Did Blair and His Labour Cronies Betray a Generation?

I returned to the UK in 2001 and it took me time to figure out what was going on in Britain. If anything I was relieved to see the Labour party back in power: at least, I thought, they look after the people.

But slowly I began to suspect some of their policies were a fraud…

The Education of masses of people and the ramp up in further education all looked good on the surface, but underlying it, I suspected, was a big lie: a massive corruption of the education system.

The Labour Government decided it needed to offer the opportunity of higher education (University Degrees etc.) to many more people. Now to do this, it reasoned that the ‘free degrees’ of the past and grants could not be afforded: so they decided the students should pay for them. The result was some students finished university with massive loans (25,000 to 30,000 Pounds plus): a poor way to start a working life.

Just to give you some background into higher education in Britain…

I was a university student in 1978 to 1982 and in that time I was given a Full Grant by the local authorities and the tuition fees were paid: i.e. if you were good enough you could go to university and depending on your family income most of the fees were paid (some students from wealthy families did not get full grants (living expenses), the parents had to contribute). I basically got a free higher education and so did Tony Blair: I suspect Gordon Brown did as well.

The motivation to give masses of the population access to higher education seemed, superficially, to be good, but I suspect the motivation was more sinister: I suspect the Labour Party wanted to keep large amounts of young people off the dole to keep the jobless figures down.

Now why would I think that, because the Labour Party then proceeded to systematically lower the education standards: if they had been genuine they would have kept the high educational standards.

They lowered the standards: 90% of students taking most exams now get an ‘A’, in my day they graded on the curve (a normal distribution) and only the top 5% of students got an ‘A’. So many more students now had ‘A’s and so could now get into university.

A symptom of this slide in educational standards is that some of the top universities in the UK (Oxford and Cambridge) now require prospective students to take an entrance exam. In other words they don’t trust the ‘A’s that students get taking the Examination board exams. They look at the student Examination board exam results and think…
Are they an average student with an ‘A’ or a high flyer with an ‘A’?

What’s the point of having an examination system if virtually everybody gets an ‘A’ on the exam: you can’t tell who is from the intellectual top drawer and who is just average. Which is precisely why the top universities need the entrance exams: in order to find out just who has the intellect.

I friend of mine lectures for Business Degree subjects in the UK and he remarked that some students could barely write a sentence and yet somehow found themselves on a Business Degree course.

My friend used to fail some of the students who took his courses, but that presented him with many difficulties from the Administration: he had to justify why he had failed clearly bad students. The problems were such, that now my friend just marks up the student as much as he can to get them just below the pass rate and then he passes the buck to the Administration, so that they can decide what to do with the bad students. It’s a far cry from the once very high standards of the British Education system.

Now back to the jobless (Dole) figures in the UK: in the Labour Party’s Government for much of the new millennium the jobless figure was quoted as such above 1 Million.

A University of Sheffield jobless analysis show that this was a lie: the jobless figure was nearer 5 Million (the extra 4 Million were found to be on disability).

The University compared similar European countries, France and Germany with Britain and found they had virtually the same jobless rate of 10%: the difference being France and Germany told the truth and called people jobless, whereas Britain put them on the disability list and thus off the jobless/dole list.

So why should anyone really care that the Labour Government encouraged students into higher education with ‘relaxed’ educational standards. Well the ‘relaxed’ educational standards causes problems for employers: they can’t rely on the exam results to help find the best employees, the ‘A’ student in front of them may not be a good ‘A’ student.

The students encouraged to go to university largely end up with a massive debt and no job to go into, at the end: i.e. media studies graduates and many arts graduates.

When I was in the UK in 2007 it was very difficult to find someone with practical skills like a plumber or plasterer: most of the students that would have gone into a trade were encouraged to go and do a degree, despite being ill suited for a degree course. This created a shift in the skill range of the country and probably made the UK more inefficient.

So the end result was large numbers of disaffected, debt ridden degree qualified people who couldn’t get a job and large numbers of people who could get a tradesperson: an unhappy situation.