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The new man at the helm of Universities UK, the "trade body" for university vice-chancellors, is saying that universities ought to be teaching remedial English lessons to students who arrive at university not being able to communicate very well in written English:

Universities 'must offer basic grammar classes' - Telegraph:
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Last Updated: 1:48am BST 14/09/2007

Rick Trainor, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said that universities should do more to ensure graduates are properly prepared for the world of work.

Employers have already criticised the standards of basic skills among teenagers, saying too many are leaving school with a poor grasp of the three Rs.

Wlk b4 u rn plz!!!
Originally uploaded by Ryan Pierini

Now, he would apparently label me "nostalgic" for hankering after the days when pupils were able to string a sentence together by the time they left school. Apparently they more than make up for this basic inability in "new capabilities" in "IT, in group and independent working, in spoken presentations and in creativity well beyond those of their predecessors." After all, he says, every generation whines that the next is not "up to scratch".

I'm sorry, in the words of former Glasgow University Rector Richard Wilson, I don't believe it! This is in a country where we now spend nearly £80,000,000,000 a year on education. Prof Trainor can call me old fashioned all he likes, but I don't believe that it is acceptable to be spending that sort of money for people hoping to go on to higher education to be leaving school with only SMS level English. We are failing them not least if they enter work or higher education without the ability to communicate complex ideas in a way that everyone ought to be able to understand.

It's not that new a problem either. I remember as a new Hall Warden ten or so years ago being asked to "proof read" someone's essay which turned out to have the feel of a Joycean stream of consciousness with little structure, and even worse grammar. But I suppose the modern way of looking at this is that if we universities can take someone barely able to write on the basis that they can "Powerpoint" (which I am assured is now a verb in its own right) well and turn them into a world class graduate, our "value added" is significantly greater than if that person had arrived with a full set of basic academic skills after fourteen years of schooling.

And yes, I suppose if we're going to graduate them at all we're going to have to engage in this remedial work. But it should be with much protest not resignation. First and foremost we should be screaming out that this level of entry to higher education is just not good enough and that schools, not universities, ought to be addressing it.

...and we still don't seem to know what to do about bankers!

The Bank of Scotland, whatever is now left of it, is 312 years old. That of England just two years older. Ever since the banking system has been built on state protectionism, corporate welfare, monopoly privilege and, at its heart, a gigantic fraud.

The fraud was that a goldsmith could give both you and I receipts for my gold stored in his vaults and make money on both - from me a fee for keeping my gold, from you interest on the receipt you had borrowed from him. Indeed they found they could duplicate this so frequently, fraud upon fraud if you like, that though gold is perhaps regrettably no longer the basis of our money, the "hardest money", real "hard cash", amounts now to just three per cent of our total money supply in terms of everything we all have collectively borrowed and deposited.

To be fair, most goldsmiths at least issued notes of their own. Customers - both depositors and borrowers - chose which goldsmith to bank with on their reputation. If they became overstretched, issued what was felt to be too many receipts for the same gold, their notes would be less desirable in trade, there may even be a "run" when all the receipt holders tried to get their "real" money, the gold, out of the bank, which of course had much less gold than he had issued such receipts for. Nowadays, however, what they create and destroy in their lending business is denominated in the national currency, a currency issued nominally at least, by the state and guaranteed by the state.

This means it is no longer a private affair between a bank and its customers as to whether their business practices jeopardise their customers' savings; it is a problem for us all. We have ceded control of the supply of money issued in our name to private businesses whose main aim is to make profit for themselves and who, in the course of that otherwise noble pursuit, play fast and loose with the very air the entire economic system requires to function. And states protect them, bail them out as seems about to be the case in the US to the tune of almost countless billions, because they have to guarantee the currency they have so little control over.

Regular readers will know I am very fond of a quotation from Josiah Stamp, Liberal politican, Chairman of the Midland Bank in the 1920s and reputedly second wealthiest man in Britain in his lifetime:

"Banking was conceived in iniquity and was born in sin. The Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it back again.

"However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine will disappear and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of Bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits."

It rather seems to me that with the events of the past few days, we may be "taking the earth away from them" (or, more accurately and nauseatingly, buying it back from them) which they have stolen from us with their inflationary approach to money, but leaving them the power to create those deposits all over again with which, in the next bubble, they will buy it all back again.

Everyone seems to think that money has somehow been pretty constant. The way it works I mean, not whether we call it shillings and guineas or pounds and pence. But the current confidence trick really began with the depression of the 1930s and the work of two extremely wealthy, powerful men in the US who persuaded the government of their day to set up the system that enabled them to create "our" money according to their corporate priorities. The results of John D Rockerfeller and John P Morgan Jnrs' work was the Federal Reserve and the rapid ramping up of fractional reserve banking, and the eventual demise of real solid backing for that currency.

If the current crisis really does turn out to be the "big crunch" at the end of the cycle begun by that 1930s "big bang" we should be ready with policy to replace that fraudulent, anti-competitive, oligarchical system, designed by the very wealthy to keep them that way for little actual productive work with something different. Entirely different. I do not detect any mainstream politicians with the cojones to say so. Our governments and politicians are but eunuchs to the bankers, and the longer that continues, the more the vast majority of us will suffer.

I'm not sure whether to tip my hat to Linda Jack for highlighting this non-story or to criticize her for regurgitating excitedly and in the manner of a parrot a scurrilous and unthinking story from the Torygraph that Chris Huhne owns shares in surveillance firm.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 3:07am GMT 03/11/2007

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat leadership contender who has strongly criticised both supermarkets and the surveillance state, is a major shareholder in a company that supplies "people monitoring" technology to Tesco.

The revelation by The Daily Telegraph of Mr Huhne's links to the country's biggest supermarket may raise questions among party members about his consistency.

Mr Huhne, 53, the party's environment spokesman, owns £250,000 worth of shares in Irisys, a Northamptonshire company that makes thermal imaging technology used to track people as they move.

It's a bit like saying we should criticize the medical use of morphine because some people misuse its close cousin heroin. So far as I can see the criticism of the "surveillance state", criticism which I fully join with , is about being able to snoop on and track identifiable individuals, usually as they go about mundane ordinary lives. This is the heroin, open to abuse and getting worse.

However the company in which Chris owns a significant shareholding, Irisys, does not do this sort of stuff. What it provides is the morphine of the surveillance world - generally beneficial when used properly. It does infra-red surveillance. Individuals cannot be identified*.

Its original application of this technology was to examine structures for stress points - it's the stuff that stops the plane you're traveling falling out of the sky because nobody noticed a hairline crack in the wing, or that keeps oil rigs safe from the stresses of the open sea.

Can you tell who it is yet?
Originally uploaded by carolyne_ej_smith

Used on humans, its thermal imaging technology allows for such helpful things as finding a person buried in rubble in an earthquake zone. More sophisticated applications combining it with computers in various situations would have helped prevent the Hillsborough disaster by preventing too many thermal blobs getting into the enclosed area where all the crushing took place. It helps to prevent unauthorized access to secure areas by one thermal blob "tailgating" someone with a card (it alerts a security guard who goes to take a look presumably) or keeps a count of the number of thermal blobs having entered a building so that if it needs to be evacuated the emergency services can see that everyone who went in is accounted for.

All good stuff I think you would agree. Then there are also applications that simply enhance the experience of the user - Tesco (amongst others) use it to tell how many people are in the store and to open up extra tills so that when they get to the end of their shop they don't have to wait in a queue. Others use it to count "footfall" into a shop or shopping centre to help them provide the optimal layout in the store. One could imagine it being used for example to check how many "thermal blobs" there are at bus stops along a route and decide to put on extra buses.

Of course, just as you can abuse morphine alongside its cousin heroin if you want to, you could couple this technology with CCTV and do actual snooping on identifiable individuals. But it's not what Irisys does. So I reckon Chris is in the clear here, personally. Indeed, by investing in a non-invasive application of modern technology, he is probably more than in the clear - he is on the side of the angels!

All this is readily discoverable from the firm's website. It's just lazy journalism and even lazier parroting of that journalism to peddle that this is some conflict of interest portraying Chris as a secret supporter of the surveillance state.

*There is research going on at the moment that suggests that you can identify an individual solely by their gait and I suppose this could be an issue even with medium resolution infra-red images, but so far as I am aware it's neither proved yet or in production applications. Presumably Irisys, and their shareholders, would take a view on whether this is an area they would want to get into when it is possible and proven.

Just a week into the ban on smoking in enclosed "public" places, there has been much coverage of Conservative plans to increase the tax on alcohol to discourage "binge drinkers" - an idea which, if memory serves, was mooted late last year by the government itself anyway. I like to think that it was such a crazy idea then that it contributed to Ms Hewitt's removal from the health brief.

But on both issues, on health grounds at least for the participants (if not the passive smokers and people beaten up by drunks), surely the best answer is a complete ban? Both are drugs. Alcohol in particular can be served up as a very powerful concoction, ten or more times more powerful than the cider I used to get hold of at school. In study after study when respected organizations look at the wider social effects of different drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, they have upheld the "Blakemore/Nutt hierarchy of harms" which puts alcohol fifth, tobacco ninth, both ahead of cannabis at eleventh and ecstasy way down at nineteenth out of twenty one substances they evaluated. You can read the whole reasoning in the RSA report - and don't pretend to tell me that the RSA is looking at archeological pot finds from the Bullingdon Club of the eighties as we are perhaps led to believe, they are looking at today's market in drugs.

In 2004 in Britain around 106,000 people died from causes related to smoking tobacco, and every other smoker is likely to die because of illness and disease caused by their use of tobacco. There were 8,389 alcohol related deaths. And, while there were 2,598 deaths 'from drug related poisoning' that includes prescribed and over the counter drug misuse, and in fact only 663 were put down to heroin, methadone, cocaine, amphetamine (including ecstasy) and GHB. And, as we know from these studies, the alcohol related deaths are if anything rising not falling.

So clearly the rational response is to ban what are two of the most addictive and dangerous substances we know of. Why would any government wish to be complicit in the licensing for recreational consumption of such killers? But not only that, the Treasury no doubt rubs its hands with glee at the prospect of taking money from these drug addicts and the pushers who supply them, the tobacco and drinks industries. Blood money - that's what it is.

So, which of you competing authoritarian parties is going to bite that bullet? It's populist tinkering nonsense. Something must be done, this is something so let's do this. Let us choose our poison and help make sure our choice is a safe as possible by legalization and regulation of all these substances. Banning them makes their grip stronger. Indeed, as recent evidence on cannabis shows, it makes them stronger.

And I haven't even begun to talk about caffeine, sugar and chocolate. These last two of course contributing to a ticking time bomb of ill-health and early death through obesity related conditions. If you believe people know best and are capable of making their own decisions, let them. Otherwise, do the rational thing and ban all these currently legal killers too and be done with it.

Technorati Tags: alcohol, cannabis, conservatives, drugs laws, liberty, smoking ban

I meant to pick up on this from Sunday's Observer - The Chancellor's got his eye on a new best friend

Jasper Gerard says that:

David Cameron should place a bug on BA's shuttle to Edinburgh. For with the filthy Chilean sauvignon, dry roasted peanuts and sundried delights from the All Day Deli Counter, Gordon Brown and Sir Menzies Campbell, returning to their constituencies for the weekend, could be making a light snack of the Conservative party.

Half-decent sources tell me that Brown has, at the least, made tentative overtures to the Liberal Democrat leader about what might happen in a hung parliament. And an inconclusive result is what bookmakers predict. Brown is desperate to break from Blair. Upon entering Number 10, he wants fireworks with announcements even more dramatic than his first act as Chancellor, granting independence to the Bank of England. Many of his prize rockets hoarded in the Treasury have already been set off by that twisted fire starter next door, Blair. So Brown needs a spectacular. And what sparkler would light up the political landscape more brightly than electoral reform?

Now, forgive me if I'm overly skeptical, but I reckon we've "been there, done that" and had the tee-shirt stuffed right down our throats. I know that there are a lot of Labour electoral reformers that somehow blame the Lib Dems for allowing the PR issue to go off the boil and thereby, as they see it, jeopardizing the chance of PR happening before now. And don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that it is one of the most important issues in politics in the UK at the moment. And I know that sounds real wonkish compared with terrorism or crime or whatever else there is to worry about but I cannot accept that we live in a democracy when 22% of the electorate decided more than half the seats in parliament and all of the government.

But...as the article goes on, Gordon may believe that "It could produce centre-left government for yonks, securing what [he] calls 'the progressive consensus'". I don't regard PR as a way of keeping someone in power for ever. As the argument against PR is frequently trotting out - it is about "weak government", about limiting the power of the executive - to reduce its ability to interfere with our lives unopposed as the last ten years have seen. And so we need to persuade the Tories too of the idea. If they really mean that they want small government, let them put their money where their mouth is.

Holding the balance of power, if that's what it comes to, means just that - being able to decide after the votes are in whether the people have rejected a failing, lying and corrupt Labour government and by how much, and which side's policies, mixed with our own of course, are likely more in favour with that electorate. Ming knows that, and made great play of it during his election campaign for leader.

No deals Gordon, get ready to beg. We're not going to have spent ten years attacking nearly your every move, on liberties, on constitutional reform, on illegal warmongering, on centralizing, and a whole load of others only to be seduced by a mere bagatelle of half-baked PR in the hope of creating a long lasting hegemony in which we may play some part.