Archaeology; The Canary that was Shot halfway down the Mine.

An Artists Impression of the Stonehenge Visitors Centre that will never be.

Archaeology is known for being a canary trade, during times of economic downturns and reduced construction; archaeology tends to lose out. The only commercial work in the trade is based upon development and rescue archaeology. So the recent recession wasn’t all too healthy for the trade, the workforce dropped dramatically perhaps even by 30% during the period in the UK and has yet to even start feeling the effects of the (until the last quarter) improving economic outlook.

The effects of the recession on Archaeology have yet to be fully studied but I advise anyone to take a look at work done by Kenneth Atchison who has written several informative articles on the subject.

Archaeology, as a subject, was born in the United Kingdom and you would expect a responsible government to give it some slack when it comes to the cuts. Of course, this really isn’t the case; considered a “soft target” archaeology has face severe cuts in museums (including the Stonehenge Visitors Centre which was due to finally be made into something more than a couple of converter shipping crates), government funded research projects and the loss of development contracts as the government pulled funding from things like BSF (Building Schools for the Future). In the bonfire of the quangos English Heritage is being cut by 32%, so ⅓ of government grants to archaeology will be withdrawn. Research funding will remain static for the next four years, a significant cut when you take inflation into account and funding provided to universities for archaeology is getting cut by 100%, yes that’s right 100%.
The cut will mean that departments will be forced to charge, at minimum £7,000 per year to stand still.

So what are the implications?
With Museums set to close there is now no more room to store archaeological artifacts, producing a significant cataloguing problem. Many counties will be losing their “Archaeology Officer” so will receive no advice regarding planning permission thus making likely archaeological remains at threat.

The loss of trained and experienced individuals from the trade will be a further devastating loss as yet more jobs are being dropped.

The damage being inflicted by the cuts to Archaeology is likely to unrecoverable and, quite frankly, are going to put the trade back by something like 50 years. This is clearly another example of how this government simply have not taken into account the severe damage they are going to cause by adopting such a fast cuts programs. By damaging archaeology in this way they are going to put hundreds, if not thousands, of people out of work in this field alone, thus reducing consumer spending and damaging growth.

Archaeology may have suffered during the recession but it had just survived, now the government have decided to put a disproportionate cut on a trade because it's an "easy target".

Conclusion? The government is effectively shooting the canary that survived the mine.

The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing

So the deficit reduction plan is now well on the way, the list of savings is endless; so many different controversial cuts are happening that it’s impossible to keep track of them all. One of those cuts that have almost gone under the radar is the sell-off of much of the forestland in the UK.

This is a pure example of the thought processes in the government and how flawed they are; there is absolutely nothing more important than tackling the deficit they say, we must save as much money as possible they say but the thing about the sell-off of the forests is that much of that land isn’t really the government’s to give away.

Britain’s forests are almost entirely owned by the people of the country, else they’re owned by the crown; making this land freely available to the public for the enjoyment of everyone in this country.

The Forest of Dean is one of the forests selected to be released from public ownership.

The thing is that the government see the forests as an asset that can be sold off, their ideology says that the forests might be better managed by the private sector; this misses the point. Just because the government feel that the Forestry Commission doesn’t do a perfect job, it doesn’t mean that they’re allowed to simply take away 50% of our countries forests from their care.

But as I have already stated, Britain’s forests are NOT an asset that can be lightly sold; if the government wants to sell them they should put it to the people, this decision is as serious as a change in the voting system and should be put to a referendum. But this will never happen, as per usual the government have become detached from their duties to this country; the obsession with the deficit is producing a horrifying dystopia revolving around money and economics. If we do not stop actions such as these we will lose those few things that make this country great; from the compassion of being able to receive free health care to the ability to roam much of the most beautiful landscapes freely.

It is clear now that this government only “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” (Oscar Wilde)

Scrapping the EMA is a defeat for a compassionate Britain.

Another set of prejudices pandered to.

When the EMA was scrapped it was accompanied by a significant amount of language that I personally find horrifying. The volume of people whining that the people who received it didn’t need it, and that all the people on it were just buying games for their xbox, it was clearly a “waste of tax payer’s money”, they should get a part-time job and that most students would still go to college anyway. Accompanied by the now cliché “Labour spent all the money” lines.

When I read these kinds of comments it strongly reminds me of the Victorian “Deserving vs Undeserving poor” ideas, these morals resulted in the workhouses. People felt that someone should really really need to have the handout if they were to receive it, so they expected the disadvantaged to beg and plead and do the worst jobs in society to get even a loaf of bread. Of course, I am by no means comparing the scrapping of the EMA to a workhouse but the language being used is the same.

Most complaints about EMA are to do with the means-testing, and many do have a point here, there are real examples where students who have received EMA are far from even realising that they’re receiving that much at all. The household income method doesn’t really work when you get examples of rich families buying their son/daughter a flat somewhere so that they’re entitled to EMA because they’re not living with their parents. There are many other examples which, whilst not as extreme, are nevertheless still irritating.

But does this justify scrapping the scheme altogether? Absolutely not; EMA was a very young scheme and no doubt had problems, tweaking it to provide a more logical framework would have sufficed. (This being said means-testing has not been outright proven to actually save the tax payer any money, the money that goes into means-testing itself often outweighs what is saved by it.)

The thing is that the introduction of EMA had visible, and very positive, effects; college numbers increased, school retention rates increased and there are countless examples of students being given an extra set of choices to be able to go to the college that they wanted to go to not simply the local one. Even the Conservatives are aware of this, which is why they are so eager to point out their “replacement scheme” even if it is wholly inadequate.

I’m not going to go into arguments about the national economy, or indeed the deficit, in this piece as that is another story. But there is no reason that anyone has given me that can justify the complete abolishment of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, they are the same reasons people give for abolishing Jobseekers Allowance and the NHS, and I fear that if the government continue to follow this line of reasoning that the entire fabric of a compassionate society will be demolished.

Labour Hold Oldham East & Saddleworth

On Wednesday night Simon Hughes was trying to explain the Liberal position; just as the Lib Dems have decided to change their tactics from being friendly with the tories to being slightly more harsh.

The Oldham East & Saddleworth By-Election has simply shown that the Conservative-Liberal Alliance is simply that; the Liberals are having to lean on the Conservatives to survive, I doubt that without Conservative tactical voting that the Liberals would have even held 2nd place in this seat. If you pay attention Of course this is speculative, and that the scenario meant that it was in the Conservatives interest for the Liberals to hold the seat. But the Liberals are going to have to work extra hard in order to ensure that they are not annihilated in this May's election; relying on Conservative Tactical voting will not help them one bit.

To put this result into perspective, the latest Polling Average (an average of all polls over 25 days) according to UK Polling Report is Con 38 (+2), Lab 42 (+14), LD 9 (-15). It is interesting to see that the shift in support away from the LDs has literally been replaced by the Conservatives (taking into account the +2).

By the looks of things here, the Conservatives were more than Soft-Peddling in Oldham; for such a large shift of support away from the Conservatives they must have been actively campaigning to get people to vote for the Liberals Tactically.

Then again, of course, I may be completely wrong; after all it is pretty much impossible to tell why every voter voted the way they did :-).

So will the Liberal change in tactics be enough to save their position? Well we'll have to see.

Is Polling Worthwhile?

Please Click the chart to See in Full Resolution

Usually polls only come up in the media when an exciting one comes up; recently there has been a lot of shouting about the Lib Dem position, with the cliché response that polls are not always accurate or that there are X number of years until the next election.

Because the media only look at the 'exciting polls' we tend to lose the real picture; above is a graph of all the polls conducted in 2010/2011, there are times when the peaks and troughs are so close together that it becomes almost impossible to read. The weeks preceding the election had such a density in polling that it's hard to gauge what's really going on.

This graph demonstrates clearly how a singular poll can be worthless, noting the significant peaks and troughs; the margin of error is usually around +/- 3. The problem with the above graph, of course, is that multiple polling companies results have been used all of whom use different weighting techniques, sample sizes and methods of dealing with "don't knows". Note that ICM, for example, have consistently shown slightly higher polls for the Lib Dems whilst YouGov have tended to produce the lowest Lib Dem Polls; this is due to the fact that ICM assume that x% of don't knows will vote how they claim they did in the last election whilst YouGov tend to not reassign don't knows in this way as they think that there is too much assumption in this area.

It is useful to appreciate regular polling; it give us a far better picture of what is going on with their poll. The importance of polls is looking at the moving average; a singular poll showing the Lib Dems at 7% means nothing, but if you put it in a series of polls with a range of 7-13% you can see that the underlying support is more likely to be around 10%.

It is also worthwhile to note that polls are not meant to be prophetic, rather they are gauging support at that moment in time; so the Oldham East & Saddleworth Polls may prove to be worthless (especially as they are likely to have modified some of the voting intention, and that only 1 has been done by each company involved). It is also very difficult to grasp localised polling; attempting to poll a specific group or locality draws problems itself, the larger and more generalised your polling the more accurate it is likely to be. Survation's poll of Oldham East & Saddleworth was a complete waste of time, a poll of just 250 people is simply not large enough.

The value of polling is that it gives us a relative impression of public support; since the election polls have suggested a consistent decline in Lib Dem Support and a gradual increase in both Conservative and Labour support, although the moving average from the last two weeks suggest the first time Labour have produced a clear, and consistent, lead in years but we will know more about the underlying position by next week.

Sorry that was a bit rambly but meh.

Constituency polls being unreliable as ever?

This is a quick blog about the polls that have come out about Oldham East & Saddleworth; ICM & Populus have very similar polling levels whilst Survation have a very different level of Labour/Conservative support.

I think much of the reason for this is the combination of the scale of survey, the timing of the survey and much of the calculation.

Populus had a survey sample of 1,500 whilst ICM and Survation only had 500 (the difference between ICM and Survation here is that Survation only had about half their calls producing results). Populus and ICM also operate much faster than Survation who took 10 days to complete their survey of 500 people so their poll was less of a snapshot of opinion.  I do find the idea of a 20 point swing away from the conservatives a bit extreme considering the national outlook.

We should be aware, however, that constituency polls are notoriously unreliable, especially when it comes to the Liberal Democrat marginals; tactical voting tends to mess things up a bit for polling companies.

So taking these polls with a pinch of salt they all display something very significant... the conservative tactical vote is effectively saving the lib dems from falling into third, populous included questions on the reasons why people were voting the way they were. 10% of Lib Dem voters (who claimed to vote conservative at the election) claimed to be voting tactically ‘to keep labour out’. If this is true it would be clearly apparent that the Conservatives haven’t been fighting this seat at all; indeed it seems that the Lib Dems have been exploiting the tactical vote significantly. It would be ironic for tactical voters if they are the ones saving the Lib Dems from 3rd place.

My conclusion? These polls are inconclusive, there’s still everything to play for in Oldham ;-); however if ICM/Populus are accurate then this will be a spectacular no vote for the coalition.

The Lib Dem Position in the Polls

Taking a look at the implications of the Liberal Democrats worsening position in the polls.

Last night the YouGov polling agency recorded the Liberal Democrats at 7% in the polls with a net government approval rating at -20. As YouGov point out; this is within margin of error for a result of 8 or 9%, and some pollsters are recording the Lib Dems at around 11-13%.

Now, I know that many of you will be saying things like “there are 4 years left of the parliament” or “polls aren’t accurate, remember cleggmania!” so I shall explain why the current polling is so significant.

Unlike ‘Cleggmania’ the current polling for the Lib Dems has consolidated in a consistent trend across all pollsters, ‘Cleggmania’ was a short and sharp spike in opinion polls that suggested a phase as opposed to consolidating opinion; which is one being demonstrated by the current downward trend. The graph displays a moving average of the polls since the start of the year.

For those who are now shouting at their screens about how there are “4 years until the next General Election”, well for a start there are the local elections coming up in 4 months meaning that the Liberal Democrats are going to struggle to hold onto Councils like Sheffield City and any Liberal-Conservative coalitions in local government are going to take a beating.

This is important for party morale, if candidates are worried about keeping their seat due to national unpopularity it will raise questions in their mind over whether staying with the Liberal Democrats is a good idea, whether Nick Clegg is a good leader or whether being in the coalition is doing them any favours.

Note also that after first set of cuts were announced, the Conservatives and Labour both improved in the polls whilst the Liberals dropped like a stone almost as fast as Cleggmania shot up. The difference being of course that after Cleggmania the upward trend did not continue whilst after “anti-cleggmania” the downward trend did.

So what if the economy recovers? Will the Lib Dems recover? It would be fairly logical to assume a slight recovery but the question on the economy will mostly fall down to the Conservatives. In the Lib Dems U-Turn after the election on the economy and the “taking the sting out of the conservative” rhetoric will do little to persuade the Lib Dem ‘achievements’ saved the economy. Indeed Conservatives may well argue that the Lib Dems may have made the economy recover at a slower rate than if it had been a Conservative majority.

So what can the Lib Dems do? It is difficult to suggest that the Liberal Democrats will reach pre-election levels by the next General Election without doing something truly impressive. The last time the Liberals reached this low a level in the polls it took 20 years and a party merger to truly recover. But then again, who knows what might happen!?

So where has the Lib Dem Support Gone?

When the coalition formed and started undergoing their austerity agenda I stated that the votes that the Liberal Democrats would lose would go to various parties, some would go to Labour but large chunks would go to Green/other Left Wing Groups.

How wrong I was, the overall swing has almost entirely gone to Labour; 59% of former Liberal Support has ultimately gone to Labour and 11% to the Conservatives. Indeed there has been almost no change in support for smaller parties. Whilst UKIP and the Green Party have very slightly improved their standings other parties like the SNP and BNP have dropped on a similar scale. However, if Lib Dem supports keeps falling at the same rate that it is the Liberals are likely lose their place as the 3^rd party to UKIP by the end of the year.

So, Nick Clegg? How is your pledge to double the number of Liberal Democrat seats going?

Ah...not well by the looks of it.

Are Control Orders Being Scrapped?

One of Labour’s most controversial pieces of legislation could be removed, but is this simply a re-branding?

You'd be forgiven for being a little confused about the government's position on this; there’s been a lot of contradictory stuff coming out of the coalition this week over control orders. The latest stuff coming out of the coalition is pointing to “control orders will be ditched”, Nick Clegg has spewed out a great deal in recent days that nothing has been confirmed and that there are no guarantees. The reality is that Clegg has been pouring on the “scolding hot water” before the inevitable disappointment. Indeed, Nick Clegg’s comments have even received praise from the Telegraph, a significantly pro-control orders newspaper.

It may well be today that Cameron decided to steal Clegg’s headline today, but unless control orders are genuinely removed, this will be nothing more than a rebranding. The Conservatives have done a lot of rebranding since getting into power; every single reform and proposal has the word “progressive” slapped onto it, they used the brand “academy” to distinguish an entire new school system, Lord Browne’s ideas of lifting the cap from £15,000 to £20,000 for tuition fees repayment and the Part-Time students support were branded as Lib Dem “achievements” whilst in London the cycle scheme initially started by Ken Livingston has been given the nickname “Boris Bikes”. Be fair to Cameron and his PR team; they’re brilliant when it comes to rebranding (even if they’re rubbish at governing).

My thoughts are that if Nick Clegg is going to make an announcement on control orders today, it means that a decision has been made. Ahead of the review being conducted by Lib Dem Peer Lord Macdonald.

So why have decisions apparently been made today? It may well be that the Liberal Democrats are probably being forced to pay the cost of their low position in the polls after last night’s YouGov poll that led to yesterday morning’s Independent headline: “Lib Dem Support hits all-time low” (They weren't at an all time low by the way). Or maybe the Conservatives have realised that they now need the Lib Dems to survive their current polling ordeal in order for the government to survive.

If the answer that comes out has the word ‘compromise’ in it, I will probably be forced to throw up.

The Justifications for the 20% VAT rate just will not do.

Conservatives have increased VAT by 12% since
the start of the Thatcher years.

So it’s here, everything will now be charged 2.5% more than we were before; the least justifiable tax of them all. George Osborne expects to raise £13 bn from this; and many Conservatives have been arguing the same old stories that we’re ‘over-spending’ and that we should avoid buying those shoes that we really want and we would avoid the extra cost of the vat rise.

This kind of rhetoric is absolutely unbelievable not only because the lower down the income scale the fewer can afford the shoes in the first place but because it discourages spending! The awful rhetoric doesn’t end there... “Raising vat will stimulate growth and create jobs in the private sector...” said George Osbourne said (having returned from his £10,000 per day holiday over Christmas). Now tell me, how is this meant to occur? Oh I see; the richer classes must be bribed to stay in this country in the hope that they might give some back.

To those who say the VAT rise isn’t much, you have to think of those who have recently become unemployed or have had pay freezes etc. They still have to drive to work, they still have to pay bills, and they still have to buy food. If someone is struggling to get by already then increasing the amount they have to spend (even by a few pence) could be the difference between solvency and being put on the streets.

How is any of this fair? Bailing out the banks effectively cost this country £1 trillion, yet they’re paying back £2 billion... If you’re going to argue that the banks will be sold off again for profit then why are we worrying about the deficit?

Looks like I’m going to have to buy ‘Tesco value’ whiskey from now on...

Reform University Education don't increase the price.

When we look at the English University system we cannot say that an increase in fees with a mildly better repayment package as ‘progressive’ nor can we really call it a reform. Reform in this sector requires a far more sophisticated approach than the current (barely) 2-Dimensional debate revolving around the cost of fees which is doing nothing for the student, the taxpayer or universities. Taking a glance at international university systems we can develop a cost-effective and high standard university education, for the student, the tax-payer and the universities.

Much of the NUS argument these days revolves around the cost of fees affecting lower income families being able to afford university education and being put off due to the rise in fees. In many ways this is correct, but more appropriately, it affects 1^st Generation students (those who are the first generation in their family to go to university) the most as they are the ones with the least knowledge of the academic world and how it works. There is a big argument that one of the key reasons that students from certain backgrounds are already being put off from university as they are in fact being put off from staying at school; this is something that damaged the effectiveness of the Australian abolishment of fees during the 1970s. So, for students there is a two-fold level for helping those on lower incomes from getting into university; encouraging those to stay on at school is vitally important.

This is where the EMA kicks in, now I know that many will shout and moan that “90% of students at 6^th form/college would be there anyway without it”; this statistic does miss a large point of the purpose of the EMA; it was there to not just encourage students to go to 6^th form/college but to give the student a greater choice when it came to which college they went to (it perhaps could have been put across better to students). In particular, students from rural areas will find it difficult to get a choice over which college to go to because they cannot afford the commuting cost; with EMA they got that opportunity without a significantly larger portion of money being spent by the tax payer to fund more colleges.

With all this being said, it is important to realise that dropout rates increased at a converse rate to the numbers of students from lower-income backgrounds that were no longer going to university; yet university numbers increased! So what happened? I should imagine that the numbers of lower-income students who felt they could not afford university increased over this period and, indeed; during the boom years many felt it would far more profitable to not bother with university at all.

The economic problems surrounding degrees and their currency largely lie in the fact that we’ve had the increase in the number of students coincide with the baby boomers reaching their 40s/50s and their complete chokehold of all the jobs that require qualifications. This has been damaged further by the number of low-level managers who have worked their way through the system without qualifications and are unconvinced that those holding degrees are worthwhile employees. The research and technology sector has not had the same crisis due to the simple fact that it is essential to have a full degree to get anywhere in the industry as opposed to simply being a ‘more ideal’ candidate.

So, how can we ensure that university education applies more to the talented than simply those of a particular background, whilst at the same time ensuring both high student numbers and a strong degree currency? Is this an impossibility? It can be considered as these are all relative that it probably is, but if it is possible there are methods to improve all three simultaneously. It is very important to look at all aspects of education in order to understand the ways that we can improve education as a whole. Areas like starting age, the format of ‘vocational’ degrees, the place that education holds in the state and the resolution of the two-tier nature of higher education are all areas to look into.

It is traditional for students to enter higher education at the age of 18 in this country, which is a pretty arbitrary time if you think about it. It is by no means unique to this country but there are countries that do not use 18 at the starting point. Let us take a look at Australian Higher Education; this starts a year earlier at the age of 17, and it is hardly considered terrible place to go to university. But what are the advantages and disadvantages? The disadvantages, of course, that it means that education is reduced by a year and that the value of college and/or school faces a likely reduction; there are also morality issues about alcohol et al which many to the centre-right will be concerned about. The thing is, however, that by pulling higher education forward by a year it means that graduates will be more competitive on the jobs market internationally; able to complete a masters degree by the time they are 21 and improves the feasibility to do a year in industry as part of their degree.

Year in industry work has been very valuable for many students in the past and should be encouraged, but we shouldn’t be going in the direction expressed in today’s Guardian by some universities, it puts too much emphasis on the corporate sector. I wholeheartedly disagree with Paul Jackson’s (Uni. Leicester) opinion that ‘There is no difference between academic skills and employment skills’ there is, and should be, a significant difference between academia and corporate skills. There will always be cross-over (as suggested in my last blog) that makes academic study valuable in the workplace but they are not the same thing. As soon as we see education as a commodity then degrees become nothing more than ways of purchasing extra-spending power not a contribution to academic study. This being said, more degrees should encourage the year in industry; working with relevant industries to the degree can be highly valuable for a student’s development, but should not be allowed to merge with a degree grade in itself.

http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z202/tewkes_ape/ranking.jpg

There has been a great deal of talk that the new tuition fees system will produce a two-tier university system. I disagree because the two-tier system already exists, the new system will consolidate and worsen the two-tier system. Marketising higher education has always produced a system where bottom end universities struggle to improve whereas universities like Harvard steam ahead with a burgeoning budget, it has been shown that this has no effect on student power at all and, instead, only empowers the rich universities (this is a large debate which I will be covering in more detail in my next blog). Much like colleges Universities at the bottom end of the spectrum must be encouraged to improve their academic quality in a way that is not affected simply by prestige, whilst we don’t want to damage our top universities we cannot allow them to simply get a stranglehold on our academic system.

More of our universities need to improve in the world standings, and therefore we must be ambitious with our education system; investing in it, as opposed to cutting it. Private investment in our universities will never compete with that in the US and therefore higher education must be a high priority for government spending. With improved government spending in the Higher Education sector we can start to explore something far more exciting, the idea of a state that is driven by education and producing a highly educated workforce can hope to improve its standing in all sectors; industry, government and the arts are just examples. If the country can become an education power house it can become an export whereby the country can become the world’s university.

The First Education State.

                Thought this was interesting? Check out my last Blog on the Graduate Tax here. 

** (Sources for University Private Funding)

http://www.nacubo.org/Documents/research/2009_NCSE_Public_Tables_Endowment_Market_Values.pdf

http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/01/76/65/annualreport2008-09b.pdf

http://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/aboutus/downloads/cam_facts_figures_interactive.pdf

http://www2.hull.ac.uk/pdf/statementsofaccounts08-09.pdf