Pants on Fire?

Congratulations to the BBC's sharp-eyed Sean Coughlan for pointing out that the DfE's Nick Gibb was trying to mislead the public about education funding last week when he claimed that his department was “spending record amounts on our school funding ... the third highest spender on education of the 36 member states of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)."

However, it turns out that on a per-pupil basis, this equates to a cut in real terms of about 8%, and that the OECD figure includes private school fees, university tuition and all sorts of other non-state school funding and it's for the whole UK, not just England.

Tut, tut.

Nice to know that the UK Statistics Authority and the Office for Statistics Regulation are investigating and will publish findings “shortly", but there's nothing about whether Mr Gibb's pants are currently, or will be, on fire ….

Double Standards? Or Just Very Standard Hypocrisy?

Watching the news in my London hotel where the lead story has been around England’s participation (or not as a result of the chemical attack in Salisbury) at the World Cup, a thought hit me like a football below the waist. As the Conservative Party has apparently received around £3million in donations from Russian associates in just over five years:

• Are they proposing to give it all back if the Football Association try and bring Vladimir Putin to book?
• Or is it just some headline-grabbing grandstanding from politicians out of touch with more than just higher education?

Adonis, A Donkey and A Donut

For reasons I can't even being to grasp, this summer has seen UK Higher Education under attack from all directions, and particularly from the Narcissus-like “Architect of Fees”, Labour Peer Andrew Adonis.

He's criticised fees without seemingly knowing very much about them other than headline costs, vice chancellor and senior staff pay (he does have a point - some of them receive ridiculous levels of remuneration), and most irksome of all, academics and their so-called “three-month summer holidays”

Marking? Feedback? Boards? Research? Admin? Preparing? Obviously, these things are all done on a beach over cocktails, or in some Iberian café while the kids argue over which straw donkey grandma would prefer as a present, but at least we in the sector do tend to spend at least a little time trying not to look like, well, donkeys.....

He's followed up his ridiculous accusations of our idleness and privilege for 25% of the year (or more? who knows?) with an attempt to report the Committee of University Chairs to the Metropolitan Police for alleged crimes of conspiracy and cover-up in dealing with Freedom of Information requests after it advised members on how they should respond to Adonis’s enquiries.

It wouldn't have taken much research - maybe he could have asked one of us academics to do it in between rubbing tanning lotion on one another - to find out that most English universities are regulated as exempt charities and that even a cursory look at the law will show that the charge of criminality is utterly baseless.

Joining him now in an ill-judged campaign to undermine the finest higher education system on the planet (not just my opinion - I go all over the world, and academics in foreign institutions are consistent in their praise of it, and puzzlement at what a succession of recent governments have been doing) is something called UK 2020.

This is apparently a "think-tank" run/administered/convened by the Conservative MP Owen Paterson based on “concerns expressed by numerous friends who are parents of university students” which has announced that UK HE operates a “cartel” conspiring to rig fees and ensure that students get poor value for money.

Now if only this set of ignorant buffoons had waited until all we idle academics had come back from our incredibly long holidays, then their report might have got an interested and concerned audience?

We might then have put some effort into preparing for the coming year to assuage our guilt at doing so little, for so much, to the benefit of so few...

Opportunity Knocking

I’ve just had my first door-knocking of the general election campaign, and have to admit that the activist’s introductory claim to be "getting out and about before people got sick of election/campaigning/etc" did elicit a more favourable response than cold callers normally receive on Saturday mornings.

Anyway, as I live in an area where the sitting Labour MP has a marginal majority and favoured Remain in last year’s referendum, but with a local electorate which voted to Leave, the Liberal Democrats appear to have identified an opportunity to position themselves as the natural opposition to the sitting government on the subject of Brexit, or at least that’s what my visitor was trying to claim anyway.

Admittedly, as just less than half of the national electorate voted Remain in last year’s referendum, it is very plausible that a significant proportion of them could well be attracted by a party proposing a clear and coherent alternative to the government’s plans for leaving the European Union, however, as my doorstep conversation confirmed: the Liberal Democrats don’t actually have one.

It’s not a particularly challenging analytical exercise to conclude that the Labour Party’s policy over Brexit is so convoluted that very few, if any, of their MPs appear to understand what it is. Tim Farron’s representatives (this one at least), on the other hand, are up-front in their desire for a second referendum, but when I asked "on what exactly", our conversation got a little more interesting.

Now I don’t know whether the obfuscation is deliberate party policy, or whether someone has decided that a lack of clarity will help to generate local votes, but it turns out that the second referendum promise is not based on whether Britain should leave the EU: it would be on whatever deal the British government eventually strikes. Or in other words, some sort of decision on whether the UK should take the Brexit terms agreed by the government, or remain in the EU until there’s an arrangement in place that the electorate can accept.

I also don’t know (and neither did the person canvassing for my support) whether Article 50 can actually be revoked now our PM has triggered it, and so can’t say if it’s even possible that any popular rejection of a future deal could involve Britain staying in the EU, but if staying is a possibility, what incentive does the EU have to offer any sort of acceptable deal if it wants to keep the UK?

Theoretically, the Liberal Democrats are well-placed to exploit the chaotic "leadership" of the Labour Party, not least with regards to the desires of Remainers, but they really need to rethink their stance on EU membership...

Lives, Damned Lives and Statistics

The number of people living in unhappy relationships has more than doubled in five years, to over 1 million, according to an article in today's Mail Online which references some research by the Office for National Statistics.

Until just now, I didn't realise that the ONS asked any of us about misery, but it's made me start to wonder whether any of those questioned were required to put down exactly what it is about their partner that makes them so unhappy or if not, how can the researchers be sure that a respondent isn't just a miserable person who happens to be in a relationship?

And also: have the ONS extrapolated each response on the assumption that if one half of a relationship is dissatisfied with life, then it must follow that their other half is also, or is there some sort of leeway for the person in despair to have a spouse who thinks that everything’s fine?

All of which means that the figures quoted can't be considered as accurate, as it could be higher or lower, but there seems little to disprove the assertion that the actual number of unhappy adults in the country is increasing, And this, in a leap of statistical correlation somewhat along the lines of Henderson's Somali pirates and global warming, has been taken by some as proof that it is a financial recovery, rather than a recession, that chips away at marital bliss.

I'm not disagreeing with their assertion (only the statistical basis), but it might be that we were just as unhappy five years ago, but are now a little more honest when anonymously surveyed about our feelings, or that we are simply becoming less accepting of our current situations in an ever-shrinking world.

Blowing things up out of all proportion

On the way back from London yesterday I picked up a copy of the free paper to read on the train home, and in it was an article about the new Mayor banning adverts like this one from the Underground System.

It includes several quotes from Mr Khan about his parenting, demeaning images, and:

“Nobody should feel pressurised, while they travel on the Tube ..... and I want to send a clear message to the advertising industry about this.”

Now I realise that he's not been in the job very long, but surely one of his staff could have briefed him that it's not a pneumatic tube running under the streets of our capital city....?

No Defence

The Aston Villa defender Joleon Lescott has infuriated already-upset Aston Villa fans by Tweeting a picture of a £121,000+ Mercedes-AGM S 63 Coupe just after a 6-0 home defeat by Liverpool less than 15 minutes after the final whistle.

We all know a car like that is well within a Barclays Premier League player's price range, but to advertise the fact directly after a heavy defeat?

More than a little insensitive, as the resulting on-line fans fury is testament to, but the ex-England international has surely made it worse by trying to claim that "the tweet sent out from my account involving a picture of a car was totally accidental. It happened whilst driving and my phone was in my pocket."

Now in addition to the suggestion of contempt for the ordinary fan, he either thinks that the world is full of gullible idiots or is arrogantly confessing to a serious traffic offence. So as someone who spends a lot of time driving in the West Midlands, I'm hoping that he's lying about the accidental Tweet as Lescott's phone would have had to perform the following all by itself...

• Phone unlocked
• Twitter app opened
• Icon to send tweet selected and pressed
• Add image icon selected and pressed
• Image from album selected and pressed
• Click to upload image into tweet selected
• Tweet sent

Not very likely is it?