Labour’s shadow business secretary has accused the coalition government of “pulling up the drawbridge” on the next generation of students.

Speaking at the party’s annual party conference in Manchester, Pat McFadden attacked the government’s aim’s to widen participation in higher education.

“More achievement isn’t a decline in standards. Its people getting chances in life that their parents and grandparents could never have dreamed of,” he said.

“And our movement knows that if you give people a platform, they will achieve.

“I have a message for the ministers in charge who benefited from the best education themselves: stop attacking the goals of more participation in education; don’t pull up the drawbridge from the generation that comes after you,” he added.

Vince Cable has opposed Labour’s target of 50 per cent of young people entering higher education, a policy was introduced by Tony Blair during his second term in office.

Mr McFadden continued: “All around the world countries are sending more young people to university. Yet here some argue that more achievement means lower standards, as if there was just a small lump of talent that had to be shared among the traditional chosen few.

“But more achievement isn’t a decline in standards. It’s people getting chances in life that their parents and grandparents could never have dreamed of. And our movement knows that if you give people a platform, they will achieve.”

Mr McFadden’s speech attacking the Liberal Democrat’s aim came after Ed Miliband was elected as successor to Gordon Brown last week.

After his election Mr Miliband reiterated his plans for a tax which includes charging graduates between 0.3 per cent and two per cent of their pay for 15 to 20 years graduating; with higher earners taxed more their education than low-earners.

The speech marks a significant shift in policy for the party that introduced the current tuition fees system whilst in power.

Despite former Home Secretary Alan Johnson dismissing the ideas, Mr Miliband believes that the graduate tax is a fairer system.

“It’s based on a fundamental principle which says the more you earn the more you pay back,” he said on BBC television’s The Andrew Marr Show.

“The alternative is two things. Higher and higher tuition fees, which lead to higher and higher debts for people – and I’m afraid that does put people off going to university and is a burden on middle-class families.”

In an article written for the Guardian earlier this year Mr Miliband outlined further reasons as to why he thinks the tax would help students.

“As fees rise further, less well-off as well as part-time students will be even less likely to apply to more expensive universities and so damage their opportunities.

“Such a tax Allow us to avoid the debilitating cuts the coalition intends – starting with the 10,000 places it has already cut this year.

“Studies have shown that such a levy could raise substantially more for universities than the current system.”

“… And the government that has to make those cuts will make itself unelectable for a generation.”

Cameron and Clegg would be weeping into their well-tailored suit sleeves at the words of the Panorama reporter, if they weren’t so busy getting off…

Hours and pages of serious coverage, from BBC News 24 to the Economist claim the pair have “got into bed”, after their “civil partnership” in the back garden (tee hee) of Number 10 (nope, can’t make a joke out of that…).

From the media that has grown up alongside the New Labour government that, for all its failings, can be celebrated for legislating to give gay people the right to make a union accepted in the eyes of the law, the crude comparison made when two men stand as a pair, is, actually saddening.

“OOO, it’s like a fake wedding, like one of those fake weddings Elton John got…”

Grow up.

The Independent claims that the “courtship” could have been going on since 2006, the poaching of bright Liberal Democrats to possible Conservative defection.

But this isn’t just a bare-faced switch of allegiance, this wasn’t inevitable, the conclusion needn’t have been foregone.

And unfortunately for those of us who would have preferred a centre-left alliance, the opportunity wasn’t there, Labour weren’t ready.

The government would not have been legitimate if the administration formed was a Lib-Lab coalition.

Although smaller party support was offered by the Scottish National Party, and Plaid Cymru, a “rainbow coalition”, Labour declined, telling maybe of their feeling of guilt?

This too may have created instability, and then what? Another election, with surely a similarly fractured end?

New Labour now need to go away and think about what they’ve done. If it’s our Tory past you’re frightened of, Labour history is more recent.

I will say it and say it again. Two wars, a ‘global financial collapse’ fuelled here by our leader’s belief that he had “ended boom and bust”.

Surely the Venus Fly Trap of a capitalist economy?

Bureaucracy, inequality and greed.

So call it Libcons, Libservatives, or Torycrats if you have to, but two of our political parties have come to a sensible agreement, and I am glad.

With the £163billion deficit and £6bn worth of cuts announced in the Queen’s Speech, nobody can envy the new coalition.

The eyes of the world are on them, or at least we’d like to think they are, and many people are aching for it to fail.

But, scared and scare-mongers amongst us, the Conservatives cannot and will not go off the deep-end. The mines were all closed the first time, for one.

And nobody wants to be hated in the 21^st Century, we are Tweeting and Facebook petitioning in the biggest public space there has ever been.

It wouldn’t take a 12-year-old the break during Hollyoaks to super-impose Cameron’s head onto the body of Edward Scissorhands.

So concessions have been made. Some, as a Liberal Democrat member, that I am not happy with.

Will agreeing a referendum on electoral reform will produce Nick Clegg’s desired result? The majority of people after all are Labour and Conservative voters, whose parties benefit from the current system.

But if it happens then the kind of coalition like the one being made here would be common-place, which is good.

“What are they doing, compromising and agreeing on things if they’re not from the same party?”

THAT’S THE POINT!!

Some things are just consensus and more heads are often better than few.

And what of opting out of votes on the contentious issues?

Not what Lib Dems wanted, but they didn’t win. We will have to make do.

Academies? Pupil premiums? We shall see… But scrapping wasteful ID cards and rolling back the CCTV state can’t be a bad thing.

But instead of complaining and worrying about cuts, which everyone agreed had to be made, why don’t we, as a nation, get up off our majoratively fat arses and look at what things we could save, because we like or use them, if the government can’t? Leisure services are usually the first to go.

For our hatred of politicians and government, we can’t help but want them to microwave our dinner, put it in front of us and move fork to mouth while massaging our knee.

I hope Ed Milliband gets the Labour leadership. He is a brilliant speaker, and crucially for the necessary severance from New Labour was not an MP when the decision was made to go to war.

And I hope there is a new Left, I’d love to be a part of it.

So Dave, Nick, good luck, fortune favours the brave.

The ID Cards system brought in by the Labour government to help fight terrorism, crime and illegal immigration is a monumental waste of time, money and resources.

Up to the present day, the government has spent almost £230,000 a day developing the system and according to a survey by the London School of Economics, the total cost of the scheme could be as much as £15 billion, three times more than the government estimate.

Given the state of Britain’s finances at the moment, I’m sure this money could be used in a better way to pay off some of the country’s massive debt.

There is no real need for ID cards either. All new passports issued now are biometric, storing basic data such as your photograph, name, address and your date of birth.

But biometric passports also have the ability to store your fingerprint and iris details, essentially the same data that an ID card would store. So the simple question is; why would you pay £30 for something you don’t need?

You also have to question the logic behind launching an estimated £15 billion project and then making it optional.

Meg Hillier, Junior Home Office Minister, recently stated that the ID card would be of particular use to young people for proving their identity in bars and clubs instead of using their passport.

I have never taken my passport on a night out. I find that my driving licence and previously my provisional driving licence are perfectly good enough.

Finally, there is the issue of data protection. The data disclosed will be shared among a number of organisations and stored as part of a huge central database of information.

As we know, the government has a poor record in protecting data and the large-scale IT system used is likely to be vulnerable to hackers. However, this is assuming the data isn’t on a laptop left on a train in Milton Keynes.

By William Cook

So, Gordon Brown came up North for a painfully stage-managed forum with a choice group of people, where questions were vetted and there was no room for debate.

And what did we take away from it?

Almost nothing.

A token gesture, from, to quote the questionable Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, “the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government”.

When pressed on the issue of ‘frontloading’ by Parviz Shasva, owner of Rooms Nightclub, the PM suggested, “we could ask for an agreement among the retail trade and talk to Tesco and so on but then a number of shops may keep outside of that.”

“Could?”, “Ask?”.

Forgive me, Gordon, I’m a bit confused here. Aren’t you the most powerful person in the country? The leader of the country? And then clearly the best placed person to tell companies to change their practices if it is in the best interests of the people who you represent?

From Margaret Thatcher to date, power has become increasingly centralized in the hands of one person, the prime minister. And yet, his answers are feeble. He sounds powerless.

Unfortunately, I’m not surprised. The Guardian reported last week (22^nd October) that Lord Myners, the City Minister “insisted… that the government could not use its stakes in the bailed out banks, RBS and Lloyds Banking Group… to stop bonus payouts.”  £1.3trillion of taxpayers money has been pumped in to banks to keep the sector a float, and yet, it appears that our elected representatives cannot stop a practice that has rightly infuriated the public.

Lord Myners urged the banking sector to address the bonus issue itself in a bid to not “bash the bankers”. Ask them nicely not to give themselves lots of money?

One can’t help but compare this with MP’s ability, or not, to self-regulate. Richard Garside, a local estate agent asked of Jacqui Smith’s regretful plea in the House of Commons following her home ‘flipping’ that gained her more than £100,000, “can any employee caught stealing from his employer expect that an apology will suffice?” For the average employee, the answer is no.

So, do you get a bonus if you look after people as a nurse, and reach all the targets? Do you get a little extra if you get all the kids you teach through all the ludicrous testing forced upon you by central government as a teacher? No, you don’t.  You are just doing your job.

So why then, when these people are just doing their job, and even when they aren’t, are they allowed to take home thousands of pounds in their already unfairly large pay packets?

Are some people above recrimination?

Lord Myners is addressing high street banks that have taken government money. Not even the investement banks that got us into this trouble in the first place.

The Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has come out with some headline catching rhetoric, but with little believable policy. He actually plans to cut cash bonuses while still giving rewards in shares. One can only look on in disbelief.

Maybe Mr Brown would have felt better with an easy question at the forum, like “what is your favourite biscuit”, a question posed to him at an audience with mumsnet. An easy question, that took him two days to answer.

Incidentally, it’s a choc-chip.

By Kirsty Styles

FRIDAY 18th September and I set off for the Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth. The sun is  shinning, but the clouds of recession, high debt and unemployment set the scene for the last big autumn conference before the General Election.

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WELCOME, and welcome back from your barbecue summer. Pack your bikinis away, say goodbye to the sun, and sense the sarcasm. No matter how much sun there was in June, we will only remember having to ditch our umbrellas after wind meeting rain, culminating in us looking stupid and getting soaked anyway. In fact, July has been provisionally touted as the ‘wettest on record’. Continue Reading

Human nature has inspired a whole host of wonderfully complex and intriguing debates; nature/nurture, original sin, predisposed personalities. So surely the next debate will be, if nobody’s watching, does everybody take what they can?

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Opportunity, fairness and equality. This was the core ethos when New Labour came to power in 1997.

Blair promised that everyone in Britain will be given a fair chance to succeed and Brown promised to eliminate the ‘boom and bust’ culture. But a surge of wealth and opportunism had to come at a price.

Fast forward 12 years and we’re deep into a recession, a culture of overspending and over borrowing has left the country in economic hangover and the people in charge seem oblivious to it all. We’re experiencing the bust morning after the boom night before.

Forecasts have even been made, predicting it’ll be the year 2032 until the debt levels return to a sustainable level. It’s probably because the phrase “green shoots of recovery” is tossed around so casually that when signs of them actually do appear; we tend to play it down as more hot air from politicians. Instead, given the severity of the recession, the public want to see an economic orchard emerging before they believe the worst is over.

Admittedly, Gordon Brown is a far less media savvy Prime Minister than his predecessor at number 10 and neither is he videogenic in comparison to Blair. It tends to be the armchair political commentators who feel the need most to vent spleen at the Brown believing he single-handedly caused this economic downturn.

George Osborne didn’t even manage to take a break from his routine tongue lashing of Labour to actually try and present a substantial alternative to Darling’s list of proposals in his budget response. The message was focused on what The Tories would have done to avoid the recession and what errors the Government have made in trying to bring about economic recovery.

It seems as if the opposition are trying to milk votes without presenting an alternative to this mess. If either of the two major opposition parties had an actual plan then why didn’t they create some kind of mock-budget to show how they would provide an alternative solution.

When a nation becomes disenchanted with their government, the tendency is to assume that the grass is always greener on the other side. Perhaps we’re supposed to take that literally now that The Conservatives have ‘reinvented’ themselves with an eco-friendly image. Such tactics have included; the new Conservative party logo of a scribbled tree and David Cameron’s laughably contrived bike rides to work…whilst having his shoes and brief case chauffer driven behind him ! Yet Cameron felt compelled to berate The Chancellor’s car scrap scheme for its miniscule carbon footprint!

However, it was Liberal Democrat’s Treasury Spokesman Vince Cable gave the most sober interpretation of the budget. He asked voters not to dwell on the past and even told politicians to “Stop the childish bickering over whose to blame.”

Quite a bold, yet humbling statement from Cable, given he was the one who’d been constantly warning The Government about a potential recession years beforehand. He could have quite easily spent 5 minutes preaching “I told you so”.

Instead he outlined a realistic road to recovery. Cable mentioned that the government could spread the burden of tax more fairly rather than taxing low and average earners. He also fingered out the legal tax dodgers living in tax havens saying: “British tax payers pay through the nose while the Union Jack flies above many of the world’s tax havens.”

It’s just a shame that Britain’s archaic first past the post voting systems means that the Lib Dems never get fairly represented in parliament to help mitigate the bi-partisan bickering between Labour and The Tories. The often forgotten third party had received 25% of the total votes in the 2005 general election but received 10% of parliamentary representation. Meanwhile in the same election, Labour received 35% of the total votes but managed to hold onto 55% of the overall seats.

When the last Conservative government began to look tired in  the mid-nineties, the media took it’s usual pot-shot but it was ultimately Blair’s vision, leadership and PR skills in a new age of rolling news which helped him formulate a strong manifesto to appease voters from both the left and right.  Now that The Daily Mail, The Express and Telegraph have their tongues firmly sewn into Cameron’s trousers and The Sun flirting with the idea more and more, support is being rallied behind an visionless alternative with no solid policies.

David Cameron just tells the public that if The Conservatives got in power, the road to recovery would be long and hard… just as Labour as tells us. It’s not unsurprising of him to lack answers when he is inept at asking questions. Every Wednesday he phrases the questions in exactly the same way at PMQs, always beginning.

“Will the Prime minister admit…” or if he’s feeling adventurous: “Will the Prime minister confirm…”

This is his standardised set-up of closed-down questions in an effort to expose Brown’s stubbornness by not answering questions in a straight manner on Labour’s failures. Shame that Cameron doesn’t practice what he preaches whenever he’s asked by journalists… Will Mr. Cameron admit that he has taken cocaine?

When Cameron won the leadership contest in 2005 he promised an end to ‘Punch and Judy’ politics. Even at the time, most took this statement with a pinch of salt and The Tories reaction to the budget has augmented the taste of the sodium based condiment (at least in my mouth) even more.

Brown has in fact eliminated the textbook recessions of the past which always came with high inflation and high interest rates. It’s quite obvious that The Conservatives are taking the ‘kick ‘em while they’re down’ approach rather instead of outlining a clear vision of the road to recovery, as this would include taxing the wealthy and invariably upsetting their own core voters!

By Nick Townsend

The decision at Exeter University to overturn a ban on having the British National Party to speak there is in some ways, an admirable one. Continue Reading

UCLan vice-chancellor Malcolm McVicar has had his plans to make learning a foreign language compulsory for all new students rejected by staff. Continue Reading