The Way Forward

While things continue to move behind the scenes, little will be forthcoming on the website. Blogging is winding down, exams are taking over. Activism is winding down, studies are the priority.

I will however pen a few of my thoughts concerning MPs expenses. I’ll make no excuses, it’s been a bloody disaster. Some MPs will have to resign and in a way they will deserve it. In another way they do not. Don’t get me wrong, they’re out of order, but humans are inherently imperfect and when faced with temptation few out of any group of people will be able to resist. But there is another aspect to this, let me set out the argument:

Imagine you’re an MP in the 1980s. You’re coming into the job, you’ve got a salary roughly equivalent to that of a GP or other well paid public sector employees. Now run it forward a few years. Your pay is not being increased. Your pay isn’t increased for years and years on end. However, now there’s these expenses. You’re not given pay rises, you’re given additional ways to claim for things. This continues for 25-30 years. Expenses rise, pay stays the same. Would you not eventually begin to see these expenses as a form of pay?

It has struck me throughout this scandal just how high the proportion of older (Conservative) MPs claiming ‘bad’ expenses has been when compared to the younger (Conservative) MPs. Is it the Westminster village attitude or is it the lack of any pay-rises that have lead to these views? I wouldn’t want to speculate.

However one thing I would make absolutely clear: Electing MPs from protest parties won’t make a difference to this. It will put a different person in parliament, but in the end human nature will stay the same. If individuals decide to stand on an ‘anti-sleaze’ ticket it might work, but the moment you get some form of movement or party standing for protest you also get the inherent dirtiness of human nature. Such are humans, and we would have to be raving socialists to think that human nature can be changed.

In the end parliament will be cleared up, this crisis has made it inevitable. Politics will be cleaner and will hopefully attract more people as a result. Hopefully some of the people sniping from the sidelines will now see the light and decide to do something about the issues they care about and get involved in politics. Politics will always involve the same people unless the public decides to do something about it. It’s why I got involved, it’s why you should.

AGM and the New Executive

This evening was the UMCF Annual General Meeting. The following people will now make up the Executive for next year:

 
• Chairman – Will Stobart

• Deputy Chair – Gaz Morris

• Treasurer – Rob Manning

• Social Secretary – Nick Kling

 
Minutes of the meeting will be made available in the near future.

Cheers
Will

The Bodge it Budget

The Following is an article I wrote for Student Direct. The online version can be found here.

Alastair Darling’s Budget has destroyed our Generation’s future Prosperity

I listened to Wednesday’s budget announcement with a mixture of boredom, fury and impending doom. We can excuse the chancellor for being boring, given his job he can be excused for not sounding particularly enthusiastic about what he had to announce. But what none of us should want to excuse is the horrible fate that awaits us when we finally step out into the real world and join the workforce.

It’s not that I don’t believe that the chancellor has some good intentions. Nobody goes into politics in order to deliberately do harm to their country. But given the almost systematic manner in which the infrastructure and the public services in this country have been mishandled, we could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. There’s the government debt, rising for the next four years to 79% of GDP; that’s 1.4 Trillion Pounds. Over the next two years the treasury will be borrowing more money than all governments put together since the bank of England was founded more than 300 years ago. It’s a staggering amount of money and it’s us who will be paying this money back.

I feel sorry for those among us who will be leaving university this year. The jobs will be scarce, the competition harsh. And even if jobs can be found, they may be on a part-time or short-term basis. Those of us who have another one or more years to go will find ourselves in equally unenviable positions. Don’t kid yourself; the next few years will be tough. We will undoubtedly have to pay back more out of our wages in taxes and we will receive fewer benefits in return. The last ten years have seen people live above their means; the next ten years will see people suffer as a result. This single matter constitutes the greatest failing of this government, and is probably one of the greatest failings in governmental oversight in our nation’s history.

So what would I want to see changed? I would like to see some realism and some honesty from the government. All this budget did was push the pain further away, like someone taking out a new credit card to avoid paying off their current debts.

We needed the budget to give us the truth, to tell us that yes, there will be pain, but that there’s a way to get through it. This budget didn’t do that, the government closed its eyes and pretended the problem didn’t exist. Life will go on and the public finances will be restored. But it will be a long and painful journey for us all.

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Apologies for the lack of blogging, but exams are upon us. Expect little between now and the AGM.