Standing up for students

Dec 5 2010 by Ian Robson, Sunday Sun

SOMEONE needs to speak up for our poor put-upon students and it might as well be me.

Revolting they may be, with their unwashed socks and smelly underpants, but I have every sympathy for their protests over what are essentially plans to limit university education to the rich.

Are you from an ordinary working-class background, with a few brains, in this rotten Con-Dem Nation?

You have no chance of higher education unless you go into serious debt!

Politicians from the Liberal Democrats had promised to oppose rises in tuition fees.

It was the biggest, fastest, most brazen broken promise in recent political history and the party should be ashamed of themselves.

There is talk of the Tory lap dogs abstaining in the vote for increased fees. If they had the courage of yesterday’s convictions they would go one step further and vote against the proposal.

Abstention is little more than a coward’s way out and the former Lib Dems – surely they are no longer a party in their own right after rolling over so comprehensively – are not short of cowards.

So, kids, go ahead and protest. Protest with energy, with righteous indignation, with imagination, but keep it peaceful.

Most of us are on your side but only if the demonstrations remain peaceful.

For their part the police should stop seeing students as the enemy.

I have heard that some students, simply caught up in the protests as bystanders, have been stopped from going back to their halls of residence. That’s not the right way to win friends in the student community.

And for their part lecturers should actually do some value-for-money lecturing. Many students have very little face-time with their lecturers.

It’s partly because university students are expected to get on with it but also because lecturers are too busy doing their own research.

It’s time to put personal research aside for a while. And do more to spend the £7000 students will pay each year actually on the students.

The Tories in the corner

IT’S entertaining to play Spot the Tory in these days of political polarisation.

A peer was forced to apologise when he said child benefit cuts would discourage the middle classes from breeding. Earlier another politician, a lord no less, said we had never had it so good.

Howard Flight and Lord Young are true blue Conservatives.

David Cameron was said to be angry with both men but you have to wonder if it was all spin.

Perhaps Flight and Young really are representative of the people who are running the country these days but, like the elephant in the room, you just don’t mention it.