, that Further Education (FE) colleges already received lower payments for students compared to schools with 6th Form years (i.e. years 12 and 13) attached: £4,631 compared to £5,650 per student.  FE colleges are the places where students who are taking a little longer to get their basic qualifications catch up and they are the places where the core of vocational training goes on.  Even for people on apprenticeships or company training courses, a lot of the actual teaching, and this is not simply in the classroom but in college workshops, goes on in the local college.  Out of FE colleges come people trained in a vast range of activities such as caring, agriculture, hairdressing, mechanics, catering and office work. 

FE colleges are what now produces the skilled working class as opposed to the unskilled, with the machine minders of the past now call centre workers.  Having skills of a nationally recognised standard (and you only have to think back eating in restaurants and cafes in the 1990s to see the improvement through things like NVQs)  not only means that companies have more skilled workers, but also that these people have more opportunities and through better pay inject more money into our consumer-driven economy.  No economy can run on simply having the unskilled alone.  The likelihood is that skilled workers from across the EU will come and fill the gap that, through its cutbacks (because FE colleges are funded by local authorities), the government will quickly open up.  The other element which damages opportunities is the shutting off of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA).  This was something that until a few months ago, you heard advertised regularly.  The EMA was only £30 (€34; US$48) per student per week and was only paid to families with a combined income below the national average salary.  The total bill was £500 million, just over a third of the cost of (building, let alone maintaining) the two aircraft carriers not to be in service until 2014 and 2016.  The thing is EMA, introduced in 2004, made the difference for many young people between being able to stay on at FE college and be trained and being compelled to go to work immediately, by definition in a lower paid job, or now as unemployment rises, be unemployed.  It is a double loss to the state as they will have to receive some benefits in order to live and in some families it will mean teenagers being pushed out on to the streets into crime.  As Toynbee notes, the supposed concessions in the cuts, such as £150 million in university bursaries and the 'pupil premimum' will benefit wealthier middle class families rather than the poorer ones who gained from EMA, not just in the immediate term but longer because their children could go into better jobs.

Noting this, shows up how prejudiced the government's policies are in terms of social class.  As recent revelations about the state subsidy of the pensions of teachers teaching at the UK's most elite schools, Harrow and Eton and the fact that the head of Lloyds bank which is 40% publicly-owned is being paid £8 million per year shows that the elites are not 'sharing' the pain of the supposedly deficit-imposed cuts.  Further down the social hierarchy, whilst the middle classes feel they too are being unfairly punished (to a degree I think Cameron under-estimated, but that is the 'me first' society Thatcher and her inheritors created - deal with it Cameron) they will gain some sops by having money taken from those people already in lower social categories, increasingly being locked into those categories and being both disparaged and pressured in terms of cuts, because they are not only more dependent on state assistance but other things such as public transport which is going to suffer too.  We see a regressive spending policy which seems bent on hardening social division and robbing the poor to give yet more to the rich.

Toynbee highlights a further example, which is Sure Start which was begun in 1998 and even I have generally overlooked it as one stand out achievement (along with the minimum wage) of the Blair governments.  We all know that children from different social backgrounds with equal intelligence when they start school will find two years later that the poorer child is already falling behind the wealthier one.  In many ways we are already in the 'Brave New World' model that because of opportunities, internet access at home, a mother not compelled to go out and work and a father employed by family-friendly company not compelled to work long hours, is always going to help, especially as IT now plays such a role in education even in pre-school years.  Sure Start was a useful gateway which brings us back to the FE colleges, because the 'one stop shop' approach meant not only assistance with pre-school learning and also parenting skills that many feel parents need training in, but also connected parents to training and retraining at local colleges.  This is now all going with its government funding frozen (so falling in real terms) and again local authorities further pressed for the cash they would have put into Sure Start.

I am grateful for Polly Toynbee for continuing to scratch behind the headlines, dominated by higher education, to show how extensive this government's damage to opportunities is.  If they believed in a successful private sector with skilled, trained staff, then they would not be ending EMA.  Though no-one has stated it, and too many continue to divorce the financial aspects of the spending cuts from their social impact, it is clear we are heading towards a society in which you will have no chance to get yourself out of the social category into which you are born, even through study and hard work.  You will be condemned from birth by this government's attitudes.  I guess they think middle class people no longer able to aspire to higher education will take over the vocational places and give up hope of 'threatening' to come close to the 'natural' elite that Cameron and his ilk clearly see themselves as being.  I see a bleak future for FE colleges, always in a challening situation in terms of their funding; some, I have noticed are rebranding themselves as FE/HE colleges, seeking to capture the kind of 'community college' market, a cheap university, as in the USA.  However, I believe that the government have made a severe miscalculation and very quickly the UK will be lacking skilled workers even skilled middle management and this will have to be supplemented with people from other parts of the EU where you can still get training in these necessary aspects of work.  Many of the opportunities left are being closed off right now in your street and right across your town, for the benefit of the wealthy.

P.P. After I wrote the first draft of this posting I heard on the BBC news that the School Sports Partnership which now involves 6.5 million children, has introduced 1 million children to doing competitive sport in the past year alone and costs £150 million is to be axed.  The government says it wants to encourage more 'competitive sport' and leave choices up to school heads.  Yet again they show their upper class prejudices, that somehow, state-backed sport is not about encouraging competition and this scheme replaced rather than augmented school provision.  Given the challenge of childhood obesity in the UK, the cost of this step will not only be on opportunities but additional burden on the health system in the years to come.  It is apparent that again, with the apparent carte blanche provided by the deficit, the government is social engineering once again.  Sport has often been a 'way out' for a few individuals from ordinary and poor backgrounds, but now such opportunities are being choked off.  It is very likely that the British teams competing in the 2016 and 2020 Olympics will have have the same social profile as those competing for the UK in 1920 or 1924.  Sport will become an elite activity once more not an opportunity for people from ordinary backgrounds to shine.

Suddenly Acquiring A Teenaged 'Daughter'

Myself and the woman who lives in my house, given the fall in my income since becoming unemployed again, have looked at ways of increasing the household revenue, if not my income.  Like many towns and all cities in the UK, ours has a number of language schools which at this time of year in particular fill with students from across the world, notably other EU states (of which Italy and Spain seem to lead the way) and China.  They come to the UK to learn English and have a bit of a holiday from their parents.  Though increasingly language students are of all ages and business and retired people now come to such schools, their visits tend to be at different times of the year and the summer is dominated by the teenagers.  For many towns, especially run-down seaside resorts they bring in vital funds to the town and while their noise and crowds might be looked down upon disapprovingly by locals, they know that the money is very useful.  The government recently sought to choke off this revenue by effectively saying you could not come and study in the UK until you could speak a pretty high level of English anyway, a good grade at GCSE, a level that the majority of the British population does not have itself.  The industry employs 3000 people and brings £600 million per year to the UK. 

The ripple effects are far wider than that because of the need to accommodate these students.  Unlike, say, university students, most language students who come to the UK only for 2-4 weeks are billeted in private houses usually one at a time, sometimes a couple more.  This brings revenue to literally hundreds of households at any one time.  The going rate seems to be, in the South of England, about £400 per month per student.  Schools vary in size considerably, but having 200 students in one cohort does not seem excessive for the schools I have seen, so let us say each school would be putting £80,000 into the local economy each month.  I have lost count of how many language schools there are in my town, some small, some very large, but it seems apparent that by simply lodging their students in houses across the town they are providing hundreds of thousands of pounds of knock-on money into the economy.

Myself and the woman in my house realised that clearing out one room and providing it for a language student could tap us into these funds.  We had been inundated by offers from schools in vicinity and signed up with three to start with to ensure a constant flow of students.  Under UK regulations if you have language students below the age of 16 you have to undergo a CRB check like teachers and youth workers do, but if they are over 16 you can save the money and of course you get a student who should be responsible for their own welfare.  Thus, we went for this option.  We had our house inspected and were asked about what we could provide and then and sat back and waited for our first student.  We were to provide bed, breakfast and evening meal and a packed lunch when the student went on field trips on the weekend.  Out of the £100 per week this did not see a heavy expense.  Having travelled a lot in my youth as had the woman in my house, we were looking forward to having someone to talk to so she (as it turned out) could practice her English.

I have written before on this blog about avoiding the risk of inadvertently becoming a parent and the dire consequences of that happening.  However, wrapped up in this financial agreement and the business side of things I totally overlooked the pastoral consequences of having a 16-year old Spanish girl living with us for four weeks.  I had enough trouble dealing with a 7-year old and now literally overnight we have a teenager in our midst.  First she needs to be ferried from place to place in our car and the friends she is with too, so that is me breaking off what I am doing to go and collect her.  Her mobile is re-routed via Spain so any texts take hours to reach her so I am wandering round the town scanning groups of teenaged Europeans trying to seek the particular one when she is not at the place she was supposed to be collected from.  I was worried how sinister I must appear and was concerned I would be pulled in by the police.  Certainly the men lurking around there alarmed me and I immediately had nightmares of the student being butchered on her second evening in our town or at least and most likely, being mugged and having her mobile phone stolen.  The school set a 22.00 curfew, but in a house in which we struggle to stay awake passed 20.00, this is a challenge for us.  We gave up waiting up for her and were glad when the school issued her with her bus pass so I was no longer the free taxi service. 

The school she is with is far larger than the average one and has its own catering facilities open 12 hours per day and runs activities seven evenings per week.  This has meant, ironically, that we see our student as little as we presumably would a teenage daughter.  She does not stop for breakfast, just goes from her hour long chore of selecting her clothes and putting on make-up (one error we made at first was not to put a mirror in her bedroom meaning the bathroom was blocked for an hour each morning and before any major social event).  She will not take lunch and we are asleep before she returns.  I worry that in fact she is not eating enough.  After the first couple of nights she has had no meal with us and even eschews the proffered packed lunch at weekends.  Occasionally she remembers to text to tell us of her comings and goings but that is rare and the text usually turns up long after the event.  We have had none of the English conversation around the dining table and our computer has been adapted so that anything you hover over with the cursor comes up with a Spanish translation.

We are not the parents, we are not even in loco parentis, but when you have a young person in your house, especially one who is unfamiliar with your town and who does not seem to be eating enough and going to bed late every night, meaning she is now not rising in time for school, you do get concerned.  However, I suppose in this case we are no more than a bed & breakfast hotel for a guest who only wants the former.  She will soon be gone, but what it has alerted me to is that within 8 years, possibly less, the small boy who lives in my house will probably be just the same and that unless this household breaks up when the house is repossessed as it well might, I will be having to face up to the same sort of demands but permanently.  I suppose with a parent on hand discipline and curfew hours will be able to be enforced in a way we cannot with our guest.  I do feel rather though that I have spent some time with the 'Spirit of Summers Future' and seen all the unease and driving that those years will bring.

Visas: Delay, Humiliation, Expense and Economic Suicide

As I was sitting in a taxi yesterday travelling to a job interview, I got the usual diatribe from the driver about how foreigners are coming over to the UK and taking our jobs. Ironically, I always hear this from white taxi drivers who are clearly in work. This one added a new twist to his complaint by going on about how the foreign workers here send all their money home so they bring no benefit to the UK at all. Of course, bigots always jump over the facts to get to the most extreme aspect they can find. For a start the driver forgot that British workers overseas all around the world send money back to the UK and he would be offended if anyone tried to stop that. Secondly, when it comes to foreigners, all bigots somehow think that those people are exempt from all the laws that everyone living in the UK come under. The key one is that the bulk of workers are taxed at source through P.A.Y.E. (Pay As You Earn) taxation so they are contributing to the British economy every time they are paid. Only those working in the grey or black economies do not pay tax and that goes for anyone in that kind of work no matter their nationality. The third thing is that the driver seemed to assume that all migrant workers subsist without food or accommodation. Foreigners pay rent and in fact are often ripped off; they buy food and other consumer items, so in this way contribute to the economy. Of course, these basic facts never penetrate the minds of these bigots.

I suppose facts never got in the way of prejudice, as in the recent headline from the 'Daily Express': 'Immigrant Baby Boom Costs £1bn' with no realisation that the baby boom is actually among British middle class families who now insist on 3 children to fill up their 4 x 4 rather than having 2 children that they would have had 10 years ago. In addition, it forgets, that whilst immigrants do bring families with them, most economic migration is still by single young males. As the return of thousands of Poles to Poland at the start of the recession proved, these are often not people who have come to Britain to settle and raise a family. What we are seeing in terms of rising population is a long period of prosperity and to some extent a fashion. In the past glamorous celebrities would never talk about children or be photographed with them, now the trend is for them to breed or assemble large families and basically what celebrities do, the rest of the population will ape, when they can afford to. Already the recession has slowed the UK's birth rate.

As an aside, I wonder if there will ever be a taxi company that will advertise itself specifically as having non-racist drivers. I would certainly use them as I am getting sick of having to listen to 20 minutes of racist claptrap which stresses me out when I am on my way somewhere important. I would just love to have someone give me some feminist attitudes or some anti-capitalism campaigning when I got in a taxi. (I suddenly have this image of campaigner-comedian Mark Thomas running a taxi firm in which passengers got a blast of liberal ethics every time they travelled!) These days I tire of trying to catch the taxi drivers out by coming out with some line more extreme than theirs; a favourite was that seized heroin should be made available free to old aged pensioners on the National Health Service having the twin benefits of making the elderly happier and keeping down on future care bills. The other one is to revive Jonathan Swift's sharp satirical essay 'A Modest Proposal' (1729) on the consumption of babies to keep down the Irish population. See: http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

Holiday Visas
As usual I am wandering away from my chosen theme. To some extent this reflects the way my mind works, one thing sparks another and the posting reflects that. I come to visas, and there are lots of facets to these. I cannot tackle all of them so will focus on a couple of factors. Leaving aside work or study, many countries require visas even if you simply wish to go on holiday. The USA's 'War on Terror' has lifted this to a new level effectively forcing other countries to adopt the biometric approach that the US authorities feel is necessary and to some extent spreading US anti-Arab/anti-South Asian bigotry to other countries by default. When the Cold War ended many East European countries realised they could make good money out of enforcing visas that people had to pay for. This had nothing to do with regulating the movement of people, it was simply a national version of local councils' residents' parking schemes, it raised revenue.

France, which in the past was seen as a country sympathetic to peoples of different races, especially non-whites, now has a rigorous approach for visas even just for holidays. To get a visa for a holiday in France you have to go to the special office in South Kensington and are given a time, this is not the time of your appointment, it is the time when they open the doors to the tens of people waiting each day. Typically you will have to wait 7-8 hours to be processed. There are no facilities in the office, so make sure you take a lot of food, water and entertainment especially for children. The place is filled with sobbing, bored children. I suppose the French authorities do this to try to put off people from applying. Any British/EU friends you might have are barred from entering. Once inside applicants are called for interview. They expect children of 5 years old to attend interviews and from a woman I know who went through this process, she had to fight to be able to go into the interview with her 5-year old son who was naturally terrified of being questioned about his holiday plans by strange people in a formal office. I know this approach has long been used by Israeli authorities when families arrive in Israel on holiday, to check for terrorist intentions of the parents, be prepared many innocent people cannot take this level of questioning especially of their children. The attitude is: if you do not like it, do not try to come to our country.

Also be careful in trying to go to France if you are self-employed. You will be seen as unreliable. They assume that people who have work in another country such as the UK, will want to come back to it, but they seem to assume that any self-employed person will happily uproot their business and seek to establish it in France. Anyone who is self-employed needs a letter from their Chamber of Commerce, which in the UK is a club whereas in France is a regulatory body, but the French authorities seem not to understand national differences in this respect. They do not accept letters from a bank and in the case of the woman I know contested whether the branch she used was a genuine one, which would have enraged the manager who signed the letter, I am sure. Often at the South Kensington office, they will forget that they have actually processed you, so the office may close at the end of the day leaving you without your passport and no visa, again you have to fight often to get the documentation you need. It is quite easy to come away from a day there without your passport and no visa, despite paying for it, and having to make another appointment of the same kind. Once you have gone through all of this you get a 6-month visa. If you need another you have to start again. Clearly France is unhappy at receiving tourists from outside the EU and wants to put as many obstacles in the way as possible. These people are not potential immigrants, they are holidaymakers. When applying from the UK rather than an African, Asian or American state, you can assume they have a life in the UK that they are not going to throw over to move to France, though clearly the French authorities think their country is so wonderful that people would give up their legal right to live in another EU state to move there illegally. My suggestion is, if you are a non-EU citizen who wants to go to France, travel instead to Belgium or the Netherlands and simply drive into France as there are no border checks between these countries, you simply pass the border as you drive along the motorway.

Visas for International Students Coming to the UK
The other aspect about visas which has come to my attention is how much a mess the UK has got into over student visas. The 240,000 international students (i.e. students from anywhere outside the EU) form 14% of the university student population of the UK and even in 2004 this brought £4 billion per year (through paying rent; consumption of food, computers, etc. and fees) to the UK economy. The level rose 60% 1999-2004 and by 2020, it is expected that the number of international students in the UK will reach something like 600-700,000. Many universities are heavily dependent on the fees foreigners pay which are usually three times the level a UK student would pay. Income from fees alone amounted to £1.7 billion in 2008, a rise of 58% since 2003. There are 14 universities that have more than 5000 students from outside the EU and given that the average student body of a UK university is 20-24,000 this shows that they are vital to particular institutions. Given that many universities are shedding staff in their hundreds: Exeter got rid of 330 in 2008; Bournemouth 200 between 2007-8; London Metropolitan will be shedding 550-800 with some departments losing 40% of their teaching staff, it is clear that for many universities to survive needs the income international students bring in.

The UK has long been a popular destination for international students but has always faced competition from the USA and Australia. To some extent, the USA reduced its appeal with its harsh policies towards foreigners after September 2001, but eight years on it is recovering its market share. Even Tony Blair recognised the benefit the university 'industry' had to the UK economy. In 1999 and 2006 he extended rights for international students now to stay up to 2 years after completing postgraduate courses (most international students come for Masters courses, not undergraduate ones) and enabled them and their families to work more. He saw that attracting intelligent people to the UK not only had immediate income benefits but longer developmental benefits too.

Contrast that attitude to what is happening now. Reports show that the UK is facing far stiffer competition from across Europe. Portuguese universities have been compelled by their government to teach courses in English; Germany which is aiming to have 7.2 million international students by 2025 charges equivalent to only £55 for student visas compared to £145-325 for a UK visa and the fees are roughly the same as German students will pay rather than three times as more; French universities charge less for foreign students than domestic ones; courses are being taught in English in institutions as far apart as Belgium and Finland. So, in this competitive marketplace, the Border Agency introduces far more stringent entry requirements for students. Each university now has to sponsor each international student who wants to study with them leading to increased bureaucracy; they are also responsible for getting the Border Agency in to expel failed foreign students. There is the cost of the new visa, but the biggest problem is that even students who have got through all the hurdles are not getting their visas. Students from Sri Lanka have to travel to India to get a visa to the UK, those from Malaysia to the Philippines, where the embassy has admitted they are overloaded. Apparently the backlog is 20%, which by my calculation works out as at least £340 million lost to UK universities in fees this year. In addition, there will be lost custom in subsequent years as students opt for cheaper, more efficient rivals to the UK.

Of course, people will say all of this was necessary because people were coming and attending bogus language schools and in fact then working illegally in the UK. The purge of such bogus institutions has been very thorough and has closed down 124 across the UK. However, in the wave of anti-immigrant hysteria the UK is currently experiencing that was not seen as enough and students were caught up in the procedures really designed to limit the number of builders and waiters coming to the UK from outside the EU. As is typical of UK and US policy, legislation is rushed and then regretted at leisure. People might argue: 'well it is fine, university semesters do not begin until October', not realising that most international university students are compelled to attend pre-sessional courses over the Summer to prepare them to study. Those courses have been running, sometimes already for weeks, with many students missing. Ironically, many potential UK students have been turned away this year because of capping on recruitment. Even if these people were let in you would need three of them to replace every single international student, in terms of fees.

Just at the time when universities are struggling the anti-immigrant hysteria has meant they are being kicked while they are down. This will damage what has effectively become a distinct sector of the British service sector. The Border Agency could not have timed their new approach worse. In addition, as is typical in the UK, they totally under-estimated how involved the process was going to be and how many staff and resources it would use up. They knew how many international students came to the UK in an average year but did not bother to put a machinery in place that could cope with it. It seems that British policy is tearing itself in two directions: to promote international students coming and yet make is far harder than ever to do so. International students are keeping many UK universities afloat especially in the recession and I am sure this blunder will mean some closing or certainly contracting severely. Effectively we are handing this billion pound business to Germany, the Netherlands, USA, Australia, etc. on a plate. With such a fiasco at such a competitive time, the UK may never recapture its market share and thus the UK economy as a whole will suffer. I was told that Portsmouth reckons that simply visits by the parents of international students to the city brings it £26 million each year. I did not hear the figure for how much the students themselves will bring. Portsmouth will lose £5.2 million in missed parental visits this year and probably many millions more in international students who are not there.

I think the lesson of these two examples is, fine have visas, but make sure the operation of them is fit for purpose, otherwise you will be damaging your country's business and will give the income such visitors would have provided for you, right into the hands of your rivals. That is a bad move at any time but is a woeful approach in time of recession.

P.P. 09/10/2009: Interesting to read from the BBC that 5000 students from Pakistan have yet to receive their visas to take up their places at British universities and a further 9000 are awaiting the outcome of appeals against the refusal, not by universities, but by the Border Agency, to give them a visa to study in the UK. The government has said the delays are not the fault of moving the visa office for Pakistanis from Islamabad in Pakistan to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (2087 Km; 1297 miles from Islamabad; almost equivalent to having a visa office moved from London to Kiev (a distance of 2131 Km; 1323 miles). The time to process visas has been 60 days, four times the 15-day target and has not been helped by computer failure. Improvements mean that the target should be reached next month, but this is too late for students, who as foreigners, were expected to start vacation classes back in September to begin proper study this month. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8292941.stm

UK Universities: Snobbery and Decay?

I am coming to think that with all the lazy analysis in articles in 'The Guardian' newspaper that I should top reading it. Then again, it is proving to be an excellent prompt for my postings here and without that I would lose out on the contentment I get from blogging. What does strike me, though, is that I post only in the evenings and in my other spare time. The resources at my disposal are only what I can locate on the internet and the occasional newspaper. I assume (possibly wrongly, but I do not think so) that anyone writing for a national newspaper even just as a columnist has access to more research resources than me and they are paid to do it, rather than as a hobby. This is why I call the analysis 'lazy' because they simply do not bother to bring together the information necessary to produce a well-informed article or column piece.

The focus of my irritation today is an article entitled 'Students have been sold a lie' (31st January 2009) written by Decca Aitkenhead. You would assume it was an article about the fact that graduates are gaining less of an advantage from receiving a degree that university and government publicity promised. However, instead you have a very snobby article denigrating the so-called 'new' universities. Before going further, it is worthwhile exploring the different designations of UK universities, the changes in which are part of Decca's complaint.

'Ancient' universities, i.e. pre-late 19th century: the medieval ones - Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and the 'latecomers' (i.e. in the 1820s-30s), St. David's, University College London, Kings College London and Durham.

'Redbrick' universities established in the 19th century: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle (famously featured in the Channel 4 documentary series 'Redbrick') and Sheffield. The term 'redbrick' in common usage expanded in the 1960s to cover any university in a large UK city. An oddity in this category is Keele built in 1949 between the Victorian and 1960s expansions but generally now grouped with these earlier ones. Wikipedia wrongly puts it in the 'plate glass' category.

On Wikipedia I came across a term, I had never heard before: 'plate glass' universities, though apparently it was coined by Michael Beloff in 1968. These were built in the expansion of the 1960s. In my youth they were called the 'new' universities and then were lumped in with 'redbrick'. I suppose this new term is to distinguish them now from the newer 'new' universities, the post-1992 ones. Anyway this grouping includes: East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Lancaster, Sussex, Warwick and York. They were on the edge of medium-sized towns/cities but on greenfield sites, for example East Anglia is on the fringes of Norwich, Sussex close to Brighton and Warwick next to Coventry. Beloff actually neglected many other universities that came in the 1960s expansion but that which we would include in this category: Aston, Bath, Bradford, Brunel, City, Herriot-Watt, Loughborough, Reading, Salford, Southampton, Stirling, Strathclyde, Surrey, Ulster. Again they fit the pattern of the ones above, e.g., Brunel on the western edge of London, Surrey in Guildord, Aston on the edge of Birmingham and Bath, Bradford, Salford, etc. in medium-sized cities. Some universities seem to be left out of these lists, notably those making up the University of Wales.

'New' or 'Post-1992' universities. For the history of these we have to go back to the 1960s with the expansion of higher education. Alongside the universities being built at the time were polytechnics. These were also higher education institutions but with a focus on technical and vocational subjects. They were often run by local authorities, which meant that they could be seen as simply extensions to local secondary and further education. This was despite the fact that many had origins dating back to the 19th century, such as London Polytechnic, established in 1838. They tended to offer 'ordinary' (as opposed to 'honours') degrees. The application process to them was separate to that of universities and people were able to apply to 5 polytechnics and 4 universities simultaneously. Polytechnics offered degrees at all levels including to doctorate. Unlike the universities which monitored their own standards of degree awards all polytechnics were monitored by the independent Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) which ran from 1965-92. Despite this the polytechnics (in contrast to institutions named this in France) were looked down upon as un-academic and inferior. In 1992 all the polytechnics became 'new' universities, though this term was applied more broadly. Those that had been polytechnics are: Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Brighton, Bournemouth, Central Lancashire, Coventry, De Montfort, East London, Glamorgan, Glasgow Caledonian, Greenwich, Hertfordshire, Huddersfield, Kingston, Leeds Metropolitan, Lincoln, Liverpool John Moores, London Metropolitan, London South Bank, Manchester Metropolitan, Middlesex, Napier, Northumbria, Nottingham Trent, Oxford Brookes, Plymouth, Sheffield Hallam, Staffordshire, Sunderland, Teeside, Thames Valley, West of England, Westminster and Wolverhampton. Others were formed from colleges (particularly art or religious colleges) and institutes: Abertay Dundee, University of the Arts, Bath Spa, Bedfordshire, Bolton, Buckinghamshire New, Canterbury Christ, Chester, Chichester, Cumbria, Derby, Edge Hill, Gloucestershire, Glyndwr, Liverpool Hope, University of Wales - Newport, Northampton, Queen Margaret, Robert Gordon, Roehampton, Southampton Solent, Swansea Metropolitan, University of Wales Institute, West of Scotland, Winchester, Worcester and York St. John. From 1992 they could all award their own degrees whereas previously they had often awarded degrees monitored by neighbouring universities.

Post-1992 the new universities have had very varied experiences, some proving very successful, others, notably Thames Valley University and London Metropolitan University (previously North London Polytechnic) facing grave problems (it did as polytechnic anyway). People tend to forget that Kingston and Westminster universities were ever new universities whereas Queen Mary, University of London gets lumped in this category despite being around since the 1880s.

Aside from these designations, the universities have grouped themselves into organisations which have become more important than which category they have put themselves into. The two most prominent groupings are the Russell Group of 'research intensive universities' including parts of the University of London (marked here [L]): Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Imperial [L], Kings College London [L], Leeds, Liverpool, London School of Economics [L], Manchester, Newcastle, University College London [L], Nottingham, Queen's University Belfast, Oxford, Sheffield, Southampton, University College London [L] and Warwick. There is also the 1994 Group which seems pretty similar in purpose ('to promote excellence in research and teaching') it also has ancients and parts of the University of London: Bath, Birkbeck, Durham, East Anglia, Essex, Exeter, Goldsmiths [L], Royal Holloway [L], Lancaster, Leicester, Loughborough, Queen Mary University of London [L], Reading, St. Andrews, School of Oriental and African Studies [L], Surrey, Sussex and York.

Now Aitkenhead whines that potential students are being mislead by the suggestion that all universities are the same. Thus, she feels that the 'very people who are being targeted by university access expansion are those with the least chance of knowing what they are getting'. This is incredibly patronising, especially as even Oxford and Cambridge have made efforts to expand their intake. The average 13-year old regularly access Wikipedia as do their parents and if I can find information about the different standings of universities, does she think that someone considering going to a university (let alone parents who will spend thousands sending their child to university) will not take just a few minutes to Google the institutions they are considering? Even if they do not do that, she seems oblivious to the discussion that goes on at the school gate or in the Years 12 and 13 common room. We are all savvy consumers and will spend even more effort looking at universities than we would buying a car, a house, an ipod or a holiday. Aitkenhead misses the fact that whilst we have moved from the elitist system last seen in the early 1990s when only 6% of 18-year olds went to university to a mass-delivery system in which over 40% go, the expansion has been minimal into the lower social classes, it has simply been among the middle classes who whereas in 1985 might have sent one of their three offspring to university now see all three going. To think that anyone from any social class goes to university without care is a false assumption. In the 1980s you wrote away for printed prospectuses nowadays you simply access the pdf copy, but the choosing has not got any less careful.

Aitkenhead feels that universities are presented as all the same, but that shows how poor a shopper she is. Of course every university presents it best side. No university is going to say that 'we are in run-down 1980s buildings'; 'you will be living out in run-down Victorian terrace that is badly maintained' though that is an experience across the university sector. Portraying the University of Oxford accurately you would have to say, 'many of the rooms are medieval, the floors slant and there is no disabled access'; 'the central library' is poorly lit and cramped; there are few computer points and every time you step out you have to tackle crowds of tourists'; try using the London School of Economics Library and finding even a desk to work and the ground floor is noisier than a railway station.

At all universities there is bad teaching and poor courses as well as good ones. Aitkenhead bemoans of the 22% drop-out rate and this shows her poor research. Has she made any effort to look back to the 1980s or 1960s? Even then some courses were losing 30-40% of their students. Some universities such as Bristol were renowned in the 1980s for setting first term exams so hard that 10% of the students were removed before Christmas. She entirely neglects the fact that with 40% of 18-year olds going to university many more with mental health and other challenges are now arriving at university and finding it difficult to continue.

The thing that Aitkenhead seems to feel are only the problems of post-1992 universities are more widespred than she thinks. First she acknowledges that some of these universities are doing well, such as Manchester Metropolitan, are doing very well, and she could easily add Middlesex, Oxford Brookes and Leeds Metropolitan. However, she neglects that many Russell Group and 1994 Group universities have problems too. Her reference to violence (and 'town-gown' violence dates back decades, even centuries) neglects the fact that many old and new universities share the same town, Leeds and Leeds Metropolitan; Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam; Oxford and Oxford Brookes have campuses within sight of each other; Winchester and Southampton Solent have sites within a few minutes' walk parts of Southampton. These are just ones I have driven passed personally. The students of the different institutions live in the same streets, shop at the same shops and socialise in the same pubs and clubs, so face the same risks from crime and violence. This is more about the issues facing our cities as a whole than particular universities.

Aitkenhead says '[i]f middle class sons were dealing with fights outside their halls, their parents would be up in arms', they do and they are. This complaint makes a number of errors. First, all universities have middle class students. There is are some which have more and some which have more working class students, but there is no strict segregation. Students go where the course they want is run and where they can afford to travel to/live. Increasingly students from all classes are not travelling so far from home to attend university. Second why does she imagine working class parents are more passive on behalf of their children than middle class parents? Her whole article has this fantasy of cow-like, forelock-tugging working class people, blinded by the wonder of getting a child to university to the extent that they make no complaint. Perhaps she just thinks they are not articulate enough to complain. Has she been to any school recently or even read any education articles? All schools and universities face challenges and demands from parents, often very vigorous ones, and again there is no distinction in class for this intervention. Surely Aitkenhead must have read the articles about how much more involved parents are in their children's education; universities now put on special events and produce publications for them, something they never did in the 1980s. People are up in arms about these issues. Aitkenhead: ave you never even bothered to access any parently discussion boards? Have you heard of researching an article? It consists of more than sitting in a pub listening to friends whine.

Aitkenhead's snobbery continues. She speaks of a student from a photography course facing £25,000 of debt. There are students from all sorts of courses and all sorts of university with such debt. I have been discussing the problems that that brings on this blog on and off for the past two years and Aitkenhead could have found references to it from her own newspaper amongst many others let alone from online and broadcast sources. In fact if you go to a more upper market university you could find yourself spending more. Students graduating from Oxford do not escape such debt. Of course for Aitkenhead that kind of debt is worth it '[i]f university was giving [students] ... the kind of social and cultural incubation I enjoyed'. Again she neglects the fact that this happens, but students are no longer part of an elite system so they mix with a wider range of people like themselves rather than gaining access to elite groupings. In the UK, getting access to so many of our professions is still about who you know rather than what you know. Even if you go to Oxford and Cambridge if you associate with the type of people you would have met at the school you came from then you are not going to get the leg-up that you would do if you came from Eton or Harrow schools or are now able to associate with such people. Added to this is British xenophobia which means they stay mixing with Britons being hostile to mixing with the increasing number of students from Beijing or Berlin, so actually cutting themselves off from the 'social and cultural incubation' that would help them not just get a job in the UK but across the world, but of course to Aitkenhead, that would be no benefit (and it seems many British students, no matter what their social class, share that view).

There is a huge difference between universities (and between different courses within each university) and no-one believes otherwise. These terribly naive people who Aitkenhead feels have been falsely sold a course that gives them no social or economic benefits are very small in number. Her suggestion that their children should work their way up through the ranks of some profession is incredibly dated. You do not even get to begin working your way up these days until you have the entrance ticket of a degree.

In adopting this snobbery, wanting her low-quality institutions relabelled, Aitkenhead misses the whole point about the restrictions on social mobility and progression in British society, the true impact of adopting a policy of mass higher education and the costs of such education to individuals (which seems to be being realised though not explicitly, surely 'non-repayable' funds are beginning to look like the grants of old). No university is going to say it is a poor place to study, it would be suicidal to do so. However, universities cannot isolate themselves from the problems facing the cities that they are located in. Consumers of all things, including education, are both knowledgeable and demanding. Information both official and unofficial about all universities, is easily available, there are a plethora of league tables which undermine any misselling that Aitkenhead believes is so prevalent.

The first part of her article goes on about students not paying attention to lectures and the fact that you can buy essays. Neither of these things has changed in 20-40 years, they are probably just more visible. The inattention of young people is a problem right across the years and society, it is not an aspect of attending any particular university. It stems from children knowing that adults are so hemmed in by regulation that they lack sanctions to demand attention. Conversely, any student wasting their time in a lecture or class is throwing away their (or more likely their parent's money). We hear a great deal about students demanding things for their fees, but effectively then fritter it away. However, we could be back at 1930s Oxford and seeing youth that was inattentive and frittering away their money and their gifts. For Aitkenhead it seems more offensive because these are ordinary people rather than an elite. Buying essays is nothing new either, it is just in the age of the internet it is more visible and easier,though conversely, using software that is available in all UK universities, far easier to detect. She neglects to point out how many students are thrown off courses (and in the case of subjects like Law, banned from working in the profession) for cheating or copying.

Aitkenhead says that the photography student will never get the job he wants. Of course many people never end up with the job that they want, no matter which university they attended. In fact the UK has always had this, in the 1980s, more managing directors of UK companies had History degrees than any other subject. Whilst there is an emphasis on 'employability skills' and courses for work, university is still about developing thinking, adaptable people who can turn their hand to many things. In one office job I had where there were a lot of musicians and writers working a colleague complained that it was 'the hall of lost dreams', I contested that saying the people were in good jobs which thus allowed them to pursue their musical and writing interests more fully than if they were trying to scrape by on them alone. You do not have to be on the road or in a garret all the time to perform in public or get a novel published. A good degree prepares people for work. Some people will get their dream job, some will not, but there are many other factors than simply the course you took. For example a student graduating from a course in 2009 will find it far harder to get any work, let alone their dream job than a student coming from the same course with the same grades would have done in 2008 or 2007.

What Aitkenhead effectively wants is a return to the elitist university system in which intellectual middle class students simply mix with intellectual middle class students on leafy campuses cut off from the world, without having to pay for anything and then get a job easily at the end of it. This was never the true pattern: anyone who has visited buildings of the University of Oxford one of the most elite and privileged of the UK universities will know that even they do not escape reality however hard they might fight it. This journalist missed an opportunity and instead simply banged out her ill-informed prejudices about universities and offers no suggestions for solutions. She bemoans (working class) people's ignorance, when those people do not exist. There might not be a working class consciousness, but people from all strata of British society are skilled, critical even aggressive consumers who pride themselves in not having the wool pulled over their eyes. She pities her imagined passive working class families' pride in small gains without noting that in the UK, a small gain in a generation is all that society permits us to get. I attended a good university and got a good degree but have never had a job that lasted more than four years and am certainly not my dream job. I am the first and last person in my family to go to university. The issue of the lack of social mobility that holds back so many graduates would have been far more worthy of Aitkenhead's attention. Saying that, any poorly-researched article like this one was, is probably a waste of time.

P.P. - 05/04/2009: I was stunned to read that Decca Aitkenhead has received an award for interview with Alastair Darling. I can only think it stemmed from her 'scoop' about the severity of the recession as in my mind she has never shown any particular journalistic ability and is very lazy in her research. I suppose one should not be surprised at a newspaper who actually employs Tristam Hunt to interview people, a man whose ego fills two-thirds of any article he is connected with.

Persecuting Students

As I travel around the South of England and elsewhere in the UK I pick up odd local leaflets and I came across one this week which fitted in with attitudes I have been picking up in a number of towns. I noticed it a couple of years ago in Southampton when the council started complaining about the number of streets that had students living in them. With 36,000 students in total at the city's two universities with in a total population of 217,000 people in the city at the last census in 2001, it is not surprising that students are prominent. University student numbers have rocketed since the 1990s with the government aiming to have 50% of 18 year olds in nay year attending university. There are currently 800,000 people who are 18 this year, which means the objective is 400,000 university students each year. Given that most undergraduate courses last 3 years, that means potentially 1.2 million students just doing undergraduate degrees at one time. This level is being reached with 451,000 students starting undergraduate courses in 2008 plus 13,000 student nurses, though of the total number of undergraduate students from outside the EU was 240,000 so possibly 50-60,000 new non-EU students each year as many of them go on to postgraduate courses or research. Anyway, we have hundreds of thousands of students in the UK and the level is likely to increase. After a small dip in 2006-7 recruitment has picked up again. The government policy is to encourage and sustain such levels.

Of course the population in towns seem to want anything different. The only city I have visited that seemed to like the money students bring in is Portsmouth which reckoned their parents visiting alone broung £26 million to the city which only has one university with 19,000 students of whom 3,000 are from overseas. It seems to every other town I visit students are loathed and are seen as mucking up the supposed local community feel of towns. Of course, in fact through stimulating hatred they create a negative integration of the community which ranks up against them. This was clearly expressed in the leaflet I saw. It did not ask if you had 'student problems' it simply stated that you did in this area and that they were reducing the value of your property. It then gave a whole long list of people to telephone in order to harrass students, though it whined that the police were pretty powerless. Clearly the author of the leaflet who gives his name sees all students as bad and needing constant harrassment.

I accept that there are noisy students, but they are the minority. There are also very noisy families, noisy elderly people, noisy single working men and women. Interestingly a lot of the problems the leaflets says are cause by students are: wheely bins on the pavement, overgrown hedges, cars on the pavement and 'To Let' signs are actually problems caused by all sorts of people. Many students do not have cars and in most of the streets I drive down the bulk of vehicles parked on the pavement are company vans and 4 x 4s driven by wealthy men and women, not students. Wheely bins get pulled on to the pavement by dustbin men not the public so in any street you will find them all on the pavement at any one time. Overgrown hedges and 'To Let' signs are not things that students control, these are the responsibility of the landlords/letting agents, who I feel are actually responsible for much of the bad problems in towns by not tending to the properties they rent out and constantly moving people on. When you are being hounded by a landlord you have no pride in the place where you live. In my street eight houses almost in a row, have been emptied even though the tenants have only been there four months, because the letting agency went bankrupt and the properties have been taken over by someone else.

As with all groups in a community there are always some people who cause problems, but students are not over-represented in this group. Should we throw out every family with young children because the children on one family run around stealing things, breaking windows and so on? No, because the other ninety families in the street are fine. What are these anti-student protestors seeking? All students purged from a town? Young people to behave like middle-aged people? They have no rational plan, they simply want to get angry and to turn their hatred and prejudice against someone. People have come down on assaults (verbal and physical) on asylum seekers and immigrants so these angry bigoted people have sought out a new target and see students as an easy one. Within increasing numbers of students coming from abroad it allows racial prejudice to come in through the back door too.

Ironically seeing university students as 'outsiders' is increasingly wrong. A lot of this is due to the cost of study. In Scotland 60% of students go to their local university, in England it is over 33% and on average all students now are likely to travel only 28 miles (45 Km) to attend university if they are from working class background and 63 miles (101 Km) if they come from middle class background. Thus most of the UK students studying at a university these days will come from the same town as the university or the surrounding county (of course not all towns have universities and some have two which will have an impact, by definition though people have to leave rural areas and small towns if they want to go to university, they cannot attend their 'local' one). More university students than ever before live with their parents while they are studying. Half of students have to do paid work to pay for basic living expenses and most students do as much paid work as they do study, adding up to 31-40 hours per week for these things combined. So, in fact, the student of 2008, does not resemble students of 'The Young Ones' (1982), they work a lot and they tend to study in the town where they live or the nearest urban area to their parental home. Students make up a great deal of staff across the service sector from health care and especially care for the elderly, to working in your local pub or shop, without their cheap labour a lot of these places would close down (check out how many students are working in your average high street, they cannot all be replaced by immigrants).

So, persecution of students is as bad as prejudice against any group in society. It is simply being used by ignorant, brutal men and women to let their anger out at something rather really trying to improve themselves rather than looking around trying to find a new target. A lot of the 'student problem' is in fact the more pervasive 'landlord problem' and I see no-one sending out leaflets about their nasty behaviour.

Putting Young People in Demonised Categories

One thing which is noticeable when talking to the 6-year old who lives in my house, is how his school demonises 'teenagers'. His school only takes children up to the age of 11 so seems to feel free to portray teenagers as responsible for all the crime in the local neighbourhood. This has been done to such an extent that to this boy and his friends the term no longer designates a period of life most of us go through, but has become synonymous with the word 'criminal' or at least 'delinquent'. In the past we clarified our labelling and they were called 'teenage delinquents' to distinguish them from normal teenagers, but that distinction seems to have disappeared. Of course some of the crime in the neighbourhood is committed by teenagers but a lot of it is not. When a bench was stolen from the school playground, teenagers were blamed. If it had been found turned upside down in the nearby park with tags sprayed all over it, I might have agreed, but it entirely disappeared from the district. No teenagers could be bothered to carry a heavy wooden bench for three miles. It is clear it was stolen to order by people with access to a van and able to leave no trace, this does not sound like teenagers. Yet, the school somehow feels it has to be teenagers and not older criminals.

What situation does this leave the 6-year old and I imagine all the other children in the school as they edge towards becoming teenagers themselves? I know in comedy, notably Harry Enfield's teenage character, Kevin, they mutate into a surly, argumentative being. However, now these children also imagine that they turn into criminals automatically too. This has grown to the extent that when the six year old sees teenagers he assumes they are committing a crime. We saw three boys probably ages 12-14 carrying a sofa and he said they must have stolen it. Then we saw them stopping at the house of an elderly woman and delivering it to her. It became clear she had bought it from a nearby second hand store but had been unable to transport it home. These boys were actually aiding their community but the view of the 6-year old had been so distorted he simply assumed a crime was being committed. Becoming a teenager is very tough anyway, you go through puberty and have all the issues of peer pressure, developing interest in the opposite sex (or the same sex) in a sexual way, acne, deciding what academic path you are going to go down, image issues and so on. There is often pressure to commit crime petty or more serious. However, the way that the school has been educating these pupils is that, well of course they will all commit crime because that is what teenagers do, they cannot help themselves. Coming from a Christian school this is a terrible abdication of direction for their pupils.

The bulk of teenagers never commit a crime, just as the bulk of the population never commits a crime. So why is the school not pointing out role models of teenagers who make a positive contribution? In the district there are Scouts, Guides, Boys' Brigade, martial arts, sports, dancing and drama clubs and other societies through which teenagers do a great deal. Why are they not pointing to them so that in the next few years when their pupils are fed along the conveyor belt of life into being teenagers they can see that crime is not the only option and that they can make moral judgements which are surely part of what being a Christian is about, if not simply about being a human in a civilised society. The school offers to alternative to the pupils, it is almost as if they have been damned to being criminal teenagers and nothing they can do with get them away from this predestined path. They do not even do what private schools are and try to create 'young fogeys', i.e. children with middle-aged attitudes, you know the sort, painfully apparent in the UK certainly, and from what I have seen New England too, they are 40 at 14 and miss out on the important challenges and test of character during their teenage years and ultimately find coping with life difficult even if they have avoided the seemingly inevitable criminal path.

Even when young people have managed to get to the end of their teenage years having been condemned as inherently criminal throughout, they are then beaten with the stick of being a 'student'. Of course those who do not continue study can end up in criminal circumstances, but it seems ironic that in the UK those who try to improve themselves are condemned almost as severely as those who try to find unskilled work and are blamed for living off state benefits. This whole attitude seems weird. Where does the population want people aged 13-26 to go for that period? They seem to simply want them to disappear into thin air and reappear in their late 20s. There is a meeting I saw advertised this week in a town in the South of England, it begins with the line 'due to an unprecedented influx of students into this area', which immediately is a lie. The university has been there for a couple of decades and students have always lived near it. The large increase in numbers going to university was in the late 1990s and early 2000s and whilst there are year-on-year fluctuations, there has been no huge leap, it is just the locals are becoming resentful of students. Anyway, they are going to seek a 'solution'. Students have become so demonised in this area that the approach is beginning to smack of persecution. The only tolerable option seems to be simply to drive them out of the town.

It seems that the only council I am aware of who know what financial benefit students bring to a town is Portsmouth. Neighbouring Southampton wants to restrict the amount of student accommodation in the city and Bournemouth farther West along the coast is beginning to behave the same. The attitude towards students is now becoming like that towards prisons or needle exchange centres or even wind turbines. People want more of them to be built, as long as they are not in their area. Britain's development is being slowed by this attitude.

In Bournemouth the university suggested that it buy and develop a derelict retail site be turned into a new student hall even though it is a number of miles from the university campus. It would hold 7-800 students, equivalent to, say, 160 households of students removed from houses across the town. However, complaints have been raised about this scheme too. So what do people want? They do not want students living in their streets and they do not want them in an area away from residential houses. Again they simply want them to disappear into thin air. If they did, suddenly a lot of the shops that those people like would lose a great deal of custom. Bournemouth University has 16,000 students who literally pump millions of pounds into the local economy, but the local population would rather forego that and gripe about young people. They will neither assimilate the students nor ghettoise them, they just want them gone. I can understand that the seasonal pattern of students do disrupt the nature of a locale. Partly this is caused by landlords simply buying up as many properties as they can to rent out to students. I know one road where six houses in a row are owned by a single landlord and rented to students, they lie empty all Summer. Of course no-one would dare say that the patterns of purchase of landlords should be restricted, because, that would be restriction of free exploitative capitalism, so, instead the blame has to be put on the tenants (as always!), who in this case are students.

Of course there are students who behave badly. Then again there are people aged 18-21, students or not who behave badly. A lot of that stems from Britain's appallingly immature approach to alcohol consumption which marks us out sharply from our European neighbours. Every weekend though I can see men and especially women in their 30s and 40s vomiting into gutters just like younger people, in fact often worse, because they have more money than the students trying to work their way through university. In fact in a pub these days the student is far more likely to be behind the bar working than in front of it consuming as almost all UK students now do many hours of paid work each week to keep down their vast debts. So, I accept there are bad students, but as with teenagers they remain the minority. The ironic thing I have found over the past few years is the sharp criticism of students during the Summer and around Christmas. People portray them as 'outsiders' coming to their town and causing problems, without thinking that at those times of the year, the students around are actually the children of the local population who have come home from university for the vacation. Of course, the reality never gets in the way of demonising young people.

The UK population needs to rethink how it interacts with teenagers and students. At the moment the approach is to condemn them all as criminals and rowdy louts. No positive role models of young people that accept that it is hard being young especially in these times when so many opportunities are being snuffed out and young people face so much pressure to behave in ways that are deemed 'tolerable'. Even when they behave perfectly fine there is no credit given, which produces a terribly nihilistic attitude among the young people. Why should they bother to try if they are still going to be lumped into a huge demonised category? That is not going to resolve tensions in communities. You might as well say, that because old people move slowly and smell, and take up the pavements with their walking frames and their electric wheelchairs, and because they play their television so loud you can hear it doors away and yappy dogs, that they must be banned from town centres. This is the ridiculous level to which young people are being categorised negatively. The UK police and local authorities have more powers to prevent 'anti-social' behaviour than probably any other state in the EU (possibly excepting Germany) and so if there is wrong or disruptive behaviour by people, no matter what their age, it can be stopped, there is no need to keep rubbing in the complaints, which generally impact most against the teenagers and students who are not behaving badly. Being a teenager or a student is not a bad thing in itself, it is individuals who decide to behave, to say otherwise is no different to the Nazis saying that Jews were evil, or apartheid South Africa that blacks were stupid and lazy. See individuals for what they are, do not simply read the negative label you assign all the people of that type.

P.P. 18/11/2008 I posted this just at the right time. Today I read a report on the BBC website which highlights a Barnardo's research which shows young people are 'casually condemned' with 54% of adults thinking children 'behave like animals', 43% said they felt adults needed to be protected from children and over a third thought the streets were 'infested' with children. Comments on websites of national newspapers said teenagers were 'feral' and should be 'shot'. Taking up this line, Barnardo's is running an advertisement in which adults are shown as hunting down 'vermin', i.e. teenagers. There is no denying that there are young people who do commit crime. However, whereas people think teenagers commit 50% of crime, in fact they only commit 12%. You are at more danger by far from adults than from teenagers. The United Nations last month highlighted Britain's intolerance to young people. This is unsurprising given that even schools who should be highlighting the achievements of good children are simply putting out the same negative stereotypes. Consequently it is unsurprising the attitudes shown up by this research suggests that the only solution many adults can think of is violence. None of them take responsibility for the fact that some children end up this way. The whole response is irrational, you cannot eliminate a whole generation and in fact they are far less of a problem than is assumed. Alienating young people just exacerbates the problem. Adults who can make their voices heard are just scapegoating young people who cannot.