UK students clash with police/ Prince Charles' car attacked

[Bruce Dazzling]

Tons of pretty indiscriminate baton swinging in this footage.

Are the NY Yankees in that riot gear?

[Simulist]

Perhaps it is that fascism doesn't exist as just one or another ideology, but that the real essence of it lurks often quietly beneath all ideology.

[IanEye]

.


Lest we forget
the glorious dead
Poppy Day
remember poppies are red
and the fields are full of poppies

History repeats itself
.

[stefano]

Dunn if this goes here, but I came across quite a good 25-minute doccie on Johnson and Cameron at Oxford, giving the context of Thatcher's second term and mining strikes. Includes the interesting fact that a phone call from Buckingham Palace persuaded the Conservative Party to offer a recently-graduated Cameron a job.

The first of three parts:

[Seamus OBlimey]

9 December 2010 Last updated at 16:23

Government to pay for security guards at Jewish schools

The government is to pick up the cost of providing security guards at Jewish faith schools in England amid concerns about anti-semitic threats to pupils.

At the moment, parents of children at 39 state-funded Jewish schools in England pay £1.6m towards the cost of enhanced measures like security guards.

Ministers have decided to foot the bill to ensure children and staff "feel safe" and can concentrate on studying.

They say they will look at the case for similar help for other faith schools.

At the moment, all state schools get funding to provide basic security measures such as perimeter fences, gates and CCTV.

However, ministers have decided it is unreasonable for parents at Jewish schools to continue paying for extra measures, such as security personnel, given the particular threats the institutions face.
Security threat

"Faith schools make a fantastic contribution to our education system and none more so than Jewish faith schools," Education Secretary Michael Gove said.

"Children and staff at these schools should feel safe at school and able to learn in an environment free from any anti-semitic or racist threats."

The schools will receive £650,000 in funds straight away and up to £2m a year based on assessment of their needs. The funds will be administered by the Community Security Trust, which helps protect Jewish communities and synagogues and draw attention to anti-semitic violence.

Its research suggests there were about 920 anti-semitic incidents in 2009, the highest total since 1984, and 124 violent attacks - 41% up on the year before.

The Trust said not all schools, the bulk of which are located in London, would receive the same amount of funding and resources would be allocated "efficiently and according to need".

"The Trust is grateful to the secretary of state for recognising the importance of security provision at state-funded Jewish schools and for the time he and his department have spent assessing the problem and constructing a viable solution," its chief executive Richard Benson said.

The Department for Education said other faith schools - including Islamic schools - should make representations if they felt they were at particular risk and deserved similar support.

"We made approaches and none of the groups came back and said yes we do," a spokesman said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-11960291

fnord?

[Elvis]

Future debt-slaves are using a metal barrier as a battering-ram to smash in a door to the Treasury building. Numerous windows broken.

I'm lovin' it!™

I'm just reading an old book, "A Short History of England"; am I right that one of the things that made England great was its universal education system?

[MacCruiskeen]

Get 'em when they're young...

Schoolboy warned by police over picket plan at David Cameron's office

Nicky Wishart, 12, told he faced arrest if public disorder ensued and armed officers would be present

Comments (26)

* Shiv Malik
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 December 2010 17.49 GMT


Nicky Wishart a pupil at Bartholomew School Eynsham Police told schoolboy Nicky Wishart he would be arrested if his picket at David Cameron's office sparked unrest. Photograph: Virginia Phelps

The mother of a 12-year-old boy has criticised Thames Valley police for taking her son out of lessons because he was planning to picket David Cameron's constituency office today.

Nicky Wishart, a pupil at Bartholomew School, Eynsham, Oxfordshire, organised the event on Facebook to highlight the plight of his youth centre, which is due to close in March next year due to budget cuts.

The protest, which was due to take place today, has attracted over 130 people on Facebook, most of whom are children who use youth centres in Cameron's constituency, Whitney.

Wishart said that after the school was contacted by anti-terrorist officers, he was taken out of his English class on Tuesday afternoon and interviewed by a Thames Valley officer at the school in the presence of his head of year. During the interview, Wishart says that the officer told him that if any public disorder took place at the event he would be held responsible and arrested.

Speaking to the Guardian, Nicky Wishart said: "In my lesson, [a school secretary] came and said my head of year wanted to talk to me. She was in her office with a police officer who wanted to talk to me about the protest. He said, 'if a riot breaks out we will arrest people and if anything happens you will get arrested because you are the organiser'.

"He said even if I didn't turn up I would be arrested and he also said that if David Cameron was in, his armed officers will be there 'so if anything out of line happens ...' and then he stopped."

Wishart, who describes himself as a "maths geek" said he was frightened by the encounter. "I was really scared. Normally I'm a confident speaker but I lost all my confidence. My mum was worried, and I was worried and I didn't know what to do."

Wishart's mother, Virginia Phelps, 41, said: "On Monday I got a phone call in the afternoon at the school from one of the senior staff members, saying, 'we've had the police here, it's to do with the anti-terrorist group, they've taken an interest in something Nicky's posted on FB'.

"I was under the impression that the police would come to the house and speak with us in the evening but I am absolutely fuming that they spoke to him when I wasn't present, especially when I live just 10 minutes from the school."

Speaking about the youth club, Phelps, a mother of three added, "Over the last few months, the kids have been trying to keep the youth club open, raising money by cleaning cars. They've raised £140. Through the club they've been had all sorts of experiences that I couldn't afford to give them myself."

Despite the police visit, Wishart said he would continue with the picket today and he would be delivering a letter to Cameron's staff about the youth centre closure.

A spokeswoman for Thames Valley police said: "We have dedicated officers who work in partnership with all the schools in our area to make sure young people remain in education and in a safe learning environment.

"On Tuesday 7 December, our schools officer for west Oxfordshire attended the school in Eynsham and spoke to a 12-year-old boy in the company of the pupil's head of year, about a planned protest. This was not with the intention of dissuading him from organising it, but to obtain information regarding the protest to ensure his and others' safety. As with any demonstration, we always aim to facilitate a peaceful protest."

The headmaster of Bartholomew school, Andrew Hamilton, refused to give comment saying that it was something that the school was "dealing with internally".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/dec/1 ... ice-picket

[MacCruiskeen]

Future debt-slaves are using a metal barrier as a battering-ram to smash in a door to the Treasury building. Numerous windows broken.

I'm lovin' it!™

I'm just reading an old book, "A Short History of England"; am I right that one of the things that made England great was its universal education system?

"Great"? Well, certainly the Education Act of 1944, though far from perfect, was one of the things that made Britain considerably better than it had been during its period of imperial "greatness". It and other subsequent reforms meant a free school education for all - including even girls! - and the opportunity for anyone who passed the exams to attend university for no fee whatsoever and with a more-than-adequate grant to support them if their family wasn't rich. (I am not making this up.)

It was also one of the things that fueled the political, artistic and social revolution of the Sixties, and we can't be having that kind of thing again, can we? By god no, sir. I say No! Nowadays, machines are much cleverer, more efficient and above all more obedient than mere educated human beings. What Britain needs today is a small sub-elite of pusillanimous debt-enslaved technocrats & managers existing resentfullly alongside a mass of impoverished and ill-educated McJobbers. If you don't believe me, ask David Cameron.

[Simulist]

I appreciate you posting this picture. The unabashed sense of entitlement of these so-called "royal" people is simply astonishing. There they are in their über-fine clothing, being chauffeured about in their undeservedly too-expensive car, and the expressions on the faces of Charles and Camilla appear ever-so-shocked that other ordinary humans exactly like them — minus the excessive privilege — are shouting "Off with their heads!" even as these students are being swindled out of an opportunity simply to learn.

[MacCruiskeen]

Weegee

[Elvis]

"Great"? Well, certainly the Education Act of 1944, though far from perfect, was one of the things that made Britain considerably better than it had been during its period of imperial "greatness".

Thanks, MacCruiskeen. I did pause at using "great" but hell, y'all are fab, really (with the notable exceptions, not much different anywhere).

and the opportunity for anyone who passed the exams to attend university for no fee whatsoever and with a more-than-adequate grant to support them if their family wasn't rich. (I am not making this up.)

See? Greatness. I LOL'd at "not making this up" but that kind of free education would astound lots of ignernt 'Murkins.

It was also one of the things that fueled the political, artistic and social revolution of the Sixties, and we can't be having that kind of thing again, can we? By god no, sir. I say No!

Good God man, never!!

[barracuda]

that kind of free education would astound lots of ignernt 'Murkins.

I'm not sure about that. When I went to college, California State universities were available at a nearly negligible cost. I think I paid under $1000 per semester. And my graduate school education was free. Even today, though the prices of state schools here have gone through the roof (20 - 30 K per year, ffs) community colleges are reasonable and affordable to just about anyone interested in attending. Had the prices of state schools tripled overnight, there would have been a commotion here, I'm sure. But instead, it happened very gradually.

[MacCruiskeen]

... In economic terms, the state has been looking to lower the unit cost of the higher-educational aspect of social reproduction, while restructuring its provision to focus its spending on reproducing forms of labour-power capable of producing the most value. I.e. it is trying to perform a classical, national ‘general capital’ function. This conflicts with the broader ideological rationale of education with regard to citizenship, culture and social wellbeing. UK governments have been especially reductive in this respect, in their image of education, since they implicitly assume that a ‘proper’ education should be restricted to the self-perpetuating elite of private schools, Oxford and Cambridge universities, and associated institutions. The ‘democratic’ unification of the sector was thus the ideological cover and economic mechanism for a far more hierarchical restructuring of the system. The polytechnics offered vocational studies, but some of them – like Middlesex – also developed innovative arts and humanities programs. It was mainly in polytechnics that new theoretical paradigms in the humanities – like Cultural Studies, for example – developed in the UK during the 1980s. This creative side of the new universities is being comprehensively destroyed by this process.

In the 1980s, Middlesex Polytechnic had a Philosophy Department with over 20 academic staff, teaching a wide range of types of philosophy to all first-year students in humanities and social sciences, as part of a broad-based foundation year. Governmental emphasis on vocational focus has perversely been (mis)translated into a ‘re-disciplinarization’ of teaching (in part, as a result of research-funding mechanisms), such that this ‘liberal arts’ aspect to higher education is being obliterated, at a time at which communicational and basic analytical skills are actually in much higher demand. This is the result of the imposition of abstract market models, without any knowledge of, or feel for, the complexity of the mediations involved in educational systems. The mediating agency of this abolition of meaningful mediations is a corporate model of financial management, imported from an already redundant phase of industrial capitalism.

The last Labour government in the UK abolished the Ministry of Education, separating out schools from universities, and allocating universities to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. There could not have been a clearer signal of its abandonment of the very concept of education. Within universities themselves, though, the concept is less easily simply abolished. Here, financial management (and its epitome, the financialization of all accounting) appears as one side of a fundamental contradiction; the other side being these institutions’ own educational ‘missions’. The minimal political task here is to draw attention to this contradiction and to force institutions to confront it, and to find a way of maintaining something of their missions. The government can be held directly responsible for this academic version of the famous ‘mission creep’.

The macabre joke is, of course, that all this is – even in narrow economic terms – likely to be completely counter-productive. Withdrawing investment in human (‘variable’) capital is hardly a brilliant strategy for growth. It harks back, once again, to the Thatcher years, when the state-sponsored economic goal appeared to be simply to drive down the cost of labour-power, in a doomed attempt to compete with developing economies, rather than developing the kind of social capital required for new production processes. In this respect – to return to your question – the image of the university as a factory is double-edged. It doesn’t just refer to the process whereby educational institutions are being subjected to a politically determined mimesis of the law of value; it also refers to the fact that the mode of subjection is an out-dated one, which fails to take into account certain important changes in the capitalist mode of production itself: not least, the specifically educational mediation of the reproduction of labour-power and the increasing imbrication of the processes of production and reproduction. ...

http://www.reclamationsjournal.org/issu ... sborne.htm

[gnosticheresy_2]

The macabre joke is, of course, that all this is – even in narrow economic terms – likely to be completely counter-productive. Withdrawing investment in human (‘variable’) capital is hardly a brilliant strategy for growth. It harks back, once again, to the Thatcher years, when the state-sponsored economic goal appeared to be simply to drive down the cost of labour-power, in a doomed attempt to compete with developing economies, rather than developing the kind of social capital required for new production processes. In this respect – to return to your question – the image of the university as a factory is double-edged. It doesn’t just refer to the process whereby educational institutions are being subjected to a politically determined mimesis of the law of value; it also refers to the fact that the mode of subjection is an out-dated one, which fails to take into account certain important changes in the capitalist mode of production itself: not least, the specifically educational mediation of the reproduction of labour-power and the increasing imbrication of the processes of production and reproduction. ...

No.

It's not a "macabre joke".

Though it is quite funny reading things like this, the extent of the disconnect just has to be laughed at. Hello? it's not a bug, it's a feature. The "important changes in the capitalist mode of production" are illusory, the "mode of subjection" is never outdated, it just changes its title every so often.

[Elvis]

that kind of free education would astound lots of ignernt 'Murkins.

I'm not sure about that. When I went to college, California State universities were available at a nearly negligible cost. I think I paid under $1000 per semester. And my graduate school education was free. Even today, though the prices of state schools here have gone through the roof (20 - 30 K per year, ffs) community colleges are reasonable and affordable to just about anyone interested in attending. Had the prices of state schools tripled overnight, there would have been a commotion here, I'm sure. But instead, it happened very gradually.

I thought about mentioning California community colleges, which, as I recall, were, for a long time, free to all residents and yes are still reasonable. So it's not too bad. In many if not all states, mine included, community colleges are a quite affordable entry into higher education (last time I checked...which was...a long time ago).

But the US has never had anything like free university for anyone passing the entrance exams. (That'd be Communism!!) Mainly I was keying off Mac's note "I am not making this up," which I took as suggesting that a lot of 'Murkins would indeed find it surprising. In any event, it's to Britain's credit they valued that kind of access, and I hope this latest assault on it is reversed.

Some years back someone, can't remember who, proposed paying people to go to college (if that's what they wanted), just like a job for a few years---liberal arts education for its own sake, encouraging individual strengths, desires and potentials, in a larger context of an enlightened society. Okay, now I'm dreaming....

Any more windows gettin' smashed over there??