Happy Christmas

Opposing fee's. Opposing violence

UMSA students with Medway Labour Council candidates

Medway Labour activists stood with the Universities at Medway Students Association (UMSA) today in support of the NUS campaign to oppose the Conservative and Liberal Democrat hike in fee's to £9,000 per year.

A hike in fee's that will leave a middle-class grammar school child in Medway a debt of £25,000 and a medical student a debt of £50,000

This blog believe it is grossly unfair that intelligent people should be penalised at the earliest point in their professional lives with unmanageable levels of debt. This blog does not believe that a 17 year old should face a financial burden which will weigh him/her down for close to two decades, and at a time when leaving University, they are joining an unstable employment market and thinking about housing and perhaps marriage.

The Conservatives opposed tuition fee's in 2003 under Howard and Ian Duncan-Smith. They have undertaken a change in stance, blaming the deficit, knowing full well that the deficit reduction period is driven on an electoral cycle (four years) and not an economic cycle. They have made a political choice out of ideology - marketisation of the University sector, marketisation of trains, marketisation of schools. These are all choices.

Around 50,000 students, lecturers and members of the general public took part in what is being labelled as the biggest student demonstration in a generation, jointly organised by NUS and the University and College Union (UCU). The majority marching were doing so peacefully.

The march covered a route pre-approved by police from Horse Guards Avenue to a rally outside the Tate Britain where protestors heard from UCU General Secretary Sally Hunt, NUS president Aaron Porter and TUC deputy general secretary Frances O'Grady.

The rally focused on the Liberal Democrats who opposed tuition fee's for the General Election in May. They pledged to students they would never support an increase. They pledged to student families that any increase in fee's would be regressive. They have betrayed their voters and for that in May 2011 they face decimation in Medway.

NUS will target Liberal Democrat MPs for a recall ballot if they betray voters trust and vote for fee hikes.

NUS and not one member of its executive team support violent action. It was a minority of individuals who hijacked a just cause for personal ends.

The Tory spinners tonight are making out that the entire NUS protest was violent and was hell-bent on disorder. They can casually sneer at the hard-pressed middle class families of Medway but the fact is Mark Reckless, Tracey Crouch and Rehman Chisthi will leave an average grammar school pupil from Medway a £25,000 legacy of debt, before he/she starts working. If you become a medic, and help save peoples lives, you will have a £50,000 debt. It is the wrong values. It is Tory values.

Next week the windows will be be replaced, the glass cleared, the signs removed - but young people will still have the threat of Tory debt. Parents, pupils, teachers and lecturers all oppose a rise in fee's.

Today, they made that point.

A £9,000 fee is regressive. It is wrong. It is Conservative Party ideology against the interests of the majority of people in this Country.

Lib Dem Conference Split

The Cameron-Clegg love in. All Lib Dem announcements vetted by Downing Street...

The Liberal Democrat leadership is under assault from its own party today as the membership of the Party attack Nick Clegg and the minority who have usurped the party and shifted it to the right.

Measures announced today, all of course vetted by Downing Street, will not prevent acrimony in full public view as the membership comes to realise it has been manipulated into supporting a Conservative agenda of vicious cuts to the public sector.

Senior Liberal Democrat MP, Mike Hancock (Portsmouth South) has written to Nick Clegg ahead of his leader's speech to conference saying that he should end the dictatorship over the party by 20 Lib Dem ministers.

In his letter, he says that anything that goes beyond the coalition agreement should come back to the party's democratic triple lock procedures as defined by the party constitution. He points out that this did not happen with the VAT rise or the Academies Bill - measures that he voted against.

Mike Hancock said:

"If Nick wants to change the party's constitution then he should bring forward the appropriate motions to conference, otherwise he should abide by it."

Mike also calls for the party not to abandon its traditional support of the public sector.

He invokes Nick Clegg's words to the 2008 party conference: "In Britain today, some people are still more free than others. Pensioners spending a whole winter in the bedroom, because it's the only room they can afford to heat. That isn't freedom. Children shunted from one damp, temporary flat to another - sharing a bed with their parents because there's no space for a room of their own. That isn't freedom."

Mike calls the cuts to housing benefit vindictive and wants them not to go ahead. Mike Hancock said: "I don't think it is easy to live on benefits today - but if PM, Deputy Prime Minister and ministers think it is then I invite them to do so for a month."

Mike said:

"Nick can make it clear to the party in his leader's speech that we are not abandoning our way of conducting our business or our values. I hope he does so."

The membership were given a clue to the position of Nick Clegg in an interview on Saturday when he made clear that the party was no longer a party of the left. Clegg has betrayed his party, his values and is leading them off an electoral cliff.

Who is the greater fool? The fool, or the fool that follows?