English Votes for English Issues

I welcome Gordon Brown’s firm position in the House of Commons today. The simple fact is that under a constitutional settlement of devolution, it is a completely wrong to have the debate on the premise of a federation.

Westminster still has a massive baring on the Devolved institutions - there budgets are fundamentally tied and their policies inter relate.

Take the policy of Tuition Fees/Top Up Fees, the UK happens to have three different policies on this but for one reason alone – the changes that were started in the Westminster Parliament. The creation of the graduate endowment in Scotland was a response to the fee introduction for the UK in 1998, the Welsh flexible fee for English Students and the top up fees charged on English Medical Students in Scotland have a direct relationship with what English students have to pay in England. Welsh students will not pay top-up fees – a policy position only needed to be reached after the passing of the 2004 Higher Education Act. The polices might be locally determined but the need to decision-making in the first place was triggered by Westminster legislation.

The best thing a Scottish/Welsh MP could have done to stop the costs being passed on to Scottish students would have been to defeat the Bill in Westminster rather than their MSP/AM voting with their hands tied in Edinburgh or Cardiff.

This may be a difficult argument to make when parading devolution as a great achievement of the government but an important distinction to make. We are not a federal nation, but an devolved one. The history, systems and social mobility make us more interdependent that any other part of Europe and this is seen strongly in the way the House of Commons can set an agenda or at the very least raise questions for the legislatures else where.

I call for “MPs votes of all constituent issues”.

This is a dubious position for the David Cameron’s Conservatives to push - their unionist credentials has well and truly left them. They now seems more like a sister party of Alex Salmons SNP than Trimble’s UUP.

Labour's defending the Union both sides of the boarder!

Comments

[Kim]

I am an American and, if I may, I'd like to add my two cents to the conversation as a word of warning as to what we call "tuition" and your government obliquely defines as top-up fees has done to the state of higher education here in the US. In order to allow you to understand my position, a history lesson is in order. Up until World War II the American education system was much like Britain's in that the most well-heeled were admitted and university studies were strictly for the purpose of creating scholars and, most importantly, well-rounded citizens with strong critiical thinking skills. After the war, our government passed the GI Bill giving many returning GIs the ability to go to university, making most the first memeber of their entire family to ever go to what we call college. The entry of mass numbers, often from the working class, entering the pseudo-socialist confines of American higher education frightened a great number of conservative including the likes of Joe McCarthy. Something needed to be done to halt the potential indoctrination of impressionable young men not only at universities but also in union-afiliated manufacturing jobs and from exposure to the leftist ideas being pumped out by the biggest Satan of all, Hollywood. It was feared that by over exposure to philosophies peddled in these bastions of Reds (uni, unions and the arts) to the post WWII generation in the '50's could do damage to potential capitalistic successes in heightened consumerism that was to follow and undermine the imperiaist direction of America's foreign policy. So blowhards like Joe McCarthy did all they could to drive socialism and all other liberal ideology from these institutions. It wasn't terribly successful but it did soften the espousals of leftist thinking on American college campuses (with the occasional flair ups during the Vietnam War).

Concurrent with this ideological struggle in the US, is the growing phenomenon of corporations and government agencies using the talent pool in American universities as a sort of research and development laboratory strictly built for their own purposes.These captains of industry and directors of government policies (who had grown accustomed to the generosity of the hand outs given to them during World War II as a means developing products and technology that had long been placed on the back burner) began using this untapped resource of energetic yet unsavvy "workers/students" to do the grunt work for all the new technological research necessary to keep America industry and it's military competitive. The effect of these policies have turned the university from a center of learning to a center of amphetimine-fueled lab rats posing as students running in circles in a clear plastic ball for the shear pleasure of corporate America and the Defense Department; meaning the American university student body, for the most part (with the occasional bone thrown to pet projects that only have purely cultural ramifications) have become instruments of slavey for economic and security needs that tend to benefit the few.

Why is any of this important to the average British university student? Well, because Britain (and much of the rest of Europe as well as significant numbers of Asians and, well, damn near the rest of the world) is, for better or worse, competing with American university model and losing it's edge. There has been a huge brain drain from the rest of the world into the American system because on a purely economic level other university systems cannot compete with the huge endowments of most of America's universities, not to mention the large amounts of money collected by hook or crook by the students (mostly undergraduates) themselves in the form of tuition. An British graduate student, for example, f they should decide to study in the US (depending on their area of study) can expect to work with some of the best instructors, use some of the most expensive materials, and have access to some of the latest technology in the world. A British university, with their comparatively smaller budgets can hardly begin to compete. Unless, of course, they start charging students more and start allowing private interest to impose it's will on the academic curriculum. Sure you'll be able to compete for the best students. But these students will work as underpaid grunts in highly specialized projects and be forced to lose focus on the rest that higher learning has to offer (other than pub crawls).

So now the British education system, as is the British way of life, is at a threshold. Follow suit with the Americans or continue to hold on to tradition. You each need to ask yourself, is the purpose of higher education to produce learned, broad-minded, well-rounded, critical-thiking citizens or is it to create an educated yet narrowly-aware, overly-specialized, easily-led drone for the machine? It's up to you.