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Merseyside police work with Revenue and Customs and other agencies to stop £166m of drugs entering the country

You Are 60% Capitalist, 40% Socialist

While you are definitely sympathetic to a free economy, you also worry about the less fortunate. Wealth and business is fine, as long as those who are in need get helped out too. You tend to see both the government and corporations as potentially corrupt.

These political quizzes never seem to ask me the right questions! Since I've been defending Milton Friedman elsewhere people might get the impression that I am a rabid corporatist right-winger. I always leave these quizzes wanting to have been asked "but do you think xxx actually works". In this case xxx = capitalism. And to that I would have to say, in its current incarnation, no. We have so much protectionism and what is known as "rent seeking" - lobbying for political favouritism basically - that we end up with gigantic corporate behemoths with market positions they can easily abuse.

But I believe in the general idea that on a level playing field (and creating and maintaining that is a function of the collective social networks we create) competition and choice will make more people better off and enable more people to reach their potential and leave us more resources with which to help the most helpless. But I also believe that we have not got, and perhaps have never had, such a level playing field in all of political-economic history. But that, with new technologies putting us more in touch with other individual around the globe instantly, we are on the verge of the sort of society in which voluntary cooperation can indeed take over from the coercive state.

It seems slightly odd to me that I have only ever written once about Higher Education policy, given that I am a governor of my university, and hear about it all the time in meetings. But it has become a big issue at the moment in the Lib Dems, and seems to have been one of the major discussion areas at the Liberal Youth conference over the weekend, so I thought it might be time for me to jot down a few thoughts.

One thing that seems clear, and I believe this is common currency in university board-rooms across the country, is that the current muddled system cannot go on. 98% I believe it is of courses are charging the full top-up fees, and even they do not make up for the real terms fall of over 60% in funding per student over the past decade and a half or so.

On top of that, it fails to create any kind of price mechanism where people might be able to see what value a university or rather its applicants put on a particular course at a particular institution. It is a nonsense to think that three grand at The New University of Bloggshire is as good value as three grand at one of our world leading institutions like Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Instead we rely on very subjective analyses of the National Student Satisfaction Survey and even that is difficult as the organizers may put a good course in a subject area in which an institution is not so excellent and devalue that one course.

What also seems clear is that the value of a first degree is, shall we say, not as high as perhaps it was when all those who say "I got university free, so I'm damned if I'm going to see the next generation up to their necks in debt" went to university. It is a very generous sentiment, and, whilst I didn't in fact go to university I do recognize the hypocrisy - had I taken my school teachers' advice I would have had free higher education and a living grant too. That may not of course be the fault of the Higher Education Institutions so much as primary and secondary education - I don't suppose many students in my day would have had to be taught remedial English and maths at university as we are told some are today in order to get the most out of the Higher Education experience. Additionally, many more students than previously feel the pressure to do second and subsequent degrees in order to stand out in the job market as perhaps a first degree would have done for them in previous generations.

I think the majority feeling in those university board-rooms is that they would prefer to see the fees cap lifted completely when the opportunity arises sometime after 2010, even though by that time many may not want to charge too much so as to be in competition for a smaller number of students when the 18 year old cohort dips significantly in around 2012. We are also on tenter-hooks waiting to see how economic troubles in the wider world will affect student numbers - in previous recessions there has been a boost to Higher Education as people out of work re-train, but faced with fees and debts and an even more uncertain economic outlook, we wonder whether this will be the same this time round.

So, regardless of how our policy affects students themselves, the universities are in an ever more uncertain position. Whatever option we choose, we must see to it also that universities get sufficient funding. There will be no merit in having free Higher Education if the universities themselves cannot deliver that within the budgets allowed.

Anyway, I wanted to suggest an idea with this post. It's somewhat half formulated, and I certainly have not tried to run any figures on it yet, but I hope you might get the idea and maybe be willing to help develop it in the comments.

I have always regarded universities as social enterprises, mutual institutions of a sort. Indeed I once tried to persuade Brookes to adopt a more overt mutualism in its management structure. During the Great Depression in North America, when students were still having to pay fees but had very little money left for anything else, many embraced mutualism as a way to get through. This was the era in which the co-op meal plan, the co-op houses and halls of residence, and the university credit unions burgeoned. Partly as a result of this they have a much stronger alumni culture than we have here.

A credit union type system could be used to enable universities to charge a full market rate for their courses whilst financing all students "needs blind" so that they do not have to pay anything until they are earning. These credit unions would enable alumni (and possibly applicants before they are at university) to save, with interest, in less toxic investments than they have been in the banking system of late while funding current students through university and who would then be expected, as part of their "pay back", to join and save, investing in the next cohort of students, when they graduate.

On top of this we need a package of measures perhaps to encourage the development of low cost co-operative halls of residence and mutual housing societies to prevent the basic accommodation needs of students becoming the £5-7,000 per year drain that the big corporate halls providers expect to charge and the private rented sector delivering second class housing for students.

Again, (much) closer to home, the Oxford Mail/Times reports that:

Residents near Plater College in Headington, Oxford, have expressed concern about a

new influx of students after the college was sold



for £5.6m to an international language school.

Though I know and respect all those mentioned in the story, I am a little perplexed by this "fear". Plater College was, as the name suggests, a place of learning with students in residence and an ambition to expand, already taking in weekend residential courses and the like before they collapsed.

The site was protected for residential educational use, and indeed when Plater themselves sought to build some flats on a piece of spare land last year planning was turned down because housing use would intensify the pressures on traffic in a narrow private lane. They did however get permission a few years back, not yet acted upon, to increase the number of student rooms from, I think, about 75 to just over 100.

Plater accommodated students. EF will accommodate students. EF's main business throughout most of the year, like many international language schools, is not the hordes of Euro-teens that descend on the city each summer but young adults from overseas mainly spending several months getting their English language skills up to a standard at which they can study at degree levels in English speaking universities.

They are the least likely to bring additional traffic to the area for example. Yet they also tend to save to come here and have disposable money while they are here.

They will hopefully feed much needed overseas student fees into Brookes at the end of their courses with, perhaps, less effort on Brookes's part because they can be recruited locally.

I'm not sure I see the problem. Though it would have been nice (I have to say this bit I suppose) if Brookes themselves had managed to buy the place. Mind you, that outcome would also have involved students staying there.

Technorati Tags: oxford, plater

Yeah, okay, it's a bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but I simply cannot fathom why someone who is presumably deemed bright enough by her colleagues to manage law and order in this country cannot understand how drugs prohibition worsens the problem and leads to deaths, from violent street crime in the gangs that fight over patches where they sell drugs, via the dangers of adulterated or unknown strength products, to ignorance of what to do in reaction to symptoms of drugs and the inability to admit you have a problem because it marks you out as a criminal.

And our lawmakers are directly responsible for all these deaths. They could begin to take the supply chain out of the hands of the real criminals, disarming the streets. They could regulate and control the quality of substances so that people know what it is they are getting and taking. They could make it so much easier for people to access treatment where they develop a problem, and remember not all drugs users do develop a problem, simply by removing the stigma of criminalization, freeing up people to admit to friends and family, to stop hiding until it's too late.

Channel Four News has just run a package talking to teenagers who started various drugs in their early to mid teens. This is a problem, but it is far more difficult a problem to tackle while the whole supply chain is criminal, hiding from the law not operating within it and subject to proper scrutiny like alcohol and tobacco sales. And I'll bet you that in any community in the country there are more drugs dealers hiding, especially if you include 'social suppliers' who just sell to a close circle of friends, than there are outlets for the legal drugs of alcohol, tobacco and caffeine. How are you supposed to police that. How are you supposed to police the international trade in heroin when you realize that a month's supply for an individual addict can be concentrated enough to fit under the postage stamp on a letter?

And now, in addition to all the deaths and misery that prohibition causes, the government wants to overturn a central tenet of nearly all legal systems - that one is innocent until proven guilty - by seizing assets when someone is arrested on suspicion of supplying drugs rather than on conviction. We have truly entered a police state.

Jacqui Smith...I hope you are prepared, just as the Defense Secretary should do to returning coffins of our service personnel from theatres of operations, to attend every funeral of a drug related death of someone's son, someone's daughter, someone's husband or wife, look their relatives in the eye and tell them you're doing everything possible. Because you're not. You're exacerbating the problem and making rich some very nasty people. Prohibition kills, just as surely as if you strapped them to a chair and plugged them into the national grid, and you are perpetuating those deaths.