Category: Uncategorized

The United Kingdom Border Agency (UKBA) has decreed that London Metropolitan University (LMU) has forfeited it’s right to sponsor foreign students. By foreign, it means non-EU students. Precisely the sort that LMU prefer, as their fees are far higher – even after the home students’ increase – than everyone else’s.

This is bizarre, misapplied jingoistic policy at it’s worst. Sure, there may be students who don’t have the right to stay in the UK; they may have out stayed their Visa, or be working – or never have studied in the first place. Find them, and deport them, but don’t stigmatise 2000 students whose sole crime is not being European.

The University should be sanctioned, fined, license restrictions imposed…but don’t penalise the students, some of whom may have bankrupted their families to send them to what they, wrongly, thought was a prestigious English establishment dedicated to truth, knowledge and the pursuit of self betterment. The reputation of the UK University sector overseas may not recover from this act. Education is a very fast moving market, and an English one is not necessarily seen as gilt edged anymore – even if it still fares well by international comparison. In such a responsive sector, Government action should be there to facilitate and support, not undermine and jeopardise.

Anfield is the home of Liverpool Football Club. LFC has one of the most illustrious histories in world football. Arguably, it showed Manchester United, the biggest club in the world, how to do it – and spent almost twenty years at the top of the European game.

However, the recent racist tauntings of a visiting Oldham player, reveal that for all its claims to have modernised, football can all too easily resort to the provincial, parochial and small minded behaviour that tainted it for several generations. In the nineties, Liverpool had the elegance and talent of John Barnes to call on. Yet Barnes, a black Briton, would frequently walk on the pitch to bananas being thrown by racist fans – and many of these were home Liverpool fans!

For all its multiculturalism, Britain still suffers from huge regional differences, in relation to diversity and acceptance of differences – both cultural and racial. Our northern cities still have some way to go, to recognise that we are now one of the most racially diverse, and actually harmonious with it, countries on Earth. These differences emphasise that most of the “ethnic population” of the UK, lies in the south, and that for our small size, there still remains great intolerance and ignorance, particularly amongst the working classes of the north.

LFC authorities and the police (who themselves have much to learn), should pursue this case and not allow fans to think that this behaviour is acceptable. It isn’t.

In our last posting, we spoke about some of the technical concerns underlying the solution that had seemed all too temporal, in the problems of the Euro.

Today we hear that the Greek government, on whose behalf the Prime Minister had accepted the deal, may itself be close to failure. Apparently, the Greek Finance Minister has now changed his position on the suggested referendum, recently put forward by the Prime Minister. This referendum was proposed, one feels, as a matter of conscience on the part of the PM, in light of the austerity it would continue to impose on the Greek people.

Given that inevitably that question has to boil down to one of principle: should Greece be in the Euro or not? The PM is, at time of writing, looking like he may not survive the vote on whether to proceed with the referendum. The leaders of the Eurozone, notably France and Germany are stating that the first tranche of bail out funds will now not be paid, leading to effective default on the part of Greece, increasingly unable to pay its debts.

Some thinkers have now begun to rationalise what many of us have been saying all along – that the Eurozone will be little worse off without the Greeks. No bail out fund until a decision on the referendum, and if the answer is the wrong one, then no bail out fund period: Greece will default more legitimately than this slow strangulation, and return to the Drachma.

With the loss of its weakest member, the Eurozone could consolidate and strengthen…or unwind completely. We are at the end of the beginning, but of exactly what, remains to be seen…

No content – test posting for Networked Blogs

We are torn by the recent images of Muammar Gaddafi’s death. Perhaps we might not feel this, were we Libyan, and had first hand experiences of the horrors Gaddafi exercised on his all too suspecting citizenry. Yet…we are not Libyan; thankfully we have no direct knowledge of his megalomania, his methods of torture and international duplicity.

So we default to behaviour that has stood us in good stead for a long time: decorum, decency, privacy and sensitivity. In these times of instant media (which is almost wholly a good development), images can race around the planet in literally seconds – and can be broadcast, taken from an individual’s ownership, on national media only seconds later. This does not make it right.

There is a privacy in the death of another that we would do well to remember, whatever their crime. Are we not haunted enough by the images of Ceauşescu and his wife, seconds after their execution by firing squad? Did no stirrings of humanity reveal themselves in us, as we witnessed Saddam’s medical examination, knowing full well he was heading to a State Trial from which he would not return. Perhaps the latter was justified…The images of the killing of Gaddafi are amongst the most brutal and shocking ever shown on western media. Their publication has not been without controversy: both the BBC and the UK national press have had bulletin boards with hundreds of complaints. There is a widespread feeling of uncertainty: we wanted him removed, we sanctioned our representatives to achieve this end – we didn’t expect to see the result broadcast around the world, of a terrified, ashen old man covered in blood, seconds before his death. In the internet world of instant publicity, let us not abandon our ability to be shocked, even from those who deserve no pity from us.

In all that is in the name of Holy – how can one justify the calculated murder of 84 people? The deliberate targeting of young, idealistic innocents? To pick people off, with a rifle – when they are not the enemy, they are not armed, they are not engaged in the war you believe you are fighting – all this beggars belief, and suspends our view in the God given hope that all mankind holds dear.

Norway is a peaceful society, for many years seen as the model of an idealised, albeit State heavy, society. One that ranks highest in the UN’s Human Development Index. One cited as a model for many others to follow.

These killings show again clearly that killing in the name of God are nothing other than murder and in this case on an industrialised scale. Fundamentalism, in any guise, is the sanctuary of the deluded. It is left to the families mourning their loss, and the society searching its conscience, to make sense of this murderous act.