durhamshrimp wrote:Keith wrote:marky wrote:Recessions are cyclical and are part of the capitalist system the world economy runs on. It would be total madness to blame the most recent incarnation on the government of the time.
Gordon Brown wrote:No returns to boom and bust...
In any other decade, a house price bubble would have pushed Britain from boom to bust...
Now then Marky, either you are talking bollocks and it isn't a cyclical part of the capitalist system or Gordon Brown was repeatedly talking bollocks and fundamentally failing to understand the basic concepts of economics when Chancellor. Clearly you can't both be right, so who talks nonsense? You or Gordon Brown?
And a few broken windows in London hardly compares to the hundreds of thousands dead in the Middle East due to the lies of the last lot.
You may have Iraq as your own little Vietnam but for most people in this country there are bigger issues. Letting the Tories (who agreed with the war anyway) in because people are unhappy with Tony Blair is cutting cutting off the nose to spite the face.
I know you are an apologist for the war, and the liars who took the country in to it, and regularly dismiss the war as less important than things like student fees but I think it is a skewed moral stand point that so easily dismisses the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foreigners as less important than student grants.
But setting aside the insignificant matter of dead kids, there is the far "
bigger issue" [sic] of the state of the economy. Well Joseph Stiglitz
(chief economist at the World Bank and Nobel Prize for Economics winner) & Linda Bilmes
(lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University) estimated in their book that the cost to the UK government for the wars in Iraq & Afghanistan would be more than £20 billion "by 2010". That's not to mention the social impact of dead & wounded British service men & women.
So personally, yes, I think that lying to take the country to war meant that those politicians were unfit to govern. That's not 'cutting nose to spite face', that's holding them to account for the lies they made. By the way, the Tories agreed to the war because of the lies about the UK being at threat. You can hardly pin that one on them.
But I noticed that you avoided the straight question that I asked.
P/T Indie wrote:The families wont pay it the student will when he gets a well paid job and starts earning good money if the student doesn't go on to a succesful career he might not have to pay it or not as quick anyway it will all be linked to their earnings. If the student goes on to earning massive money in a top job then maybe it's right to contribute back into the system.
The problem is that this format catches many people. Nursing is a degree course. Staff nurses earn above the repayment threshold after a few years but still below the national average salary. Would you be tempted into university to study as a nurse or social worker, knowing that you'll be saddled with approximately £30,000 of debt (average student debt is already over £20k)? I certainly wouldn't. Clever people from poor backgrounds will be put off from going to university because it is already harder for them. This is an appalling policy which will further reduce any hope of the country becoming a meritocracy. But then, the last lot did nothing to improve the position of people from poor backgrounds either. they screwed up enough that the Tories will now have free hand to introduce long held policies disguised as a response to the economic mess.