This year the government will complete its review of top-up fees. The Association of Graduate Recruiters, which includes the likes of Shell, Asda and JP Morgan, has called for a phased increase in top-up fees and for there to be no limit on university fees by 2020.
While students face increased fees as well as cuts, the Guardian has exposed how annual earnings for some university vice chancellors have doubled or even tripled over the past ten years.
A study reported in the Financial Times has shown that the two-tier education system in Britain costs more than £50 billion a year in the wasted potential of working class young people.
These articles show the process driving the ‘them and us’ education system and the need for a fighting programme for a decent and free education for all. The letter to David Lammy MP, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, is a response to his insistence that charging higher student fees is unavoidable.
Sinn Féin recently published it’s policy paper “There is a Better Way”, a plan for the cuts which offered a few populist measures as window-dressing e.g. a marginal pay-cut for MLAs, reduced use of business consultants and slashing bonuses to hospital consultants. But aside from these few populist policies, the document is a 100% acceptance of the cuts agenda.
Working people are facing a future of cuts and falling living standards. The new Assembly and Executive have taken over from where the last left off. As we go to press, the exact cuts the main parties are planning remain shrouded in secrecy but it is clear that savage attacks are just around the corner.
ACCORDING TO the headlines, Britain is on course to a green future based on renewable energy. The National Grid, which organises electricity distribution, has just produced a report claiming that 15% of the country’s energy will be generated by renewable sources by 2020. At the same time, the renewable sector is expanding currently by 25-30% per year internationally and some leading companies in wind energy have announced new investment recently in the UK. For example, GE, Siemens and Gamesa say they are going to invest £300 million in the next three to four years. So, should we stop worrying about global warming since everything seems to be moving in the right direction?
The publication of James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History 100 years ago this year was a landmark in the development of a socialist and Marxist understanding of Irish history. In this book James Connolly sought to outline the key social struggles of Irish working people uniting all religions and to explain why the struggle for national liberation against British imperialism was inherently linked with these movements.