Dire Straights

The Coalition government has appointed Simon Hughes to be its "Advocate for Access to Higher Education". This entails selling the recent tuition fees reforms to young people in order to encourage them to attend university.

Simon Hughes is, of course, a man who couldn't even persuade himself that these reforms are worthwhile enough to vote for them. He abstained.

This is surely the coalition's single most ridiculous appointment yet. Next they'll be inviting Ed Balls to be their Spending Cuts Advocate.

Norfolk Blogger has a similarly critical Lib Dem perspective on this here.

EMA protests kick off

Good grief. Educational Maintenance Allowance was only introduced a couple of years ago. And now it's seemingly introduced teenagers to welfare dependency. These protesters need to get a grip. Bribing these youngsters won't educate them, if they had any interest in further study they would just go anyway. Anyone who's attending college purely to receive EMA is just having their time wasted by the state when they could be entering employment or training.

Demo-lition!

It's been fascinating to watch the news all day. We saw people smashing up windows and the reception area to the 30 Millbank building (or was it Millbank Tower, the journalists couldn't quite make their minds up) - all in the name of protesting against increased student fees (although oddly I don't recall anyone doing anything like this when Labour introduced them in the first place, nor when they hiked them by a factor of three in 2005).

Strangest of all has been the reaction of the NUS (whose staff, wearing reflective jackets, were prominently on the scene when those windows were being smashed in). It is currently saying on its web site:

NUS has condemned the violent actions of "rogue protestors" who have undermined an otherwise peaceful protest with NUS President Aaron Porter calling the scenes "despicable".

Strange then that this afternoon, clicking on the "WE WILL MARCH" banner produced the following, at http://www.demo2010.org.uk/

With "DEMO-LITION" emblazoned all over it (as well on the NUS' official placards and t-shirts), it seems to me not so much a condemnation of violence as an incitement to it.

Of course during the course of the afternoon all trace of this site has mysteriously disappeared and the URL currently links straight through to nus.org.uk. Funny that. There's still a couple of "DEMO-LITION" badges tucked away on its front page though.

Pity the media hasn't made a point of this, they don't seem to like reporting on union hypocrisy very much for some reason...

On a related note, credit to the BBC who managed to find the perfect candidate to interview for the Six O'Clock News (long before the watershed): a man with "FUCK" scrawled all over his face. Very prominent on the analogue set I watched it on...

Update: they just showed him again on the News at Ten.

Do you want comics? Here be comics.

I have 525 comics I want to sell. But I can't be arsed with eBay, as it won't let me do what I want it to, and charges me for the privilege. If you want the lot, you can have it for three hundred quid. If you want a particular comic, or some of them, make me an offer and I'll consider it (and probably take you up on it). Contact me in the comments, which are completely open, or on Twitter. They're all in good nick, I'd call most of them NM but I haven't got a clue about those classifications really, what the comics are good for is reading. The full list appears after the jump (if people stake individual bits I'll update accordingly):

BBC's balanced welfare coverage

Looking at how the BBC has reported reaction to Iain Duncan Smith's welfare initiative:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10807098

We're given reactions (both positive and negative) from only the following:

• Will Hutton (left-wing)
• Yvette Cooper (left-wing), speaking on behalf of Labour (left-wing)
• SNP (left-wing)
• Plaid Cymru (left-wing)
• Brendan Barber (left-wing) speaking for the TUC (left-wing)
• And a spokeswoman for the IPPR, which the BBC itself describes as "left-leaning".

Well if that's not what I call balance across the whole of the left-wing spectrum, I don't know what is! However, if we are to believe the BBC, nobody from the centre or the right of British politics has an opinion on this.

Facebook recommends...

Facebook has been making this recommendation for a week or two now, which suggests to me that at this point any real distinction between the two main parties in British politics has become utterly superficial:

Why does Andy Burnham's appearance on "This Week" have all the hallmarks of a car crash?

Burnham's turn on "This Week" last night was an absolute disaster from start to finish. He completely misjudged the pace of the show in such a way that suggests he'd never watched the programme before. Right from the outset (not seen in the above video), when Andrew Neil asked him for his "moment of the week" and he read out three carefully prepared lines of anti-Tory rhetoric - lines designed to scare people, lines that everyone's heard before (from Harriet Harman and the other candidates), lines that impress no one - it was obvious he was in over his head. Even Portillo managed to eviscerate him.

The only glimmer of light was when he attacked the Tory policy of ringfencing health spending - a sensible position to take if only this wasn't the Shadow Health Secretary of a party that is trying to convince everyone that the government can afford to increase spending on every department. One is confused by the notion of a Labour politician calling for health spending to be cut (and one might further wonder what exactly Burnham achieved during his tenure as Health Secretary).

After Diane Abbott's mauling last week you've got to wonder why the other contenders are putting themselves through this. I suppose in the long run it might steel them up a bit as politicians, though in the age of Youtube (where your worst on-screen moments are recorded for eternal posterity) I somewhat doubt it. I can't wait to see what Neil and Portillo do to the brothers Miliband.