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Punishing aspiration. We’ve all heard that a lot recently right? Ever since the Lib-Con government spliced its way into power it seems to have been somewhat of a mantra for the coalition.

Critics have called it a way for the Tories to prevent the rich and the super-rich bearing their share of the hit in bringing down the deficit.

Everything is seemingly punishing aspiration — putting up income tax on the super rich, taxing bonuses, making businesses pay more.

And it would seem today those same critics’ argument might have been given some firmer grounding than the purely circumstantial evidence  yielded during George Osborne’s emergency budget eg… the VAT rise — our most potent remaining flat tax.

Lord Browne’s review of higher education spending has recommended an overhaul that would see universities charging whatever they liked, up to and over £12,000.

There are safeguards outlined in the report that make sure that talented poor students would be suitably prevented from falling through the net. But what it doesn’t address is those families on middle incomes of between 30-55k — who this is clearly going to hit the very hardest.

Aspiration is an odd thing. For upper middle class families, the people with an income in that bracket 80k plus, their children don’t see University as an option, it’s a stage, it’s mandatory. It’s as much a part of their education as primary school is. They will splutter with indignation at the thought of not gaining a degree.

University isn’t an aspiration for them — it’s going to happen. It’s a fact of life. Generally the notion of paying for education is one they’re used to equally as their parents will have done so throughout their academic careers.

In 2010, it is the students with parents earning 30-55k for whom University is an aspiration. And its an aspiration for several reasons. Probably because their parents didn’t go. Probably because half their classmates aren’t going. Probably because they know it’s going to be very difficult for their family to afford it, especially if they’ve got siblings too.

These are reasons most of the 100k kids won’t understand. They won’t in their lifetimes’ have had to worry about the family’s finances. And their parents should be commended for that — even if they’re from a long line of well-off folks.

But that doesn’t mean the children of people who haven’t made as much money shouldn’t be afforded exactly the same opportunities as those who’ve made or retained a bucket load.

And under this ill-contrived system (not maliciously ill-contrived I should point out, just reprehensibly short-sighted) they aren’t. A handful of poor kids are sprinkled through into the redbricks, but all the middle income kids, the kids for whom University is an aspiration and not merely par for the course — they have to think twice, or opt for the cheaper course.

This policy will cause a bizarre kind of acute social derision. One where, the very average kids from the upper and upper middle classes will be going into the top universities, while their far more able compatriots from middle-income families will be compelled to choose a cheaper education.

There is enough educational inequality in this country as it is. It’s genuinely sickening that children are so staunchly segregated in their schooling via economic, racial and religious lines without it extending into University (not that they are an oasis of equality and cohesion now).

Now I’m not saying Browne had an easy job. University funding needs reforming — but it must not be done in a way that doesn’t stymie social mobility, a good education’s finest trait.

The Tories have used the words punish aspiration a lot since they came to power but they’ve used them as a way to shield the super rich (including many of their front bench) from proportional tax rises to deal with the deficit. And if they go ahead with these recommendations, all those media allegation about “the same old Tories” will have come true — because this truly truly is punishing aspiration.

Here’s Lord Browne’s intro video to the report and you can find the full website here.

Related articles

• Lord Browne report on higher education (number10.gov.uk)
• Uni Report Calls For £6k Student Fees (news.sky.com)
• Report recommends higher tuition fees (independent.co.uk)
• Report recommends lifting tuition fee cap (independent.co.uk)
• Vince Cable backs Lord Browne’s plan to raise university tuition fees (telegraph.co.uk)
• Lord Browne’s plan will turn our great universities into schools for the rich (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• Benefit cuts and fairness: We’re all in this together… or are we? (guardian.co.uk)

The Ikea catalogue is not a catalogue, it’s Mein Kampf, it’s The Communist Manifesto, its propaganda.

Right, before you get your vagina in a bunch, I’m not saying it actually has fascistic agendas (maybe some socialist ones though?), the parallel I’m drawing is the stilted unrealistic, unnatural, view of the world it seeks to convey.

It’s full to the medium density fibreboard rafters of aryan toddlers, probably called Prussia and Kursk, adorably tossing salads and playing on invisible computer consoles.

And the worst thing is how horrendously appealing the whole thing is. Looking at it, I just wished each of the rooms in the catalogue were a room in my house, sorry maisonette, shared maisonette, it’s not ex-council, at least I don’t think it is. Whatever.

I don’t care that having cardboard boxes on top of kitchen units is irredeemably impractical, being that I’d need at least a kick-stool to access them, something Ikea oddly doesn’t sell. Probably because they couldn’t contrive a version suitably plastic and kooky enough.

Despite wanting all of it, I’m fully aware it’s for appalling reasons, that stretch beyond merely vacuous materialism. I don’t just want it because I want stuff, I want it for what that stuff represents. Not what it represents to other people, but to me.

How fucking pathetic is that? I need pillar candles, and an aqua chaise lounge to justify my life to myself. It’s all tied up in “image”.

It used to be you only needed an image if you were on the TV, now everyone simply has to have one. They have to be tightly and neatly defined. And everything you own, everything you wear and do is merely a contributing factor to the overall picture of you.

And it’s bollocks. I’m entirely capable of wanting to wear a shirt and shoes one day and a pair of jeans and a tee the next. And I don’t see that this should confuse people, as it invariably seems to. Fuck you Ikea and your lovely, cheap, home furnishings that we all pretend we’ve bought from Habitat.

Image via Wikipedia

I’d like to talk to you about girls. Girls and a friend of mine. For his sake lets call him Clive.

Clive is a lovely young man, he’s cultured, intelligent, funny, well-dressed, ambitious and warm. He’s an easy going kind of Germanic geometric handsome and, okay, a tiny bit short, but he’s done a really good job working off that post-uni paunch he had for a while.

The thing that’s always puzzled me about Clive is his luck with ladies. Insofar as, he has none.

If I were a woman, not an avenue I often contemplate, he’d certainly be worth a date, but when I saw him last he told me that this month marks his current barren period’s second anniversary.

Take a second to digest that, because it’s important. This intelligent, sociable, employed, going-places guy hasn’t, in the words of Snoop Dogg, “split-a-dime” in two years.

At first it just didn’t make sense. Surely there was no single trait was so pervasive that it dissuaded all women from doing rude stuff to his genitalia? We chatted for while. Expounded his varying idiosyncrasies and decided eventually, it was his “bonkersness” that sent the women a’scattering.

I should explain: Clive, can, on occasion, go a bit bonkers. He’s an intensely emotional kind of chap, (which I always thought girls thought was a positive) and after a few drams he has been known to get a tad sweary, and ranty, and runny-away-y — but only very occasionally. And even when he does, it’s only in a vaguely affected kind of this-is-sort-of-a-joke kind of way.

The other thing about him is — he’s not sensible. Every time I see him he comes weilding a bagful of new hilarious annecodotes, which, though undoubtedly engaging pub-chat fodder, are not the larks of “boyfriend material”.

Continuing our disassembly of his misfortune with ladies we decided that it was probably something to do with the economy.

There were some unlikely paralells. He broke up with his first serious girlfriend just as news of the full severity of the American sub-prime crisis hit. His luck with women seemed to decline steadily as the state of the economy did.

Clive, we reasoned, was a risky investment, not the kind of asset you want to be dumping your affections into at a time of such uncertainty.

By the time the banks were being nationalised Clive’s love life was wilting faster than an 80-year-old’s morning glory in a cold bedroom (not that any 80-year-old’s bedroom should be cold these days — are the Tories cutting the winter tax allowance? They’re probably taxing 80-year-old’s erections too, the perverted, joyless, Tory bastards).

Could it be that in times of financial turmoil girls pick their mate on how safe an investment they are? Pre-recession I’d have baulked at such talk.

“He’s just saying that because he can’t talk to girls.” I’d have no doubt chuntered before throwing another fiver on the fire — thems were the days.

But now, in these Times Of Austerity women do seem less keen on “taking a punt on a diamond in the rough like me”… He didn’t actually call himself that, but he is one. Well actually, more like a diamond under the out-of-date creme-fraiche behind the fizzy tzatziki from last week’s BBQ.

He’s had a long-standing crush on a girl he’s known since he was a kid and I met her for the first time a month ago. To say that he could do better would be an substantial understatement. She was about as sexy as athletes foot, about as engaging as a bin liner — basically she was pretty dull. It made me sad that he thought this cold, custard’s skin of a girl was out of his league because in reality, she is a fair few below.

It really over-waters my bansai when women choose such materialistic reasons to pick a partner. And okay, our evidence is thin, but I have another exhibit.

Another friend, lets call him Bernard. He’s a man of considerably less charm than Clive, no better looking, markedly less engaging and about as much fun as being made to walk around with your shoes on the wrong feet. Frankly, I don’t know why we’re friends. He is however, stinking rich. And he knows how to show it.

He dresses like a toff. He talks like a toff. He walks like a toff. If his poo were to suddenly become sentient, it too, I’m sure, would have that same effortless air of innate, hateful, superiority that pervades every aspect of his life.

Pre-recession women found him about as attractive as, well, a disgusting, ugly, rude toff, which is in fact, exactly what he is. Post recession women however, can’t get enough of him.

Has he upped his game? Has he become less of twat? No! If anything he’s become more of one. And yet, they fall at his feet, like dizzy little schoolgirls, swooning over the things he says he can buy, and places he reckons he’ll go this summer.

Now this is all purely observational. And certainly not a generalisation I would ever stretch to the majority of women. All I am asking is, do women, and not just the heinously materialistic, lap dog toting genus, think about a man’s fiscal standing when considering them as a partner. Moreover, is that sentiment strengthened during times of economic instablilty, like what we’z are in in this bit of time right now?

Because Clive is seriously a catch. And Bernard really isn’t.

Anne Milton, the new public health minister, that heavyweight ministerial position that neither you nor I knew existed until she decided to say something nonsensical this morning, has decided that the word “obese” might confuse us and that doctors should instead just tell you you’re fat.

Anne reckons it’s about time doctors stopped talking in that crazy “technical jargon” and told us straight.

She said: “If I look in the mirror and think I am obese I think I am less worried than if I think I am fat.”

Yeah well that’s because you’re an absolute moron. The word obese has far more impact that fat. Fat is everyday, fat is mundane, fat is: “Oh you know, Sarah the fat girl who works in marketing the one with the lazy eye and the limp… yeah she fancies you!”

“Does she? Tell her I don’t date fat chicks.”

Obese is medical and sterile. It’s hospital and heart attacks. It’s a problem. It’s all those waddling twats on ITV2 and BBC3 on TV shows called “Fat Farm,” “Diet Doctor” and “The Great Big Wheezing Obese Shootout at the Okay Coral” — maybe not that last one (though it would be awesome to see morbidly obese people re-enacting famous shoot-outs from the Wild West.)

Milton’s comments just show the contempt with which the Tories regard the broader public — they’re suggesting that the average person doesn’t understand the word obese and they do.

Oh and by the way Anne, shut up.

Related articles

• Use fat instead of obese – minister (bbc.co.uk)
• Tell people they are fat: Minister (channel4.com)
• Smoking and Obesity Battle For American Death Championship [Health] (gawker.com)
• Smoking vs. obesity: Which health issue most deserves taxpayers’ dollars? (grist.org)
• Doctors should tell people they are fat, not obese, minister says (guardian.co.uk)

It’s a broadly accepted fact that Michael Gove is a twat. The problem is, the best salesmen tend to be.

That’s why it’s vital we don’t swallow Gove’s shit-sandwich about free schools. Education is too important. And it’ll take time to see the real damage Gove’s misconceived, arguably vicious plans will do.

By the time we’ve got a horde of under-qualified 18-year-olds who’ve been systematically told they’re not good enough for uni and should go into the manual sector, only to find it doesn’t exist, Gove will be sitting pretty as head of some horrendous right-wing think-tank.

And the real reason they’re not good enough, the real reason Gove wants to put an end to broader University education is because he hates poor people, he hates the working class and he hates the social mobility a good education can bring.

He and his public school alumni will continue to frolic off to the red-brick of their choice — and that’s the way he want to keep it.

Michael Gove is a bastard and he’s trying to stymie the education of poor children.

Related articles

• Education: Crash-course legislation | Editorial (guardian.co.uk)
• “Michael Gove: deprivation, deprivation, deprivation” and related posts (chickyog.net)
• Gove to apologise on list chaos (news.bbc.co.uk)

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Now if you can see the logic there please point it out to me because I can’t, and I’ve looked. I mean if he found out that David Mitchell was a Nazi or Man City fan or something I could understand. I could see that then it might be difficult to enjoy Peep Show in quite the same way.

But he’s not, he just disagrees with you about climate change.

The problem I have with James Delingpole is that as opposed to putting forward a cogent balanced opposition to climate change science he just shrieks in that stereotypically indignant, pejorative, histrionic way that all bad sceptics do. He doesn’t actually seem interested in debating the evidence, rather he’d prefer to get into self-regarding arguments with other columnists to further his own celebrity.

His blog consists solely of posts where he either slags off, most elegantly, climate change believers or responds to other columnists who have called him names.

He doesn’t see that by being so melodramatically convulsed by anyone or anything that believes or has anything to do with climate change he is undermining his very cause.

People can see him saying stupid things like Peep Show is shit because David Mitchell thinks climate change is real and think to themselves, “Ahh a shrieking indignant climate change sceptic — I’ll just pop him in this neat little pigeon hole and never listen to another word he says”.

There is a balanced, evidenced opposition to climate change — I’ve read some of it, and I’ve read the argument for it. Whether it’s happening or not… I don’t know, I suspect yes, it probably is. But I know that James Delingpole is making it a lot easier for people to ignore the argument against it.

Even if, even if, climate change is all bollocks and the polar ice cap hasn’t receded like all that silly empirical evidence shows it has, is it such a bad thing that we’re trying to live in a cleaner environment?

I live on Holloway Road and the air quality round here is nothing short of disgusting. Now if everyone started driving electric or hydrogen powered cars that would improve. The fact is pollution is a massive problem beyond just climate change. It causes disease, and generally makes the world a less pleasant place to be.

I don’t think climate change should be used as a stick to beat the poor or to stymie emerging economies. I don’t think people should be priced off the roads or out of the sky. And yes, there are, climate change extremists who hijack the debate and say disproportionate
things. So maybe the best thing we can do is take the most extreme 20% on either side and cut them out, ignore them, just leave them to snarl at each other from their respective apocalypse bunkers.

That includes you Delingpole.

Posted via email from Operation Margarine

I found myself eating just off Regent Street yesterday. The girlfriend’s office is just by there and we decided to grab some dinner with ‘me mum’. Opposite us was a gallery putting on a function — the opening of some exhibition.

The attendees were fascinating. None of us were talking so busy were we just scrutinising the bizarre and varied genus of characters quaffing champers and having what it would seem were singularly very important and intense conversations.

Apart from a couple dozen disparate types, there were two very noticeable kinds of person there: Mid-thirties creatives and function professionals. The thing that really struck me, apart from the gip-inducing waft of what might well have been expensive cologne and perfume but that once unified smelt roughly like an Algerian pimp’s breath (I’ve met a few — that’s how I know), was how secondhand everything was.

The exhibition was tame to say the least — more than that actually, it was tired and dull. It was a watered-down version of the kind of work I was seeing on a daily and weekly basis living on Brick Lane. It was so palpably embezzled in every way. The ideas were secondhand, the jokes, the style, the colours — all of it. And it wasn’t just the art. It was the people.

The function professionals, you know them, they work in ‘property’ or ‘finance’ but are always sketchy about details, usually because actually they don’t work, they’re the son or daughter of some broadly inconsequential, desperately wealthy CEO and live on an “allowance”. You know the kind of thing me and you gave up when were 15 and got our first jobs. They flit about at these things talking to one another about their “investments” ie… the things they choose to spend their allowances on.

Some of you may doubt that these people exist. And I grant you occasionally they’re hard to spot. They come in such a variety of shapes, sizes and breeds. But pop along to one of these events and you’ll find yourself surrounded by them I assure you.

The mid-thirties creatives are there for the art and to schmooze with other mid-thirties creatives — being that kind of people who revel in the significance and intelligence of their fellow professionals. They look like the kind of people you see in the east end perusing the vintage shops and markets, except 10 years older and considerably better kempt.

The thing is, the mid-30s creative and the function professional actually look quite similar. Both wear designer versions of trends that were trendy six months ago and talk about things that were new a year ago. It wouldn’t matter if this wasn’t the currency they use to expound their self-worth — but it is, so it does. It may be that the people in the east end are the ones wearing pre-owned clothes but it is these people who are wearing them secondhand.

It seems to me that once a trend in any form of artistic life has had the time to be adopted, repackaged, diluted and exploited by the mainstream, that is to say, people looking to make serious money out if it, it takes so long and is so far from its original idea that it’s ultimately pointless.

Which actually, is fine, because the only people who go and see this crap are mid-30s creatives looking for work or a fuck and function professionals looking for a sense of self-worth and something to spend their allowances on.

And if this is affluence, I want no part of it.

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