And another thing…

Well Mr Harris, would your Labour party like to maybe help out students who can’t afford to go to uni? Maybe sack the SLC bosses while you’re at it…

Hmm… a party which isn’t going to be in government after next June making all sorts of ridiculous and expensive promises.

Laughable… isn’t it, Tosh.

Labour MPs are well qualified to write about “meaningless promises”. At least Clegg can promise anything he wants, knowing he doesn’t have to honour it. Labour knew it would likely need to commit itself to manifesto ‘promises’. Never mind Clegg, what’s *your* excuse for breaking *your* promises?

Hint: I won’t accept the changing of one word – ‘constitution’ to ‘treaty’ – as a valid excuse.

And I’ll leave it to Frank Davis to have you on the smoking ban.

Yeah, like you guys honoured the Lisbon Treaty referendum, huh?

Doubly meaningless here, since again, the 3 Unionist parties persist in running campaign pledges that don’t matter a jot in Scotland, where we already ditched them.

Of course, Labour don’t like to talk about Scotland, since apparently despite wanting a referendum or two in England, and committing to one in Wales, now “isn’t the right time” for Scottish voters to have a say…

So you voted for the SDP despite their inability to implement their policies?

Perhaps only the winning party should hav policies, or even principles.

Well why even bother having an election, Tom has already called it and written off one of the main parties.

Keep = not remove.

So they did keep (did not remove) a pledge (an idea that they’d implement if they got what they wanted, a it like referendum on the EU – oh, wait…) to remove tuition fees.

Sorry Tom, but this seems like sniping for the sake of trying to keep your second place in the polls.

And tuition fees would not be necessary if TB had not wished for 125% of UK kids to go to university. Okay, I think the actual aim was 50%, but have you seen 50% of UK kids?

Tom who do you like least.

1. The Conservatives.

2. The SNP.

3. The Lib/Dems

4. Any member of the Human race that does not agree with me ( includes Labour Party)

Almost all Lib-Dem politics is of the “Aint it awful?” variety.

Baaaaah BaaaaahhHH Expenses expenses baaaah . .

I would have thought most of your regulars would have recognised their own genre.

Here’s a completely irrelevant link, but hey we are talking Lib Dems here, aren’t we?

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/chief-medical-officer-talking-shit-again-200912172317/

Heresiarch over at Heresy Corner has been bloody good on what political ‘aspirations’ mean – pledges and promises that are utterly meaningless as they will never come to pass.

‘Aspirations’ for dealing with climate change are particularly noteworthy at the moment of course.

Suppose you would prefer the Lin Dems to follow Labour’s example of pushing throuh top up fees on a three line whip having said you had no such plans.

Sadly it is clear to this ex Panour Party member that the Labour Party has no moral high ground on this or for that matter any other issue.

I’d prefer far fewer going to university and the standard of entry raised considerably.

The numbers there are meaningless without quality of outcome.

Put the money saved into schools.

I’d prefer higher education to resemble the training described in Hesse’s ‘The Glass Bead Game’ but I suppose we have to go with trying to raise the general level to tertiary so that workers can compete with workers abroad where such values are not de rigeur.

People join the Lib Dems because they have an unhealthy lust for obscurity and self-abasement.

We should “reduce drastically” the number of young people in higher education. The colleges are full of time wasters who go there because it’s a soft default option. I did, and I cannot be the only one. I gained my degree after being successful in a proper job, and it was much more fun and I got a lot more out of it.

For once, and only this time, I find myself in agreement with Quietzapple, though I think he may be on shaky ground citing “The Glass Bead Game”, since as far as I can recall, having read it over 25 years ago it is a critical anatomy of ivory tower thinking.

Far better, QZ, to read Cardinal Newman (or my blog, since I wrote about this), who wrote in a monograph entitled “The idea of a University”

“the power of viewing many things at once as one whole, of referring them severally to their true place in the universal system, of understanding their respective values, and determining their mutual dependence. Thus is that form of Universal Knowledge, of which I have on a former occasion spoken, set up in the individual intellect, and constitutes its perfection. Possessed of this real illumination, the mind never views any part of the extended subject-matter of Knowledge without recollecting that it is but a part, or without the associations which spring from this recollection.”
(John Henry, Cardinal Newman)

Nobody with a “degree” in Equestrian Psychology” (yes, there really is one) is going to be able to do much more with it than tell you who will win the 3.30 at Kempton. Useful, and lucrative, but not so wonderful if you need to marshal the best minds in the country to solve a national crisis.

Don’t forget, WWll was won by minds tempered by a classical Oxbridge Education, not a 2:2 in “Womens’ Studies”

@WW

WW2 may well not have required classical scholars (if it did etc if a few thousand women in Germany and the Uk had studied Women’s studies.

Don’t recall Churchill or Attlee were academic geniuses either . . .