Plenty of time for our Tory overlords to take advantage of those two missed opportunities…
My point was that we (as seems to be the way) are desperately trying to copy a model from the US that can be seen to be a complete fuck up by any measure other than making a select few obscenely rich. Healthcare is not getting better, Student loans and tuition costs are not getting better, minimum wage isn’t getting any better (did you know you have to be 23 to get the full minimum wage!) , our infrastructure is shit and getting worse, housing is broken, utilities are broken
I’m constantly torn on the subject of free degree education. I had got to a place where I thought it should just be free, as the progressive nature of tax automatically means that the higher earners pay proportionately more.
However, I then read an interesting piece about the lack of investment in those without degrees - they don’t get much after fairly basic apprenticeship schemes. Subsidised degrees can therefore be seen, to some extent, as giving money to the middle classes and denying it to the working classes.
So currently I like the idea of people having an individual credit that they can use for educational purposes. Whether it should cover the full cost of a degree including maintenance, I’m not sure. But I do think that it should be paid from general taxation, and hence by me as well, rather than merely by the recipients.
I think further education should be free but that absolutely does not only mean degrees. Expanding degree availability so broadly was a stupid idea. We need vocational and practical training options
And we need to allow courses that have no obvious link to employment. If firms want to train people in a specific way then they can work with educators to design courses and they can pay for them - its basically what british aerospace did when they set up my degree - and they sponsored all bar one student.
Back in the day what they got was ‘paid’, not only after the apprenticeship scheme but also during it. I got the full grant when I was a student but when I left uni my school contemporaries who had gone to work instead were running half-decent cars and buying houses.
Call me old-fashioned (again) but access to uni ought to be based on the ability to benefit from it, not on class. If it isn’t then that’s the problem which needs fixing, rather than excluding the poor by not supporting students with the costs of study, the biggest of which might very well be the lack of an income to feed, clothe and house themselves.
It’s not just the number of guns, using them at the drop of a hat seems ingrained in their DNA. There are many countries with high gun ownership per capita that don’t have proportionally anywhere near the same amount of gun crime or mass murders as the US. There is cultural issue in the US that needs addressed.
