Who do we vote for in the May general election and who do we not vote for?

[Zero Liability]

+1. I dislike the £9k fees but the Labour proposal is utterly untested and unbaked rather than sensible. If you think it will result in your children being better off you are utterly mistaken.

Given the choice I would recommend your children trying to find a decent apprenticeship. The ones previous clientco (BAE Applied Intelligence) offered would leave your child in a far better position than any university course outside the best Russell Group unis...

Plus, Labour's idea seems to partially rest on taxing high earning graduates more. How much more do they need to tax permies, before they say enough is enough? £40k isn't what it used to be, and they take their time in adjusting tax bands to account for price inflation, assuming they even do it correctly. At what point will prospective graduates not simply turn around and say feck it, I'm better off going somewhere where my skills are more valued and less taxed, or even better, starting my own business? Not that that would be a bad thing, necessarily.

I think Labour is still wed to the higher education bubble, which the increase in tuition fees went some way prick. The point that is lost on them is that the more demand increases, the less scope there is for quality to remain acceptable. Already, with everyone and their dog having a degree, Masters now carry a slight premium. How long before they also become as common as dirt? Degrees have been turned into social signalling mechanisms, rather than conferring valuable skills upon students, which they could often gain more cheaply and remuneratively through something like an apprenticeship, or other qualification granting systems. Universities are just one way of honing your skills, and often the figures used to show that graduates earn more over a lifetime than non-graduates are highly aggregated, when what may influence that significantly is the prestige of the university, the subject-matter and obviously your performance in it, so it is a very misleading statistic that is often bandied about carelessly.

The bigger issue is, if 12 years (or whatever it is) in government schools doesn't suffice to get you a decent job, that would suggest there is an issue with that 12 year period, and trying to solve it by sticking people into universities faced with rising demand is not going to fix it. They need the funds to keep abreast of increasing demand and to keep quality acceptable. Labour will just aggravate the problem.

[eek]

The bigger issue is, if 12 years (or whatever it is) in government schools doesn't suffice to get you a decent job, that would suggest there is an issue with that 12 year period, and trying to solve it by sticking people into universities faced with rising demand is not going to fix it. They need the funds to keep abreast of increasing demand and to keep quality acceptable. Labour will just aggravate the problem.

The original purpose of introducing student loans for tuition fees was to fund a growth in higher education. Supposedly this was to increase the numbers going to 50% the cynic would say it was to delay people joining the job market for 3 years hence reducing the youth unemployment figures...

[Zero Liability]

Probably true, though. Something that's occurred in the US, as well. Albeit in the US' case, student loans are one of the biggest sources of government revenue, so the motivation is strong there to keep the bubble going. Plus in this country's case we all know how students tend to vote...

[lilelvis2000]

The original purpose of introducing student loans for tuition fees was to fund a growth in higher education. Supposedly this was to increase the numbers going to 50% the cynic would say it was to delay people joining the job market for 3 years hence reducing the youth unemployment figures...

How the hell did this all work in the past before loans? When I went it was dirt cheap, now...I don't even think of Uni for my kids. You can't be £30k in debt and then also save up for a deposit on a home and pay vast quantities of tax/NI to pensioners at the same time. We are eating our kids while they are alive. Would not surprise if the next gen. don't vote at all.

[Zero Liability]

Meanwhile...

Mid Staffs campaigners: Don't trust Labour on the NHS - Telegraph

I'm not sure quite how Labour manages to muster such a high degree of confidence in its ability to manage the NHS in polling...

[wonderboy]

I will be voting UKIP because the three main parties have ruled themselves out of contention through the following happening during one or more of their being in power (and somewhat uniquely, they have all been in power within recent memory):

- the handling of the Lisbon treaty
- failure to bring banks to account for the banking crisis
- the vote on military action in Syria in 2013 (Government was FOR this action, which quite literally blew my mind based on our experiences in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq)
- continued centralisation of power within the less-democratic European Union (cf the EU Commission/Parliament system)
- complete failure to get a handle on immigration by all parties
- the NHS is quite literally in a chronic crisis
- state education continues to be awful (with exceptions)
- the "War on Terror" (both Iraq and Afghanistan)
- failure to successfully incentivise the modernisation of the wireless data infrastructure
- failure to close taxation loopholes used by multinationals
- failure to make the "UK democracy", more democratic through reform
- failure to close employment loopholes for "intra-company transfers"
- failure to hold a referendum on the EU
- failure to ensure defense contractors are held to account for cost overruns
- failure to restore trust in politicians after repeated corruption scandals
- complete planning failure when it comes to public transport infrastructure in London (have you ever been on a train/tube at rush hour?)

I might add that the popular left/right divide diverts the eye from the "liberal" (in the pejorative sense) bias of both parties.

Watch a UK Government-sponsored Oxbridge Liberal Arts graduate teach Afghani women about Conceptual Art, in Adam Curtis' Bitter Lake; as their country is destroyed around them. Then tell me you can support those in a position of Governance at the time, running our nation with our money.

[Zero Liability]

Labour and the Tories will not touch the banks, because they are reliant on them to keep credit expansion going without the direct intervention of the BoE, and therefore without shifting blame to themselves. It keeps their debts cheap and gooses up profits in the economy, as well as asset values e.g. housing, so they will not complain. The alternative is to cut spending and reduce borrowing, but then how would they vote-whore; or, to increase direct tax intakes, weakening the economy further, chasing away the productive and again not a very politically palatable option. They have shown no wherewithal to cease reliance on borrowing and credit expansion to date, and I don't expect that to change.

So, don't expect reform any time soon.

It's also not entirely fair to solely hold the banks to account for it, when central banks globally participated in stoking the flames of the crisis, as did regulators, who enacted the regulations that privileged sovereign debt with very advantageous risk gradings (a particular issue for Eurozone banks), and policy-makers who pushed them to enable their idiotic "affordable" housing policies. That said, I share Farage's view of the bailouts.

[wonderboy]

Labour and the Tories will not touch the banks, because they are reliant on them to keep credit expansion going without the direct intervention of the BoE, and therefore without shifting blame to themselves.

The government need not destroy the banking sector. They merely need instantiate an investigation to see if there was any criminality involved in the causation of the crisis.

[Zero Liability]

I agree, but I would like to see them not just hold criminal bankers to account but also regulators and policymakers who had a hand in enacting the short-sighted policies that led to it blowing up.

[lilelvis2000]

- complete planning failure when it comes to public transport infrastructure in London (have you ever been on a train/tube at rush hour?)

Try public transport outside of London and then complain.