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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.

New at 1909, how the People's Budget was intended to change the whole ethos of tax, asking not merely "how much have you got?" but also "how did you get it?" and giving us ideas just as pertinent today for differentiating between people's justified wealth and wealth gained by exploiting the common wealth and the needs of others.

News that the German and British governments have been paying for information almost certainly illegally obtained in order to chase people who try to stash their money overseas should worry us all. Obviously in this case the amounts of money potentially liable for tax are quite large numerically, although small in proportion to the total tax take - though the fact that it is merely around one fifth of one per cent of the total UK tax take we're talking about should alter our opinion about people who try to beat the system when everyone else has to pay. But it is the means employed that are of concern - paying what amounts to a criminal who has liberated customer personal information from the Liechtenstein bank at which he or she worked.

In a world in which it is ever easier for us to trade with overseas companies and individuals, to live in one place and earn in another and to invest in overseas assets, all of which are a good thing, I have warned previously that governments could try to get more authoritarian about chasing money allegedly stashed away or earned elsewhere:

This means ever more intrusive government, clinging desperately to current understandings of money, income and taxing that income as the only progressive way. We are already seeing huge bites taken out of our civil liberties because of immigration fears, terrorism and taxes.

And of course there is an alternative; that we switch to taxing only things that are impossible to hide - like land, which happens to have the added advantage of being value that the occupier does not create, rather than capital wealth or income which the worker or investor has created.

You might think this is just a bunch of rich people getting what they deserve from HMRC, but their willingness to engage is what amounts to industrial espionage to do so is disturbing and is a message to us all, whether we just trade with Americans on Ebay who then send us "gifts" tax-free or decide to retire to Spain, or further afield, whilst keeping a retirement job working online for a UK employer.

Charles Kennedy was presenting a Channel 4 "Thirty Minutes" tonight on "Politics and Power". I can't find it online, so if you missed it (as I missed the first five minutes being suckered in by those other great Liberals trying to rearrange the county in the Madness of King George) all I can find to give you a flavour is the Radio Times write-up:

Charles Kennedy, former leader of the Liberal Democrats, examines the problem he sees as being at the heart of British politics: the way politicians too often sacrifice their principles in the pursuit of power. Speaking about his experiences fighting six general elections, Kennedy compares notes with parliamentary colleagues including Michael Howard, Ian Duncan Smith, Baroness Jay, Norman Tebbit, Baroness Morris and Jonathan Cruddas.

If it wasn't actually intended as a reminder to party members heading off to conference in four weeks or so of what we (were forced to) gave up only eight short months ago, it certainly succeeded in being so for me! Charles came across as we fondly remember - frank, honest and genuine. A real "home boy" still representing the constituency he grew up in. The man who, for all his faults and fumblings at times, managed to woo the electorate with his fireside chattiness.

I missed him setting out the hypothesis, but he diagnosed many of the problems lots of us feel about politics today - disengagement, lack of trust, unwillingness to debate with the public some of the biggest issues - especially at elections times - the concentration on what a tiny number of floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies think and want to the exclusion of the majority of communities in the country, even the whips system keeping MPs on the party line regardless of what they honestly feel and whether their constituents agree.

He said that reform was necessary. IDS, I think it was, argued that there was no such thing as a General Election nowadays because of targetting marginal seats. Everyone seemed to agree. One problem was that parties did not want to appear to be divided on these hot issues (they chose Europe, nuclear power and Trident, but it could have been any of a whole load of other big issues - environment, drugs and so on), again especially at election times. And it made me wonder - how would it affect my commitment to an election campaign, say, if these big debates were aired and I did stand divided from my party on something that I thought very important.

And as I thought about it, I found that Charles was making the perfect argument for electoral reform, and in particular STV voting. It's a little ironic as I know some Labour electoral reformers felt that Charles was pretty much responsible for us letting the long grass grow around PR as an issue at a time when they could have built a lot of support for reform in their own party if there was pressure from us and the issue kept at the fore.

Under STV you have larger constituencies with several MPs and you get to rank the candidates individually in order of preference on the ballot paper. Say Oxfordshire could be one instead of six constituencies, returning six MPs altogether. In order to get yourself a better chance of being elected than your party colleagues you've got to make a name for yourself, differentiate yourself a little from them. So you might be generally a Tory voter, but are strongly pro-Europe, so you can get to choose the Tory candidates who are least anti-Eruope and maybe throw in a vote for a more free-market Lib Dem as better than the more Eurosceptic Tory candidates.

So it would give the candidates a reason to highlight their individual issues where they differ from the predominant party line, an excuse for when the whips try to berate them for voting honestly on those issues when the pressures are on to vote with the lobby fodder. In short, more open, honest and public debate, a closer approximation to the overall political preferences in the nation as a whole and no safe seats to abandon to concentrate on targeted marginal constituency.

A great pity then that Charles did not take the opportunity to prescribe that remedy. But I do hope to see more of him, soon. Not just the party, but the British political scene is the poorer for his not being as big a part of it as he was. And I say that as someone who put him sixth (if at all even possibly) in my preferences when he was first elected.

Back in April I wrote a piece about a particular Anti-Social Behaviour Order handed down to a chap from Blackbird Leys in Oxford that banned him from his family home for the rest of his life. I was particularly concerned about the draconian nature of the punishment - a modern day banishment redolent of some Shakespearian mediaeval Italian city state run by a tin-pot tyrant.

Now today the Oxford Mail reports that this particular ASBO has been quashed by a judge on appeal, who said that the evidence presented was little more than local "tittle-tattle" and did not stand up to scrutiny. Indeed it appears that one of the complaints against him was actually made about a period when the guy was already inside - one of the best of alibis in my understanding.

Now again, I want to make clear that I don't know the ins and outs of the case or the individuals concerned. Merely from the fact that this chap has had 20 years worth of prison sentences in the same period suggests he is a thorough nuisance. Originally I wanted to know why, if we ever believed that prison was there to rehabilitate, we needed an additional sanction to banish as well on a non-criminal rap - instead of keeping him inside until the authorities felt he was rehabilitated or was well on the way to being so. Then, one would have thought, he could settle back in the community he came from, even the one he offended against, and people would have a whole new experience of him.

But now, it seems that the ASBO system, apart from compounding criminal sanctions with sentences essentially even more severe (banishment from your home area where your family has been settled for decades) can be based on little evidence, evidence in particular that does not stand up to scrutiny by the legal system itself. How many more victims are there of this politicising of the justice system - where parties can go into an election claiming to be willing to bang up as many people as it takes to get your neighbourhood how you want it? I certainly know of Labour councillors who recognize that some of the ASBOs given to young tearaways on their estates were not the right way of dealing with them or their undoubted problems.

Time for a new look at ASBOs - at both the terms (banishment for life I find unlikely to ever be "proportionate") that can be handed down and at the way evidence is collected and how objectively that is viewed (how complaints about someone while they are already in prison could possibly have been entertained by even the least awake magistrate beggars belief).

The irony in this case is that this chap is currently on remand, enjoying a further stay at Her Majesty's expense - accused of breaching this ASBO that the law says should never have been issued in the first place. I hope he's home by this afternoon - though with misgivings for those who feel, rightly or wrongly, that he is a blight on their lives.

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