you would like to smack a student with a baton? look i know no-one likes students who spend most of their time watching tv and drinking and moaning that they don't get given enough money, but this is about a far far bigger issue – the tories are dismantling our welfare state and are going to privatize as much as they can, they also want to return higher education back to being a privilege only the wealthy can consider,

think of it this way – they scaremonger the shit out of everyone making them believe that the national debt is brand new, will kill everyone and is only payable right now even though spending out of recession is proven to be better than cutting out – and then they increase tuition fees with the help of nick 'ha fucking tricked you i'm a right toff really' clegg telling us that students getting themselves into massive personal debt for the foreseeable future is fine as a long term plan.

this makes no sense, they either think that getting into a load of debt is good (students) or bad (uk). 

oh and the prince of fucking wales and Camilla (met her once) get 'attacked' in their wildly expensive chauffeur driven car whilst being busy being millionaires (whose entire fortune is our money, that they never worked a day for) by a bunch of students worried about how they will survive financially in the future!   i think we are looking at the wrong problems!

we need to consider

- how the fuck in our 'equal' society do we still have a royal family?

-why the fuck are millionaires who never worried about a bill in their lives being allowed to slash the welfare state?

-again ….ROYAL FAMILY……..people are homeless…..people are being made redundant….but we have a QUEEN

- if george osborne had made vodafone pay it's taxes, (and perhaps even paid his own) and made those who can afford loophole accountants pay their tax, the poor and vulnerable would not be getting so fucked.

-speaking of the poor and vulnerable……..why the fuck are we giving the banks 40 billion (they are already making massive profits and paying massive bonuses) and expecting the sick and infirm and impoverished to suffer the burden of the banker wankers fiscal cowboy antics and mistakes.

-they will make half a million civil servants unemployed (political ethos and not debt busting)

-how will that help the economy -their wages all go back in – none of them are hiding millions in Lichtenstein – like the bankers!

-they have frozen nurses pay! thats right your local casualty nurses who get paid fuck all and save lives more often than firemen and the fuzz are getting shafted.

-we are still paying millions for a royal family. 

Thanks for representing Phizzy (and sister!).

People should note that a lot of the students there are doing it because it's something they believe in – they won't have to pay the stupid fees and tax, so they are only there to voice their opinion.

Sadly, we live in a police state so their opinion and protest is not allowed and they are marshalled into a holding pen then charged by riot police.  Great stuff.  Oh, sorry, I forgot – if you vote for a party then you agree with every single one of its policies (even the ones they changed) and if you don't vote you have no rights.  Yep, that's democracy right there.

I appreciate the points about wider society, including the welfare state (and its abuse by unscrupulous folk), the Royal family, the banks, their bail outs and the bonuses, etc., but for me this issue is the one which could sign our own death certificate as a nation.

I despair of a country that has no graduates in "useless" degrees.  The criticism that "English Literature / Classics / History / Media Studies / Journalism / Film Studies is a useless degree" is a short-sighted as it is wrong.  We need people with interest and education in a wide variety of areas to make our country worthwhile and worth living in.  I don't want to live somewhere that has no culture – and I'm a Mathematician!   Also, we can't predict what will be useful in the future, knowledge-based economy that we need.  Suddenly jobs in Graphic Design and Media are to the fore, and we need to be prepared for it.  We can't compete with human-rights-violition-child-labour-manufacturing in the far east, so we have to do something intellectual.  And no, finance is not the answer – look what they did!

Furthermore, I worry from a long-term viewpoint what undergraduates we will get, and where they will go.  A degree will now cost circa a quarter of a million (i.e. £50k fees plus £50k living costs plus £100k lost earnings from not working plus £50k lost pension, national insurance, etc. for the four years it takes for a good qualification, say).  So what jobs mean you should take on that debt because you will definitely earn a lot more than that in terms of your career over the following thirty odd years?  Hmmm.  Medicine.  Maybe Law.  Or work in a bank.  Be a corrupt politician.  Right.  Anything else?  Oh.  So where will we get our future nurses, teachers, physiotherapists, lecturers, engineers, etc.?  We simply won't.  Yes, in other countries (well, America) they have fees, but they have lots of scholarships and bursaries (They believe in philanthropy in a way we don't).  And state universities are still free.  We won't have any of that.  In Europe there's none of that – fees are a tiny fraction of what we pay, because they know the benefit it brings.  And since only 3% of people who, from this country, have moved overseas pay off their current student loans, what do you think will happen in future?  Believe it or not, a large number of doctors and other professionals, in this country, feel that they owe something to society.  So they shun higher wages abroad to stay here.  In this brave new world, if you've paid for your own degree, you may as well fuck off to America, earn twice as much and not pay back your stupid loan.

And I know everyone is upset at wasters getting crap degrees from crap universities and thus spending taxpayers' money on nothing, but this won't solve it.  Those people still won't get well-paid jobs so they will never pay back the "loan".  The only people who will pay it back get to do so twice – once in their loan repayment, and again in higher rate tax – if they stay in this country (see above!).  I understand the need to cut back university spending.  How about a return to a lower number of people going?  Or offer a certain number of free places on each course that the country feels is worthwhile – e.g. engineering, law, medicine, maths, history, physics, whatever.  Let the universities decide – we need people coming through in each discipline, we need work being done in Chemistry (even if it has no immediate, tangible benefit to the economy in the short term).  Without intellectual curiosity for its own sake we have no future.  Maybe just don't have quite so many undergraduates as at present – it's gone from 8% to 38% in a generation.

Our degrees will now become the most expensive in the western world, with the least teaching, and with the second lowest state support.  Where will that leave our country in a generation?  As a nation, we are royally fucked.

Now, all those student-hating short-sighted morons can come in and vent their frustration at "good for nothing wasters pissing my money up the wall" while ignoring the points I made above which fully address this criticism.  That seems to be how it goes in most places, from my observations.

When i qualified as a nurse i almost applied for a job in orkney (in a town called Twatt) i decided it would be like living in Northen Exposure and would be the coolest thing ever (can't remember much about Northern Exposure apart from thinking it was cool) my wife swiftly put the brakes on that idea though! probably for the best.

I am often critical of students, i knew many who were having their rent and fees paid by parents and had full student loans and still had no money and refused to get part time jobs even though they were only in uni 2 days a week, whilst i was in uni for 2 days, placement for 3 or 4 and working 20+ hours a week to pay the rent! my fees were paid by the NHS though which was helpful.

despite my criticism though i can't get round to being anti – education, it just won't fit for me, we need to be promoting further education for all that require it, for whatever they are good at,

we also need to support our manufacturing industry, i studied in Oxford and would often dispair at hearing people bang on about immigrants and British jobs for British people before finding out that they worked in the massive BMW-Mini factory, just imagine if BMW took its German jobs back to Germany for German people! clowns. 

the conservatives have closed the coal mining industry, privatized as much as possible and are now attempting to stop poorer people getting an education? and reduced benefits what do they expect the people to do? they are already working on the minimum wage too i bet – getting people on benefits to work for a pound an hour is just setting up an underclass and setting a precedent for lower wages, wait and see.

Post edited 18:41 – Dec 12th 2010 by dno1970

F**king Soap dodgers – most people who attend higher ed. end up working the same shit jobs as the rest of us so why bother? so they can develope a twatty accent and pretend they are better people? I really couldn't give a shit about fees as either way the tax payers foot the bill.  If your doing a course that has a real prospect of earning a good salary or being of benefit to society then fine we fund it, but if you want to study Klingon, Art and design or any other bullshit then you pay for it !!

Oh and how much did the Policing cost for all this?? not to mention the cost of hiring travel to the event and the impact on carbon emitions