Rat Salad Days - Why The Browne Report Is A Load Of Brown Stuff.

As the findings of the Browne Report sink in (in summary, 'Pay Up or Piss Off'), let’s dwell on the real issues at stake here.

Like the hypocrisy. Some pampered had-it-all boomers love to whine that in their day only the top 5% got into university and the rest got jobs. (Ergo, all the young 'uns today should pay through the nose for what their predecessors got for free.) I feel a strange urge to shout back that this is just another spin on the 'Do As I Say, Not As I Do' argument. And then brick their windows.

Plus it sort of misses the fact that in those days there were other options for post-A Level students. Like lots of jobs that didn't need a degree. You'd be surprised at just how many shit-shovelling, low-level, braindead office, reception and call centre jobs require a BA now. Images of some blessed soul in bellbottoms climbing the ladder to paradise and then kicking it away somehow leap to mind. There was a time when you didn't need a degree to be a nurse, for example. Or, for that matter, a businessman or a bank manager. You just needed a brain, and debt was seen - for some reason - as a Very Bad Thing.

Or how about the doublethink? Many a free market maven (or 'dogmatic arsehole' as I like to call them) scream that students gain the most from their degrees so should pay most of the cost. This sounds like a strong argument until you realise, by definition, that the whole point of education is to benefit the recipient. I may well have greater earning power by having a degree, but I also earn more for being able to add up and read too. By such a standard should we also charge for GCSEs, Primary Schools and Infant Schools? Actually, pretend I didn't say that. It might give them ideas.

Then there's the old chestnut - 'why should the dustman who didn't go to university pay for those that do?' Well, Mr. Dustman will no doubt change his tune pretty damn fast when one of the Dustchildren gets into Leeds Met. Secondly, we already pay for things that do not have a direct benefit for us, but are still for the greater good. Like Mr. Dustman's medical care and pension or his children's benefits if they are unemployed, even if it means not a jot for you if they live or die. You see, that's how society works - we help each other out, even if there isn't a direct payback.

But the argument is flawed in another way too. If degrees really do improve the lives of students* then any (economic) gains are threatened by saddling those same students with crushing debts. Therefore, these people are arguing that students should be benefited by education but only in a way that does not benefit them. That makes sense if you are an idiot.

What doesn't make sense, though, are the social costs. There is the knock-on effect of parents having to divert their finances to helping their kids through the BA/BSc grinder. And then there are those graduates who have to put off buying a house or having children because of the debts they are servicing. This does not bode well for healthy, secure societies. But hey! They get a degree!

Ultimately, it is the lack of honesty that is most galling. What most fees advocates really want is all the (economic) windfalls of a well-educated society, but they sure as hell don't actually want to cough up for it. Hence why sane ideas like a graduate tax were dropped by the Coalition. No one wants to spread the cost even though this would be both more just and sensible. And curiously, very few recipients of free university education seem willing to pay for the benefits their degrees have given them over the years and decades. Nor do they seem to feel any shame for betraying the young in that artful way that horrible old bastards tend to do in this country.

Nor does anyone admit that universities are now just another cog in the economy. Joyless and miserablist as this is, it is also very naive. The skills we all thought the country needed in 1970 or 2008 were quite different from the ones that turned out to be useful. And society needs thinkers as well as doers and office fodder. Adam Smith didn't have an MBA, after all. He was a philosopher.

But what does it say about us? We are willing to condemn future generations to £35k debts, if they’re lucky. And yet we still vote for white elephants like the Olympics, Trident and a bloated NHS bureaucracy. It is a hard-faced penny-pinching age we live in, in part through necessity. But the thing to remember about misers is that in the end they are the living embodiments of false economy.

* Considering that Alan Turing's Maths degree and Sylvia Plath's English MA didn't stop them topping themselves, one must presume this is solely an economic argument.

Teabaggers & The Grizzly Paradox.

The Tea Party movement is fundamentally self-defeating. It is founded on grievance, has a naively malign view of politics and has a sort of paranoid nuttiness that would be funny if it wasn't so frightening.

Yes, it's the Militant Tendency reincarnated as a right wing* nutjob fringe, with the only hope being that they will make the Republican Party as unelectable as the UK Labour Party in the 1980s, as it is equally culpable in letting its rogues take over and run amok. The parallels between both Militant and Tea Party are surprising, and yet clear - both emerged from a deep trauma in the parts of the body politic they represent, and in the end did or will do even more harm to them.

The centre, meanwhile always prevails eventually, and it is foolish to stake so much on a lumpen WASP ragemob (token exceptions notwithstanding**) just at the point when that demographic starts to fade away into also-ran status with all the other adjective-Americans. Regardless of the harm they do on their way down, this is the death spasm of a certain kind of America, with certain values, outlooks, hypocrisies and ethno-religious make-ups that no longer hold sway for better or worse.

But if all else fails, one can sit on the sidelines and laugh as the dolts realise they've been duped and used by billionaire backers who wouldn't piss on them otherwise. The right has its own useful idiots, though that is already a cliché to say. That they will be their own primary victims in the end is another.

So let's dwell instead on Daft Bint Meets Serena Joy Sarah Palin, only two years away from doing a Michael Foot and partying like it's 1983. She describes herself and her female supporters as 'Mama Grizzlies', and this easy metaphor is taken up by the teabaggers with glee.

But in a way, this description says more than just 'wild and free and innit for da cubz'. A bear after all is a solitary creature at odds with its omnivorous, inquisitive nature. It is drawn towards human settlements yet is volatile and unpredictable. It sometimes eats its own, hibernates whilst other animals are forced to live on their wits, needs space yet roams widely, and whilst resourceful and clever, is not quite able to find a place for itself in the modern world it keeps interacting with. It also shits in the wood, much as the teabaggers shit on their own doorsteps.

So in that sense, the Tea Party is profoundly Grizzly. And like many a bear, its rank and file have seen what is happening to the natural order it used to benefit from - and realise, in the end, that the game is up. No wonder they're getting rowdy.

* I hesitate to use the term Libertarian as this is a broad term and Libs don't herd.

** Whatever the merits or lack thereof of Lloyd Marcus' argument, he does it no good simply by whom he is associating with.

You Don't Need An E-Reader To Read.

Ever seen that Kindle advert, where the two Bohos sit on a beach and read their e-book readers, no doubt feeling smug that they've spent a small fortune on a fashionable toy?

Well, that's part of the problem with e-readers; that they sell you a problem as well as a solution - namely, that you somehow need an electronic device to store your books whereas before you could just pick a few paperbacks and shove them in your suitcase.

But the point is that you don't need an e-reader. Books still work perfectly well, and you are in fact being taken for a ride. It's simply that - through the power of advertising - Kindles and their ilk are 'cool' (because the TV told you so!) and books are 'old-fashioned' (because in today's culture, reading is something you're forced to do at school or university). You're being sold something you've effectively already got. Ever been to a library or spent time in a second hand bookshop? Usually the answer is no, because they can't afford to advertise like Amazon or Apple or Samsung... You’ve been had.

We certainly don't need Kindles in the way that we need washing machines, medical advances, computers, flushing toilets and so on. Far from being a technophobic rant, this article is more than willing to declare that technology is great and has made things considerably better. The challenge is now not to create superfluous electronic toys but to make our consumer products ever more energy efficient, more long lasting and more affordable. That's not so sexy as, say, an e-reader, though, so we buy the products with the most allure, the most street cred - the most media exposure.

Nor are e-readers an advance that improves an existing technology like mobile phones or digital cameras/recorders. Instead, it's just conspicuous consumption, just like its equally superfluous (and smug) cousin, the iPhone. They're not really about making your life better and more about waving them about (preferably far away from any passing muggers) to impress the rest of the cool kids and make the naff kids feel guilty about having skint parents (or being skint parents). It's so petty and far, far away from the joy of reading those naff things on shelves that are made from paper.

And so what if e-readers gets people reading? If they need gimmicks and a multi-million ad campaign to do this then maybe they're not the people who should be reading books. Their time might be better spent on finding some substance to their lives. And if the book trade really wants to save its hide, then maybe it needs to focus on why people are reading less and less, or why they are not buying books as much as they used to.

And something else is being lost here - the very physicality of the book, the fact that you can hold it, feel it and know what page to turn to and when. The value of owning something (rather than a stream of data) is being lost, and this threatens our connection with the world around us as we lose the joy of that contact. It’s already happened to music – too many people live for the quick thrill of a download and ignore the joy of owning a CD or discovering an old vinyl album, the joy of actually being able to hold something. In the end, what e-readers represent is another step in our relentless march away from our surroundings and into a shallow, empty inner world of instant gratification. No wonder they’re popular.