David Willetts: Students "a burden on the taxpayer"

David Willetts has been in the news for saying that cost of students is "a burden on the taxpayer" and that they should consider tuition fees "more as an obligation to pay higher income tax" than a debt".

I have a lot of sympathy for the view that Labour's 50 per cent target was arbitrary and not well thought out, but two things about Willetts' comments occur to me. I am not sure if they are contradictory, but here they are.

The first is that if we had a more progressive taxation system then it might be possible do away with tuition altogether. Those who earned high salaries due to their education would pay more tax and everyone would be happy.

The second is that there is something decadent about a society in which one generation is no longer prepared to pay for the education of the next. As so often, the problem with modern Conservatives is that they are not Conservative enough.

House Points: Michael Gove's plans for education

My House Points column from today's Liberal Democrat News. Instinctively I am rather in favour of Gove's ideas, but it becomes harder to defend them when you have to set your views down in writing.

A mixed report

How do you know when the delegates for a teachers’ union conference have flown in? Because the whining noise continues after the jet’s engines have been turned off.

Unfair no doubt, but you have to admit the educational world is infected with a terrible negativity. Reading the Guardian education section on Tuesdays, which ought to be an uplifting experience, leaves you looking for an inventive way of ending it all.

So it’s no surprise that the education unions are against the coalition’s ideas for schools: they have been against every initiative for as long as anyone can remember. And such is the current malaise in education that it is hard not to welcome any proposals that will shake things up. But let’s try a fair evaluation of these ideas.

The Conservative emphasis on allowing new schools to be set up fits well with our beloved Pupil Premium. Without it there is a danger that we would just see children from middle-class families being squeezed out by poorer children in popular schools. What we desperately need are more good schools overall.

And we should be pleased if new schools are set up by parents and community groups. Such ideas were around in the Liberal Party in the 1970s and we have lost sight of them for too long. But Liberal Democrats will be less attracted by the suggestion that commercial companies should run schools and the accompanying talk of brands and chains.

Nor is the encouragement to successful schools to opt out of local authority control attractive. One thing that Labour got right was to grasp that it is the schools that are doing badly which need shaking up. And civic pride in local schools is likely to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

However these ideas turn out – as ever, some will flourish and some will not – we are going to have a get used to an education world where a lot of exotic flowers bloom. It certainly will not be one controlled from Ed Balls’ old desk in Whitehall. So it good to see that Michael Gove has trimmed the grandiose name (“Department for Children, Schools and Families”) he inherited from Balls.

And perhaps we could all stop moaning too?

Liberal England comes to you live from Shropshire

I have brought the Dowager Lady Bonkers to Church Stretton for a holiday and this is my view from my bedroom window.

The hotel has free Wi-Fi, so blogging will probably continue.

Steve Winwood interviewed in GQ

There are a lot of interviews with Winwood around at the moment because of the release of his Revolutions box set. I promise not to link to every one of them, but the interview with Dylan Jones in GQ is well worth reading.

Three quick points of interest.

Jones has used the line about Winwood being the coolest man on God's earth at Blind Faith's Hyde Park concert before.

He mentions Mick Jagger's brother Chris being in the crowd that day. We saw him more recently with Tessa Munt and Paddy Ashdown.

Winwood wrote the Spencer Davis Group song "It Hurts Me So" when he was 12 years old.

Great Central Railway. Loughborough

Simon Hughes elected as Lib Dem deputy leader

Congratulations to Simon Hughes, who was elected as the deputy leader of the party by Liberal Democrat MPs this evening. I cannot find the voting figures online anywhere. Will they be declared? (Later. I am told that Hughes won by 38 votes to 18, with one MP not voting.)

Simon is full of plans for his new role but, as I suggested the other day, he may find that Nick Clegg has no wish to cede that sort of power to him.

Liberals and punishment

Richard Grayson writes on the Guardian website today:

Fundamental to the Conservative approach is the view that prison should be primarily about punishment. For Liberal Democrats, prison is primarily about preventing re-offending

Is this right? I always thought there was a strong element of redemption in the liberal justification of punishment, but perhaps that concept no longer makes sense in our secular society.

My impression is that this emphasis on preventing reoffending is a recent development. When I did a philosophy degree some 30 years ago deterrence was certainly among them, but I cannot recall any mention of the idea, popular now, that if someone is in prison then at least he is not on the streets committing more crime.

That interpretation of preventing reoffending was at the heart of many of Labour's numerous crime bills over the past 13 years. And Liberal Democrats consistently voted against those measures.

Nor should we treat an element of retribution in punishment as necessarily illiberal. Without it there can be do notion of the punishment fitting the crime. Indeed, on an extreme utilitarian view you do not even have to wait for someone to commit a crime before you lock them up.

Labour came close to adopting such a view when it set up centres to detain people diagnosed with a "dangerous and severe personality disorder" - a programme recently questioned by Professor Peter Tyrer.

To their credit, the Conservatives voted against this detention without crime - a decision that, I am told, went to their shadow cabinet. So perhaps what constitutes a liberal view of punishment is a more complex question than Richard allows.

I suspect the depressing truth is that punitive institutions carry on from generation, happy to espouse whatever justification - retribution, redemption, public protection - is currently fashionable. Remember that close confinement was once regarded as a form of torture.

Bob Russell "hauled before an employment tribunal"

They are going at it hammer and tongs in Bury St Edmunds.

From the Chelmsford Weekly News:

Colchester MP Bob Russell has been hauled before an employment tribunal accused of wrongly firing an alleged “whistleblower”.

However, the complainant’s evidence has been slammed as “a smear campaign” while he says the MP has carried out a “character assassination”.

A nation holds its breath.

The Great Market Harborough Tornado of 2010

There is also a report in the Harborough Mail.

Six of the Best 63

Callooh! Callay! Lynne Featherstone has won the Orange Digital Election Award for "the best use of digital campaigning by a candidate".

Caron's Musings thinks that Iain Dale should get his own radio show and Helen Duffett should be a regular guest.

Seeing Margaret Thatcher on the doorstep of 10 Downing Street made Spiderplant Land "feel sick to the pit of my stomach and re-awakened my anti Tory sentiment". Maybe I am mellowing, but to me it was just extending a courtesy to a former prime minister - albeit one she is reported never to have shown to Jim Callaghan. And as time goes on, the changes of the 1980s look less like the product of Thatcher's personal wickedness and more like the inevitable breakdown of the 1945 settlement. And I never liked school milk anyway.

Did Alastair Campbell pay towards Ed Balls ousting attempt? asks Mark Reckons. I doubt it very much but am doing my bit to pass the rumour on.

Paul Remfry, UKIP, Weaver Vale looks at plans for Glasgow to build its own Stonehenge, in part as tribute to Professor Alexander Thom, proponent of the Megalithic yard.

And Narrowboat Starcross tackles Foxton locks near Market Harborough.

"No Perfect Heroes": Paddy Ashdown to publish a thriller

In the course of a long and interesting interview with the East Anglian Daily Times, the former Lib Dem leader reveals something new:

Paddy Ashdown will be 70 a couple of months into 2011. He’s packed more into those years than most of us would manage in four or five lifetimes. Does he have any burning ambitions left?

He rattles them off. “My garden, my grandchildren, my next book. I’ve just done my seventh book – off to the publisher now. (It’s called No Perfect Heroes.) It’s a thriller. It’s got a little bit of Bosnia in it, a lot of Islam, a great deal of spying, a very great deal of Special Forces and a little bit of sex!”

Er . . . not based on your life, is it?

“No, it’s absolutely not based on my life! Somebody as different from me as you can get, but obviously my experiences come into it and add colour here and there. But absolutely not autobiographical!”

Well, it was new to me, but in fact Paddy also mentioned this new book to the Western Morning News last month.

Steven Finn, Stuart Broad and Tigger

I posted a little piece of cricketing whimsy on The Corridor last night.

In praise of Springwatch

Environmental campaigning these days is predicated upon imminent catastrophe to such an extent that it makes the natural world seem a threatening place.

So well done to Springwatch for emphasising the beauty, richness and strangeness of British countryside. If it doesn't get you out of the house, nothing will.

People elected as MPs before the 1964 general election who are still alive

The Snow in the Summer or So-So has the list.

It is surprisingly long and contains many people - Robert Carr, Edward Short, Christopher Chataway, Edward Du Cann - you might not have realised were still with us.

Steve Winwood to join the Royal Family

About time too, as far as this blog is concerned.

Well, not quite, but yesterday's Sunday Telegraph speculated that Winwood's daughter Mary-Clare may soon be marrying the Duchess of Cornwall's nephew Ben Elliot.

Meanwhile Revolutions, a four-CD review of Winwood's career, was released today. But an interview with the Aberdeen Press and Journal suggests that career is far from over.

The new Wikio rankings for Lib Dem blogs

Mark Pack has the new list.

There are now 17 Liberal Democrat blogs in the top 100 political blogs in Britain. Well done everybody.

Danny Alexander: Colonsay to the Treasury

Danny Alexander's sudden rise means that many among the wider public know little about him. To be honest, many of us in the Liberal Democrats who know little about him too.

Some interesting background come from (of all places) the Mail on Sunday, which tells us about his boyhood:

Born in Edinburgh in 1972, Mr Alexander moved to Colonsay at the age of two when his father Dion, known as Di, and mother Patricia chose to swap life in the Scottish capital for beaches and cliffs where seals and rare birds far outnumber people.

Twelve miles long and three miles wide, the island’s limited amenities have no need for specific names: ‘the shop’ and ‘the post office’ suffice.

The primary school has just ten pupils. The island has no dedicated pub but does have one bar, situated in the only hotel, The Colonsay.

Locals say the size of the community means there has never been demand for a pub.
Mr Alexander grew up in Colonsay with his sister Catriona and brother George – younger brother Robert had not yet arrived – living in a cottage yards from the harbour in the main settlement of Scalasaig.

Their mother cared for the children while their father made a living with his hands – becoming known as Di the potter – after setting up a small ceramics business in a shed, selling jugs and plates to locals and tourists.

Apologies for the thumping hanging participle in the second paragraph there.

Colonsay is the "Kiloran" of the Powell and Pressburger film I Know Where I'm Going. If you have a mind to visit it yourself, see the Isle of Colonsay website.

Mind you, it is possible to make too much of Danny Alexander's sudden promotion. As Bagehot in The Economist says:

It is easy to sneer at Mr Alexander’s service at Cairngorms National Parks; but he has actually had more extra-political experience than his boss, Mr Osborne, who, at 39, is only a year older. Many of their colleagues have only limited experience inside politics, let alone beyond it, having risen meteorically during the Tories’ last years of opposition.

In truth, this challenge would probably intimidate almost any Treasury team, however wily or accomplished, be they Gladstone and Disraeli or Mr Alexander and Mr Osborne. Those who say that Mr Alexander is peculiarly callow or ill-prepared are engaged in a kind of scapegoating displacement activity. No one is really ready. We are all Danny Alexander now.

Elkie Brooks: Lilac Wine

Like The Man with the Child in his Eyes by Kate Bush, this is a song that reminds me of my sixth-form Saturday job in a second-hand bookshop. Being young and ignorant, I had not heard it before. I now know that it had been made famous by Nina Simone in the sixties and it was recorded more recently by Jeff Buckley. Wikipedia has an article on the song's history.

Elkie Brooks has been around in the sixties and was a member of Vinegar Joe with Robert Palmer in the early seventies, but she did not enjoy much chart success until this era. Lilac Wine made no. 16 in 1978.

She is in full diva mode on this live performance from German TV, but someone should have told the pianist that you don't have to press that hard.

More on Lib Dem complaints against Phil Woolas

Last week I wrote about Liberal Democrat attempts to have the election result in Oldham East and Saddleworth overturned.

Asif Ansari, in a report for the North West edition of the BBC Politics Show, has more detail on our complaints:

In the last few days of the campaign, Labour put out a small newspaper which was predominantly an attack on their Liberal Democrat opponent, Elwyn Watkins.

Mr Watkins believes the leaflet falsely portrayed him as a politician courting votes from militant Muslims; not a group known to be particularly supportive of British democracy.

"Why are the extremists urging a vote for Watkins?" asked Labour.

Still-undecided voters had the option to read the backpage which moved onto financial matters.

This reported Mr Watkins to be personal assistant to Saudi Arabian billionaire, Sheikh Abdullah Ali Alhamrani.

It helpfully pointed out: "Political donations from overseas are illegal. Even the Ashcroft money can't match a Sheikh."

It was not entirely clear what Sheikh Abdulah's interest would have been in Oldham East and Saddleworth. But putting that to one side, the clear impression was that Middle East money was oiling the Lib Dem campaign.

I shall keep an eye open for the video of his report.

Sir Berkeley (or Paddy Logan) at Loughborough

Today I visited the Great Central Railway. What should I see when I came down the stairs at Loughborough Central station but Sir Berkeley, the locomotive that was once nicknamed Paddy Logan?

Regular readers will know all about him.