Just an idea, Vince...

This morning, Vince Cable signposted his plans for a change in university funding, whereby graduates might find themselves repaying the cost of their degrees in the form of a tax based on earnings, as opposed to the current student loans system, which discriminates in favour of those who go on to more profitable careers. Cable said that he would ask former BP boss Lord Browne, who is leading an independent review into university fees and funding, to examine “the feasibility of variable graduate contributions."
This is a bold and progressive idea. But why not be a little more bold and a little more progressive, and apply the graduate tax to all graduates, not just current and prospective students? If tax can be applied retroactively, why not levy a fee from all working-age graduates, including those aged thirty and over who have used the benefits of free higher education to carve out high-paying careers for themselves?
Cable has a track record for sound ideas about higher education, including his observation that too many graduates are now going into jobs that were previously the province of non-graduates. This has implications for his cited figure of £100,000 as the average difference between the earnings of graduates and comparable non-graduates net of tax. The graduate earnings premium peaked in the 1980s; today, a university degree is a mandatory requirement for most lower- and middle-management jobs, rather than an optional educational extra to boost one's earnings.
Cable previously told the BBC that “if you're a school teacher or a youth worker you pay the same amount as if you were a surgeon or a highly-paid commercial lawyer…I think most people would think that's unfair.” Surely it’s rather less fair to expect those over thirty to pay nothing at all? Surely it's not beyond the pale to ask those who enjoyed British higher education at its most lucrative and inclusive to give something back?
If Britain is to remain a world leader in research, innovation and education, our higher education system needs more money, and fast. But why should the burden of financing the necessary cash injection be placed solely upon today’s young graduates, who have rather less chance of going on to high-paying careers than those who left university in the 1970s and 1980s? The money that could be raised by taxing graduates across the board might well be enough to reduce the cost of university for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as solving the problem of higher education funding more fairly.
If a variable graduate tax were truly based on earnings, there would be no reason for graduates of any age to pay more than they could reasonably manage.Parents of current students might even find themselves paying less overall, if their graduate tax liability offset the costs of contributing to higher tuition and maintenance fees for their children.
NUS president Aaron Porter has said that whilst the NUS welcomes the graduate tax proposal, any changes to funding should be genuinely fair and progressive to win students' support. The core injustice of tuition fees has always been the fact that they imposed a burden of debt on the young that radically rewrote the script for young adulthood in this country, and whilst there are indeed more young graduates now than there were twenty years ago, most are currently labouring under a double load of unavoidable personal debt and high unemployment.
Meanwhile, Vince Cable, George Osborne and David Willetts, along with nearly every policymaker currently responsible for higher education funding, were financed through their degrees by a generous grants system, left university in credit, and entered a booming job market. A universal graduate tax would be a fair way of sharing out the proceeds of that extraordinary generational luck once and for all.
If the deficit must be paid for, it is not unreasonable to expect it to be paid for on the basis of equal sacrifice. If the principle of retroactive taxing is being considered at the highest levels of government, it is not far-fetched to suggest that the rich be taxed as well as the poor, the old as well as the young, on the basis of the services that they have enjoyed from the state.
I’d stop short at suggesting that Cable back-date the graduate tax to 1970, of course – that would leave older people with degrees owing, ooh, tens of thousands, almost as much as an average humanities graduate in 2010. And nobody would stand for that.

Notes on NUS reform...

Radicalism is a dirty word in British youth politics today. Three days ago, the NUS threw out a proposal to drastically restrict its campaigning and representative powers by an approximate ten-vote margin. Frustrated by this slim defeat at the annual conference, Labour Students, ‘independent’ Labour affiliates and other centre-right groups have already drawn up plans for an extraordinary conference to attempt to pull the changes through.

NUS radicalism has been so eroded over the past decade, however, that there’s barely been a murmur of fuss has been made about all of this outside the narrow alley of student politics: as a former NUS rep for Goldsmiths commented, ‘It’s been coming for a long time.’

Whilst all of this has been going on, massive cutbacks have been tabled to funding for higher education, particularly second degrees.

The worst-hit organisations will be Birkbeck College and the Open University – traditionally where hard-up students and young people go for re-training, for a second chance at broadening their personal and economic potential through education. That second chance is now being scavenged to divert cash to other parts of an already under-funded education system, by a government which recently shelled out £28bn to float Northern Rock. Over 170, 000 mostly part-time students will be affected. A spokesperson for Birkbeck university, where over a third of students have ELQ status, said, “these cuts will have an immediate and detrimental effect on all part-time students and the government’s skills agenda. Classes will be vulnerable to closure, choice will be reduced and the student experience will be impoverished.” For the NUS, however, this news is firmly on the back-burner: why bother criticising a Labour budget when the next gurning Labour-Student star has just been elected?*

Young people under 30; people in training or looking for work; the inexperienced and exploitable. We are people in desperate need of representation and support, and we are being staggeringly let down on both fronts, by the NUS and by our government. The reasons behind this are simple. We are an extremely valuable and wide-ranging market demographic, and we are, for the most part, politically docile: it's the stuff policy planners' wet dreams are made of. In any society with finite resources, it will always be easier to shaft someone royally rather than make long, expensive and unpopular moves towards the sort of systemic change that would make things fairer. This time, it's the under-30 slice of the population pie who are being shafted, and we ALL know what BASTARDS are to blame, don't we?

That's right. Us.

Yes. We are partly responsible for what has happened to youth politics in the UK today, conspiracy theorise though we may. To pretend otherwise would be immature and pathetic. We allowed ourselves to be bought. We allowed the adults to fob us off with booze, toys and gadgets, and then, because they made us panic that those things might be taken away, we allowed ourselves to be scared into a life of frantic commercial servitude - taking more exams, doing more and harder work and fighting harder for our places in the food chain than any generation has had to in the past. We made that choice. We made it when, in the last two general elections, far more of us 18-to-20-somethings than any other single group chose not to turn up to vote. We sent a message that we didn't care; we told them that they could fuck us any way they wanted, and we promised to secretly love it.

Hell, I'm not patronising: even *I* wasn't there. As I recall, I was wired on Jameson's whisky and caffeine pills, trying to study for my summer exams whilst bingeing, starving myself systematically and hurting myself in some childlike effort to weed out a particularly virulent attack of SYAT (Standard Young Adult Trauma). I regret a lot of things, and a few people, that I did when I was eighteen; I could pretend that I was so distressed that I didn't even remember to vote, but that would be utter rubbish - I remembered all right, I just didn't care, and I’ll have to live with that hypocrisy until GE 2009. I lay down and let the system fuck me for far too long as a kid; it won't happen again. I'm not saying it's easy. I know it's not bloody easy. But we can't give up on the notion that things can change, or that our votes and actions and decisions count towards what our political leaders decide to do with us.

We have been cheated - we have allowed ourselves to be cheated - of our political identity, and the NUS reforms that are still on the table emblematise that cynical, fuck-me-please-if-you're-going-to attitude that we've developed towards the older generation. What’s happened to the NUS over the past few years is this attitude in action. We’ve turned from what had, since 1922, been an important locus of comment upon government policy, particularly education policy, towards deliberately working with New Labour and not criticising their fantastically divisive and unhelpful education reforms in order to further the careers of NUS politicians, bring in cash through advertising and other schemes, and win countless establishment pats-on-the-head for our tireless delegates.

Barring a few hard-working revolutionary splinter groups [ENS LINK], the NUS has become as politically vacuous as the model United Nations or those dreadful Young Enterprise corporate-training schemes. It has functioned since 1997 as a finishing school for aspiring toe-sucking Blairite sycophants, set on making their own careers in politics not because they want socio-political justice but because they believe that they themselves deserve power. This is not what we need, as young people trying to stabilise our lives, struggling through university or other forms of career development. What we need is cross-border representation and our own, enfranchised political voice. What we need is a trade union – a real, enfranchised trade union – focused on the needs and specific problems of young workers, including but not restricted to students. But it won’t happen unless we want it badly enough.




*As a drinker and a gentleman, I feel obliged to mention that newly-elected NUS golden-boy Wes Streeting did once buy me a vodka-and-orange in a bar after a rally. Wes, wherever you are: I’m not on board with your politics, and I think you’re a dangerous sellout, but I undeniably owe you a drink. Put your people in touch with my people.

Islam, feminism and false logic on the left.

Came across this little gem via feministe: feminists are letting the terrorists win.

In precis, conservative students across the USA have been picketing Women's Studies departments which do not offer a model on Women and Islam, specifically denouncing Islamic cultural practices, as part of 'Islamo-fascism Awareness Week' (if you nearly spat your tea across the keyboard at that one, you're not alone). The reasoning being that, if you're not denouncing the treatment of women in Islamic cultures, you're not denouncing 'Islamo-fascism', which you should be doing as a good little American citizen. The really funny thing about this one being, of course, that the issues of Women in Islam, and the situation of women in the Arab world, have absolutely bugger all to do with US/British military action in the gulf.

Generally I find myself on board with the fine people at feministe on most things gender-political. This blogger, however, seems to have fallen for some very simple false logic. To whit: the Republican argument that, if one supports military action in the Gulf, one must actively denounce the mistreatment of women in the Arab world, does not mean that those who oppose military action can't actively involve themselves in Islamic Feminism. That's just as nonsensical as arguing that all feminists are proto-terrorists. The original article says, in fact, that protestors have specifically been targeting those Women's Studies faculties which do not have any provision for Islamic Women's Studies whatsoever. Now, I'm no Redneck Republican, but I'd be on the front-line of any protest to raise the academic accessibility of such studies. One in every three women in the world is a Muslim. Two percent of the population of the US and three percent of the population of the UK are followers of Islam. Islamic issues, for better or worse, are of deeply topical political and cultural significance. As such, for an academic department to ignore them, much less one which purports to deal centrally with issues of equality, is not only racist, but phenomenally short-sighted. The fundamental point that both this blogger and the whole damn Republican Right (tm.) seem to have missed is that awareness of and concern for women's rights in Middle Eastern totalitarian states has little or nothing to do with one's support, or lack of support, for military action. Sloppy thinking there. Very poor show.

Alright, now let's get one thing straight: the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were nothing to do with women's rights. Had the combined Pentagon and Westminster hawks been at all interested in fighting for the safety and self-determination of women worldwide, they would have made constitutional protection of Afghani women's rights a priority whilst they were masterminding the new constitution. They would not - just for instance- be wining, dining and declaring 'shared values' with the leader of a country boasting arguably the most shocking human rights abuses against women on the globe. The pro-war lobby does not care about Arab women, other than as a convenient lever to prod wavering centrist liberals into acquiescence.

All the more surprising, then, that the blogger at feministe seems to interpret the protest action as demanding that feminists either 'condemn their [Islamic women's] religion and...launch deadly attacks on their countries' or shut up and get back to figuring out what Mary Wollestonecraft ate for breakfast. Even more deeply reductionist is the assumption that Islam is 'not our culture, so it's not our business, so it's not our place to get involved.' Hello? I'm sorry, since when did 3% of the population constitute 'not our culture'? And since when did 'not getting involved' imply 'not speaking about Islamic issues, not speaking about Islamic women, not getting angry and organised about the phenomenal cruelties and injustices that are carried out overseas in the name of religion'?

Yes, political involvement with cultural and religious cultures and sub-cultures that we don't understand is foolish. Which is exactly why we should be educating ourselves about them. Which is exactly why we need more courses on Women and Islam. Lack of understanding is a piss-awful excuse for inertia on the political left. At some point, someone's going to use the word 'multiculturalism', and then I'm going to have to go away for a little bit and break things.* When are we going to get it through our thick collective heads that Islam, Islamic fundamentalism and Islamic totalitarian states are not the same beast?

Crucially, Islamic women are not homogenous. Yes, as some clever linkage in the feministe post demonstrates, there are lots of vocal, independent, successful Muslim women. I went to college with some of them; I've been on the panels of feminist conferences with others; throughout my life, there are likely to be Muslim women writing my textbooks and signing my paychecks. However, the fact remains that Islam is non-monolithic: Islamic women's issues in the Western world are not of a kind with Islamic women's issues in many extremist Middle Eastern states. Although it is, thankfully, getting easier for Muslim women in the UK and elsewhere to be self-determining, it is no less the case that many Muslim women, especially those in Arab states, do not have voices, are unable to stand up adequately for their own rights, and need the support of other men and women, both Muslim and non-Muslim. We need to be talking about the role of women in Islam, and we need to be analysing the situation of women in Islamic states, and - just as importantly - we need to be aware of the difference.

Discussion of this sort is crucial, both within and outside academic environments. Only by talk and debate will the general public come to the realisation that Islam is neither an evil, nor even a specifically sexist religion: rather, that there are some who use Islam as an excuse for misogyny and cruelty, that there are some heinously woman-hating, homophobic, savage totalitarian regimes masquerading as Islamic states, and that these are subtly separate issues from the theosophical paradigms of Islam itself.

Self-education is one of the most important ways in which the left can regain the courage of its convictions. Flatly denouncing someone's religion is unacceptable, especially when used as an excuse to, say, commit atrocities abroad. But questioning how that religion is used - indeed, questioning how all major world religions are used - as a destructive tool in the hands of oppressive personalities and regimes is vital to liberalism, to feminism, and to humanism.


*'Multiculturalism' = quite possibly the most disgusting and misleading word in the English political lexicon: admirable in concept, it's been used as shorthand for tolerating cultural segregation and ghettoisation, and for conveniently sweeping messy issues like arranged marriage under the carpet, shorthand for 'it's not our problem because they're not really British/American/people with rights and feelings'. 'Multiculturalism' as it's understood today, particularly in the UK, has nothing to do with real respect for other cultures.