Fancy living on 62p a day? Thousands of families are going to have to do exactly that if the government’s Welfare Reform Bill becomes law, and the benefit cap comes in. Never mind the 100,000 children who’ll fall below the poverty line, or the projected 20,000 people who’ll be made homeless by it. Never mind that the spiralling cost of welfare has practically nothing to do with the behaviour of those on benefits and everything to do with the dearth of both private rented and council housing allowing profiteering private landlords to make their fortunes from tenants on Housing Benefit. Never mind that across the country there are between 5 and 6 unemployed people for every job vacancy, so trying to change the “psychology” of people in long-term unemployment (the avowed aim of the Bill) is unlikely to get very far in getting them into work while the economy’s still in the toilet. And never mind that £26,000 for a couple with three or more children (and who were almost certainly able to afford to have that many children until the financial crisis hit and drove the unemployment rate through the ceiling) really isn’t much when you’re living in a high cost area (like, say, the whole of Southeast England), and only seems generous when you disingenuously compare it with the individual – as opposed to household – income of someone in employment and don’t take into account any in-work benefits, as this innumerate moron does here.

No, none of that matters. And no, I’m not being ironic; that’s what the polls are saying. I wish they weren’t, but they are. There really is a lot of popular resentment at benefit recipients getting what they see as overly generous welfare payments. Dave Osler asks why the big three political parties (and Labour in particular, one assumes) aren’t full-bloodedly opposing the Bill and just tinkering around the edges with amendments. Polls like the one I link to above are almost certainly a big part of the answer. Labour’s response (and in particular that of Liam “are there no workhouses?” Byrne) to the Bill has been decidedly lukewarm, but if people don’t tend to take into account things like the varying cost of living in different regions of the country when they’re thinking about how generous a “fair” benefits system should be, then it takes political courage to try and get public opinion onside by talking about the real, deep-seated systemic problems which underlie the current high cost of benefits rather than simply capitulating to it. Mark Ferguson at LabourList makes a good start, but he’s not (yet) holding elected office, so it’s perhaps not so hard for him. Until the Parliamentary Labour Party regains a political backbone and realises that being Conservatives-lite isn’t going to get meaningful political change, proper opposition to bills like this within Parliament will be in short supply.

So, apparently, if you release a report claiming that older people are contributing to the housing shortage by living in homes that are too big for them, some of those older people get quite annoyed. If you were inclined to be cynical, you might even wonder if controversy was exactly what the author – or at least whoever at the Intergenerational Foundation came up with the title – had in mind. Yes, if you write at great length about people having the temerity to keep on living in their homes after their kids leave and then decide to stick “Hoarding of Housing” at the top of it – with the nasty insinuation that people are doing it deliberately to shut their childrens’ generation out of the housing market – then you’re going to piss people off. It ain’t rocket science.

Having said that, though, it’s important not to overlook that the report’s basic point is a good one – housing is scarce, and older couples and single people holding onto homes which could fit a family when they could comfortably live somewhere smaller is clearly going to exacerbate this. And some of the responses are just downright stupid – Jan Etherington, writing for the Telegraph, gets extremely worked up at the very notion that maybe her and her husband don’t need a five-bedroom house all to themselves, launching an all out attack on wave after wave of straw men with her talk of “the property police”, “bullying” and (inevitably) “Big Brother”. The fact that nowhere in the report is anything suggested that’s anywhere near as draconian as Etherington seems to imagine (it suggests relief on stamp duty and new taxes on high-value properties to encourage people to downsize, and that’s about as far as it goes) is beside the point, of course.

In fact, most of the negative responses to the report have bordered on the frankly bizarre. Both Etherington and Homa Khaleeli at the Guardian make much of the fact that a lot of older people spend significant amounts of time looking after their grandkids, as if this is remotely relevant. If you’re a parent of young children I’m sure having your own parents look after your kids from time to time is very welcome, but it does precisely sod all to help you get on the property ladder. Almost as oddly, Khaleeli then goes on to say that the real problem is “the tone of the debate” – though, tellingly, without actually quoting either the report itself or any discussions of it to support this assertion. The (crass, ill-judged) title aside, the tone of the report itself seems pretty reasoned from a quick skim-through, in marked contrast to some of the stuff that’s been written in criticism of it, such as Etherington’s response or the Daily Mail’s usual level-headed objectivity. (It’s worth noting that the phrase “bedroom blocker” appears nowhere in the report, yet is in the headlines chosen by both the Mail and the Telegraph).

All things considered, the Intergenerational Foundation’s report should be welcomed. Looking at injustice through a generational lens can give a distorted picture at times – one that focuses too much on the middle classes at the expense of more deprived sections of society – but since (as the report points out) the vast majority of older people in the UK are owner-occupiers, this is one area where this approach can be useful. Yes, more houses (and especially more council houses) need to be built, and yes, it would probably help if the government wasn’t also slashing Housing Benefit at a time of mass unemployment, but semantic bickering about what the “real” problem is won’t help. As with so many issues, there are lots of causes, and lots of possible (partial) solutions. Persuading people not to live in houses they don’t need when there are people who could make better use of them clearly isn’t the only answer, but it’s definitely a good start.

Guest post by Matt Mahon

In June, the government announced a 22 percent cut in early years spending. At the time, the effect that was most widely discussed was the closure of SureStart centres, but now the direct impact on state schools and primary education is also becoming clear. Another ‘saving’ announced at the time was a cut in free nursery places, from 25 to 15 hours a week per child. It’s important to highlight this particular cut now because school governors are currently working on strategies to deal with the cuts in time for the September 2012 intake.

Although the cut was presented as a reduction in hours, local authorities are also able to implement the saving by offering fewer full-time places. In one typical North London primary (not named for obvious reasons), the number of funded full-time nursery places will fall from around 50 to around 30. There is currently a waiting list for places at the nursery, and all projections point to no decline in demand next year. Yet in Camden, there will be a reduction in nursery places from 1450 to 800 in 2012.

Camden council decided in July to allow schools to offer full-time nursery places above the government allocation at a cost to the parents. One community governor I’ve spoken to has put the cost of a full-time place in a nursery at £80 to £90 a week. Allocation of the free places is hierarchical – children with a statement of special educational need come first, followed by children with welfare concerns, children of low-income families, and children on free school meals.

Given that there’s provision for families in low income, you might wonder why I take issue with charging those who can potentially afford to pay for their childcare. But there’s a serious isssue here, and not just for the ‘squeezed middle’, as bad as it is for them. Rather, I’m worried about the effect of this cut on those families who are able to afford a nursery place for their child. These changes effectively move a large constituency of parents into a position where they must make an economic decision about where they send their children, and that’s an arena in which state schools will inevitably lose out.

Imagine a family who are capable of absorbing the extra £90 a week, and might be able to put a bit more money into their child’s day care. They may not have considered the possibility of paid childcare previously, but now that they have to, a range of options is open to them. Why send your child to the local comp, with its larger class sizes, when you could send them to a private nursery? Or if that’s a little far-fetched, why send them to your local school if you’re now a paying customer who can demand better? What about the one down the road? Once consumer choice is introduced, forcibly in this case, it has a tendency to trump other considerations, especially those to do with the community that surrounds a local school. At the very least, the cut in places will exacerbate the inequalities between so-called ‘sink schools’ and their better neighbours.

The prioritisation of lower-income families is the least we could hope for from local authorities, in that the vast majority of families who attend local schools in inner cities don’t have the odd £90 a week knocking around to cover costs. But these measures will force middle-income parents into a commercial relationship with their local school from the earliest stage. The outcome of the government’s decision to cut spending in early years will be the creeping segregation of schools into some for those who can afford to choose and others for those who can’t.

There’s a bit of a comments storm brewing over at LibCon over the ‘gender neutral baby’ story which came out a few days ago, with Flying Rodent in the ‘won’t the poor kid get bullied?’ corner, and Jennie Kermode of Trans Media Watch entering the fray for the ‘no it won’t, and gender’s just a social construct so we shouldn’t get so hung up about it anyway’ side.

I should put my cards on the table at this point and state that my sympathies lean far more towards Kermode’s arguments than Flying Rodent’s, but I’m not hugely satisfied by the arguments put forward by either of them.

Kermode suggests that bringing up children as boys or girls from birth will lead to “[f]rantically trying to ensure that kids play with the right gendered toys” and that this is “all about imposing adult insecurities on children too young to understand what’s going on”. Sympathetic though I am to the cause of deconstructing the gender binary, I don’t think it’s very helpful to indulge in the armchair psychoanalysis of millions of parents who do raise their infants in a gendered way, as Kermode effectively does by asserting that they’re all riddled with insecurities.

Nor is it particularly helpful to conclude that “[t]he real question is: why are we so obsessed with judging people on the basis of what’s between their legs?” There’s no denying that it’s a good and sensible question to be asking, but is it really helpful in this particular case? There’s nothing in Flying Rodent’s piece to suggest that he’s ignorant of or opposed to the attempts to question traditional gender role; indeed, he quite explicitly writes (albeit in a bit of a backhanded context) that “it’d be nice to live in a world where kids could express themselves however they like without being sadistically tormented”, and I imagine most people who read Kermode’s piece are going to be similarly sympathetic. The question is how best to balance the commendable desire of parents Kathy Witterick and David Stocker to help undermine society’s simplistic gender binaries with the likely consequences of their actions for the child in question – most significantly the prospect of said child facing bullying in school.

It’s undeniably true, as both Kermode and Flying Rodent acknowledge, that kids bully other kids for any number of reasons – weight, clothes, accent and so on – but it doesn’t follow that it’s therefore OK to act in a way that significantly raises the likelihood of your child being bullied. It would still be pretty irresponsible to call your kid ‘sweetums’ within earshot of their classmates even if they also had ginger hair and braces. Pointing to adults who act in ways untypical to their gender isn’t very convincing either; as a general rule, kids are a hell of a lot more vicious than adults when it comes to this kind of thing.

But for all the flaws there might be in Kermode’s piece, it’s by far the more convincing. The central argument of Flying Rodent’s article could be applied to parents who are openly gay, particularly given the appalling levels of homophobic bullying in schools. Should gay couples therefore not have children? What about mixed-race couples? And, perhaps even more importantly, what about the argument that the only way attitudes to this kind of thing are ever going to change is if people actually do something to try and challenge them?

Besides which, how likely is it really that little Storm (yes, that’s the kid’s name – and it’s not even like there aren’t any perfectly normal gender-neutral names they could have chosen. What’s wrong with Jo, or Sam? But I digress) is going to have their life at school (and possibly beyond) completely ruined by being allowed to decide their gender for themselves? Even if the kid does end up with a gender-atypical behaviour trait or two (which is possible), and even if the school they end up going to is rife with transphobia (entirely plausible) and the staff are unwilling or unable to do anything to challenge this (also quite believable, sadly), surely most children are bright enough to figure out fairly quickly the more obvious ways they can stop themselves standing out as targets for bullies? It seems far more likely that Storm will learn at a pretty early juncture to keep their more unconventional behaviour out of the classroom and playground than that they’ll be traumatised for life by the whole thing. Not that that’s an ideal outcome either, of course, but suggesting apocalyptically dire consequences for what’s effectively just a novel type of hands-off parenting is frankly unhelpful.

Edit: Lucy Cage points out on Twitter and in the comments that Storm isn’t going to be sent to school, a detail omitted from the BBC story. However, Storm’s parents do presumably intend their child to interact socially with kids of the same age at some point, (hopefully anyway), so I’d argue that the question of whether Storm’s likely to face bullying from them is still worth considering.

Your starter for 10: Which voice of Britain’s embattled public sector workers said this yesterday?

We acknowledge that some cuts are necessary due to the parlous state of the country’s finances, but we feel greatly let down that we are not considered to be a protected priority area by the government.

They have and will continue to spew out that much-abused mantra that we have to be more effective and efficient, but don’t be fooled by this insincere, nihilist, smoke and mirrors, slash and burn policy, for it is in large parts economics and in greater part ideology.

The answer? Police Federation official John Giblin. His remarks – made at the organisation’s conference – were greeted with enthusiastic applause. He went on to add that ‘this government, to put it bluntly, hate the Police Service’.

This has got to be as clear evidence as anyone could need of the existence of strong opposition to the government’s spending plans within the police. I realise that in the wake of the events at Fortnum & Mason on March 26^th and the deeply worrying arrests of republican protesters on the day of the royal wedding, it’s probably even harder now to make the case that the anti-cuts movement should try and engage with police officers who oppose the government’s spending plans than it was when I argued for it back in March, but the reasons why we should do so remain as strong as ever. The police are getting screwed by spending cuts as much as anyone, and – given that the Tories have traditionally been trusted by a majority of voters as the party of law and order – getting large numbers of them onside makes it that bit harder to dismiss the anti-cuts movement as some kind of mere radical fringe.

The supreme court ruled today that Raymond McCartney and Eamonn MacDermott are entitled to compensation for being wrongly convicted of murder during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This news doesn’t seem to have made much of an impact, which, when you look at the actual substance and implications of the judgement, is kind of odd:

By a narrow majority, the judges held that a miscarriage of justice occurs “when a new or newly discovered fact shows conclusively that the evidence against a defendant has been so undermined that no conviction could possibly be based upon it”.

The supreme court panel said: “A claimant for compensation will not need to prove that he was innocent of the crime but he will have to show that, on the basis of the facts as they are now known, he should not have been convicted or that conviction could not possibly be based on those facts.”

What this rather strongly implies, if I’ve understood it correctly (and as I’m not a lawyer I’m open to correction if I haven’t), is that until today if you tried to claim compensation for being the victim of a miscarriage of justice, you had to prove that you were innocent in order to be eligible. So, until today, victims of miscarriages of justice – people who suffered punishment from the State despite there being demonstrably good reasons to doubt their guilt – were effectively deemed by the legal system to be the only group in society not to deserve the privilege of being considered innocent until proven guilty. And that’s insane. The criminal justice system decides whether people accused of crimes are guilty beyond reasonable doubt or not. If they are, they get punished; if not, they’re acquitted. If a mistake is made and someone gets punished when they shouldn’t have been, they should be entitled to redress. Making them ‘prove their innocence’ first is bizarre, unjust and insane. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the judges made the right decision on this, but what the hell took them so long?

We can’t in all honesty, remember if one met Kate Middleton at St Andrews. We may well have – St Andrews is a small place, without any appreciable nightlife beyond the two streets where the students cluster. With the weather so consistently bleak only alcohol could really induce us to travel outside. And so to ward off cabin fever – we partied. More or less continuously. We partied with high and low. With the Ras (in St Andrew Yahs) in their pink rugby shirts and pink pashminas and orange permatans, and with the strange Scottish children, some of them just 17, from the yet further North, who took term times jobs on the counter at Tesco and Morrisons, and melted their teeth with Irn Bru and other industrial lubricants. Both high and low could knock it back, but to our middling ear, neither spoke comprehensibly even when sober. In St Andrews, at some point, one meets everyone.

Such heady days, those earliy noughties. St Andrews – famous suddenly for something other than the world’s second most boring sport – was for us a veritable student paradise thanks to booze day Tuesdays, post 9/11 optimism (finally now we can go out and fix the world!) pathetic academic workloads and seemingly endless credit – Wowzer! Wonga! Did we spend money! Even the poor students – who though they may never have bought drinks at the balls (preferring to limber up with three litres of White Lightening to one of White Label Gin) still splashed a hundred pounds on a ticket. £100 to go to the ball! For an opportunity to get drunk in slightly more uncomfortable clothes than one usually wore! And if we were really lucky we might grope a stranger to the warble of Franz Ferdinand or the Proclaimers – although more frequently we’d find ourselves in the St John’s tent holding someone’s hair out of their eyes – feeling temporarily saintly and therefore fully licensed to stare down the bewildered cleavage of inebriated women, cheeks blanched with tears and shiny as toffee apples. They counted their breaths like nervous divers, and we counted with them. Oh to be young again and vomiting!

The Yahs are all gone now, moved on, moved up, uP, UP … into PR mainly, corporate finance, the London nightclub scene. Meanwhile our middleclass cohort are all broke. Modestly – though it feels massive and irreparable – none of us have paid back even half our student loans yet (at any rate none who haven’t inherited). Scarcely any of us own houses or are married. We still live like students. We still are students, some of us. And so you will know us by the flecks of vitriol we unconsciously spill on Friday, at the helicopters and ermine and the thought of two week honeymoons to places beyond the range Ryan Air and Easy Jet.

And the poor students, the ones with whom we played Mega Drive and shared slabs of cardboard pizza? They all work for pharmaceutical giants, or government. They refuse to find us better jobs. We let them buy the first round.

*

Kate Middleton – we have a vague memory of a woman with a face as bright as a carton of Sunny D, eyebrows plucked into a low interrupted frown line, tiny pupils that stared straight through you to some point fifteen years in the future – to cashmere baby jumpsuits, to champions league competitive parenting, to whatever it is the rich want… more money I suppose. Was that her? It could have been any of them. So probably not.

William we knew, very slightly. A natural stooper, a polite brayer. Only occasionally a man with the punchdrunk air that comes with knowing the wrong word or phrase will detonate beneath him, a home-grown semantic IED. There are worse jobs than princing but even so, it must be a pain: required to be so constantly on guard, so ostentatiously dull. And our William – though apparently fabulously incurious about the world, and without a reported opinion on anything at all – has at least the gift of picking his friends carefully. None have embarrassed him in word or deed yet. More evidence required? He didn’t pick us. And he knows our name – so where’s our invite?

Cancel the Royal Wedding! Use the money to pay off my student debt! Our advice to students going to St Andrews next year – get their early – Tesco Express only has four counters and three shifts.

Do the Windlettons speak for our generation? No, clearly not – not when for all the hair lost, neither appear to evolve. But maybe they speak for our past, our silent acquiescent optimism – for a time before Abu Ghraib and Bear Stearns, Madeline McCann and Joseph Fritzl, Raoul Moat and Compare the Meerkat, the Tea Party and Susan Boyle – for a time, as the poet, wrote when living seemed a laugh, and love – all it was said to be.

Enough of the ‘we’.

*

The question is – will you be watching the wedding? I will be. Partly because I am sucker for kitsch, and for love – or for at least trying to spot its symptoms in others.

But I’ll also be watching with the same queasy, morbid, hungry fascination I have for the first corner of a Grand Prix or the first fence of the National. For the error, the crash, the pile up – from the mild gaff to full blown catastrophe.

The goofs most of us can enjoy – a chance to snort like from the Olympian vantage of our anonymity. The more complex the event, the more that can go wrong. Does the Archbishop of Canterbury do many weddings these days? What if he forgets his lines? Will Charles trip on Kate’s dress? Will Prince Andrew fart on camera? Will Edward pass out with sunstroke? Or at the altar, will Kate change her mind and say no? Will Will? Will a corgi do a Paula Radcliffe in the aisle? Will Harry object because he’s been secretly porking his brother’s bird? Will it be as good as the marriage of Brad and Beth in Neighbours when Brad had slept with Lauren, and she was pregnant with Brad 2.0 and no-one knew but Lou, until on the big day Beth sensed it and Brad broke down and Lauren cried and the credits ran?

But also I will be watching, coiled with a child’s clenched awe, for something much, much worse. For some hideous terrorist atrocity – sudden overwhelming violence, crowds panicking, gunfire, explosions, a ruby spray of blood on the virgin white dress, the confetti of ‘organic shrapnel’. Watching for a grenade bouncing off Charles’ conk like a beach ball, and the Queen combusting – a swollen pensioner leg torpidly wafting over the screen – to where the archbishop consumed in flames lift his skirt to reveal his satyr legs, and Philip bursts from his human disguise into his full immortal lizard glory.

And though I’ll be laid out before the telly with my snacks and CocaCola mainly for the kitsch – I also secretly want an invite to the chill banquet of shock and disgust and helplessness and compassion and heartbreak, everything about an act of atrocity you can share with your in-laws – along with the unacknowledged excitement and sudden clarity of living through the end of days, the freightload of unearned grandeur – of glamour even – that comes of being a witness to Big History. The wedding alone, just doesn’t cut it. This is TV in the 21 century. So my gift to the happy couple? A prayer they’ll make it out alive, that my own secret sick desire won’t come to pass.

After all, there’s always the Olympics next year.

“There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading…To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt.” – Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)

This story should have got much more attention than it did:

Researchers at Australian National University have found that positions with low security, high demands, and imbalanced effort-reward ratios cause more mental distress than unemployment. Over seven years, the researchers followed 7,000 respondents in an Australian labor survey. People who moved from no employment to jobs of “high psychosocial quality” showed gains in mental health. But those who went from jobless to employed in thankless, unstable positions were found to be more depressed and anxious than those who never got hired at all.

The authors of the study conclude (a bit mildly) that their ”results suggest that employment strategies seeking to promote positive outcomes for unemployed individuals need to also take account of job design and workplace policy.”

Anyone who has studied some economic theory knows the long list of costs associated with unemployment (including the often dramatic psychological costs). Hence the general view that work is better than worklessness. But when was the last time somebody brought up the issue of the psychological costs of work in a discussion on benefits and unemployment? (Clearly the sorts of people on the dole for a great length of time are not very likely to ever have jobs of a “high psychosocial quality”.)

For the necessary dirty work to be carried out, our economic system requires a permanent underclass of underpaid, overworked and under-appreciated human beings, for whom the mind-bending boredom and squalor of long term unemployment would actually be an improvement in their lives. (This is often the kind of work, remember, that stops the sewers overflowing and keeps our rubbish from piling up and rotting in the sun.)

Findings like these should provide an opportunity to openly and frankly discuss capitalism’s sheer fucking barbarity. Maybe we could decide that our current division of labour needs to be replaced with something more humane; we could defend the rights of individuals to abstain from jobs that will do incredible damage to their long-term health (maybe we could even decide that such people should not be denounced as ‘scroungers’ for doing so).

I’m not holding my breath.

This is a guest post by Andy McGowan, Access Officer at Cambridge University Students’ Union

So Nick and Dave are at it again – and I don’t just mean making embarrassing slips of the tongue like this one. They’ve also gone back to having a go at easy targets as a smokescreen for their own failures – in this case the number of black students admitted to Oxford.

As someone who has worked in widening participation for the past four years, I am obviously keen to see more bright students from under-represented backgrounds get the opportunity to study at Cambridge or Oxford. As a first-generation law graduate labelled by some student journalists as the “free school meals kid”, I am also very keen to see more students from ethnic minority and poor backgrounds do well in life. Under-representation, however, does not automatically mean that the institution is the one to blame.

Let’s look at the issue of wealth. On average, the University of Cambridge admits around 22 students each year who were eligible for free school meals. This is out of just under 3500 UK students admitted each year. Cue shouts of “shame on Cambridge – Cambridge obviously hates poor students”. At first glance, those numbers do look rather damning, but if you look at the issue of educational achievement amongst the poorest students on a bigger scale (think mosaic as opposed to postage stamp), the picture looks rather different. In 2008, only 160 students who were eligible for free school meals achieved 3 As nationally – that is out of around 30,000 students nationally who achieved AAA.

Shadow Higher Education MinisterDavid Lammy recently waded into the debate as well, and drew unfavourable comparisons between Oxbridge and the likes of Harvard and Yale. He mentions the fact that at Harvard (which he actually calls Yale), ‘no one with a household income of under $60,000 [pays] a dime in tuition or cost of living’. He seems to be suggesting that Oxbridge should do the same. Harvard’s financial support costs “a record-breaking $160 million”, which is about the same amount of money that will be generated when every single home undergraduate at Cambridge is charged £9000 a year (£95 million). Yes, Oxbridge have their endowments, but they are peanuts when compared to their Ivy League counterparts. The other way in which Harvard et al get their income is by charging the other 80% of non-eligible students much higher fees ($56,000 a year), and the average parental contribution is $11,400 per year per student. So unless he is all of a sudden advocating removing the cap on fees (which I sincerely hope he isn’t) or unless he knows of a huge pot of money that no-one else has found, it is rather unrealistic to assume that Oxbridge can all of a sudden do financial support the American way.

Lammy also seems to imply that Oxbridge should again ‘do as the Americans do’ by writing to every student from low-participating neighbourhoods who gets, for example, 3 As at AS Level. On the face of it, it sounds like a great idea – invite them along to an open day, give them details about how to apply, maybe even offer some e-mentoring. But like all ingenious plans that have yet to be enacted, there is a fundamental flaw – how exactly are the universities supposed to know which individual students from these backgrounds have got these high grades, without breaching the Data Protection Act? Once again, unless he knows something we don’t, it’s a bit unfair to expect Cambridge and Oxford (or indeed any university) to facilitate the breaking of the law, even if it is in the name of access.

As with students from poor backgrounds, there is again an issue of prior academic achievement impacting on ethnic minority students when it comes to university admissions. But this can’t just be labelled as a general “ethnic minority” issue. For example, if we look at Black students, UCAS data shows that fewer than 9% of Black students achieved 360 UCAS Tariff points or more (as opposed to 33% of Asian students). This means that Black students account for just 1.2% of degree applicants who secure AAA at A Level.

Where are the politicians calling these damning statistics on A Level performance, careers advice and inequality of attainment at secondary and primary education “a disgrace”? Where are the politicians questioning why 80% of students eligible for free school meals don’t get the GCSEs that many sixth form colleges require, let alone universities? And where are the politicians who are asking why, in 2011, your socio-economic background is still the biggest indicator of your likely educational journey? Positive discrimination, widespread use of differential offers and quotas are all methods that have been bandied around for years as a way of increasing representation of the under-represented, yet these would just be the plaster covering the bullet hole of educational inequality. Everyone knows they don’t solve the bigger problem and everyone knows that we need bigger action, But time and again we go for the plaster anyway.

Universities have a huge role to play in raising aspirations amongst students from a younger age and encouraging applications from a diverse range of students, but they cannot do it alone. Politicians constantly saying “naughty old Oxbridge” without the slightest bit of context (or sometimes even evidence) does not help in the slightest – all it does it cement perceptions about the “type” of student who goes to these universities. Instead, they need to be tackling the issue of low attainment, often triggered by low aspirations, amongst those from under-represented backgrounds. This is not about forcing students down one route or another, or claiming that one type of educational journey is less worthy than other. Rather, this should be ensuring that decisions about what and where to study are based on what is best for the individual student, not their gender, race or family income. It should be opening doors rather than shutting them off and it should be about promoting the opportunities available, rather than trying to grab easy headlines.

So yes, I do want to see more money going into outreach work with those schools who never send any students to Oxford and Cambridge; yes, I want to see Cambridge using creative ways to reach out to bright students through engagement with charitable organisations and local community groups as well as schools; yes, I do want to see more universities looking at more than just raw grades and instead consider the potential of the individual by looking at the environment in which those grades were obtained. But it is also time for the Government to up their game. Instead, what they’ve done so far is scrap EMA, treble tuition fees, and abolish AimHigher. So rather than the inevitable headline-grabbing finger-pointing at universities, let’s see their master plan for eradicating educational inequality, because frankly, it is their actions and their complete failure to deal with the bigger issue of educational inequality which are the ‘disgrace’.

As you may or may not have noticed, the lefty blogosphere erupted in mild outrage recently over the news that Camden Council had ‘banned’ the anti-monarchist organisation Republic from holding a ‘not the Royal wedding’-themed street party in Covent Garden. (The party wasn’t strictly banned – the council just refused to close the street – but since the refusal meant the party couldn’t go ahead it effectively amounted to the same thing.)

Republic, predictably, denounced this as ‘a disgraceful attack on the rights of republicans to make their voice heard’ and alleged the decision was politically motivated on the grounds that one of the reasons apparently cited by Camden Council was that the event wouldn’t ‘draw the community together’.

Now, it might be the case that Camden Council is riddled with Wills ‘n Kate-loving traditionalists (though it’s also one of the councils that tend to be in the crosshairs of Richard Littlejohn et al for employing nothing but politically correct anti-British pro-multiculturalism loony leftists, which is an interesting contrast, to say the least), but the only source for that justification I can find is Republic’s own website, so I’m a little sceptical.

The main reason Camden Council themselves seem to be citing is actually rather different. They simply claim that large numbers of residents and businesses in the area objected to the event, which, all things considered, seems like a pretty good justification for not granting permission for it; if you’re proposing to close a street, you’d think the views of those who live and work on and around said street were kind of an important factor to take into account. Personally I’d be overjoyed if someone wanted to close my road for a republican street party, but I’m aware I might not feel the same way if my livelihood depended on selling royal wedding souvenirs to tourists who happen to walk down my street. I’m not disputing that the right to peaceful protest is vital in a democracy, but it can’t automatically and in all cases override the right of people to actually use the streets where they live and work, especially if, as Camden Council claim, Republic were offered an alternative venue for the party anyway:

The council has since been in on-going discussions with Republic to resolve these issues – including offering them the opportunity to apply for their event to be held at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest public open space in the Covent Garden area. However, Republic has refused this offer.

If this is true it’s frankly kind of hard to see what Republic really have to complain about, but even if it isn’t, the furious reaction to Camden Council’s decision seems a bit over the top. The principle that people who live and work in an area should have a say on which events are allowed to happen in that area is hardly evidence of a conspiracy to silence anti-monarchists in this country. It’s simply a reflection of the fact that with any decision like this, there’s going to be a tension between different people’s interests, and weighing up those different interests and coming to a decision is inevitably going to piss some people off. Obviously it would be wonderful if local councils could please all of the people all of the time, but sadly that often isn’t how things work out.