I'm not a xenophobe, and I'm certainly not racist, but one thing that always annoys me is when foreigners move over to the UK, and attempt to turn it into their own country. For example, you have whole areas of some cities which are almost exclusively inhabited by Asians, who do everything they can to shape their community into what it would be in their own country. Now, I'm not against their culture, but if they wanted to live somewhere like their own country, what are they doing over here? The whole reason why people choose to immigrate to the UK is because it's popular, and it's British. How can it remain popular and British if it is essentially turned into a different country? More to the point, why would anyone want to leave their country and basically take it with them?
There's been rather a lot in the news recently about issues such as this, with the most obvious example being the actual ban of face-covering garments in France, including the burkha. Now, I personally agree with the French on this. I'm not disrespecting your religion or your culture, you can do whatever you like in your own country, but I do think you're disrespecting the culture of the country you live in just going over and not playing ball.
Somehing else which has annoyed me in the last week are reports that a group of foreigners were planning to picket Westminster Abbey tomorrow for the royal wedding. This is, quite honestly, outrageous. Protest against the country you decided to move to? The royal family is the most British thing in GB, so protesting against them is seriously like biting the hand that feeds. If you don't like what makes Britain British, you don't have to stick around for it! You can always go home, where you cando whatever your culture dictates without alienating the country you moved to. It's as simple as that.
I reiterate, I am not racist, I just don't think that white, middle-class, British Christians ought to be persecuted in order that the minorities might be kept happy. It was their choice to emigrate and as such they ought to be willing to play the game.
Lowri
Thursday, 28 April 2011
From the archives: A year in updates & an highly political rant.
(Originally published to Lowri Greene's Take On Life on Wednesday, the twelfth of January, 2011.)
So, it has been a year since my last post here. Since then, life has gone on: I have a new way to terrorise the country (called a provisional driving licence - soon to be full if all goes well,) I am a year closer to adulthood, a potentially terrifying thought, and for once I actually agree on things with the government. In fact, I thought I'd base this blog post on politics, and in particular an issue that will particularly affect me. This issue is, in fact, the rising university tuition fees.
As you may have already gathered (and if you hadn't, you're one of those who should certainly not be going to university,) I am a supporter of the cuts, which I gather from all the abuse I receive from my peers, is uncommon for my demographic. In fact, statistically it's precisely my demographic (white, very middle-class, young and rather spoiled) who tend to be socialists, expecting everything to be handed to them on a silver platter. I suspect that had I not two parents working at university, and therefore the understanding of the system, I should probably be a whinging socialist myself. However, if one really thinks about the issue they ought to realise a few things that make rising tuition fees actually look like an OK idea.
Firstly, one must ask oneself why exactly the fees are rising. There can only be one answer to this problem: the fact that the previous, Labour government spent a load of money they just didn't have, and the massive debt owed by the country had to be paid back somehow. In fact, if one digs deeper, an interesting and entirely feasible conclusion may be speculated - the possibility arises that Labour intentionally spend more than they reasonably can to make themselves appealing to the voter, so when the voter realises that actually what they're doing isn't good at all and vote the Tories in, the Tories have to make whopping great cuts which are a worse deal than what the taxpayer are used to, so Labour get back in again. It could easily be argued that it's simply a vicious circle of dirty tactics designed to make their opponents look bad.
There is one major problem with the cuts, however, and that is simply the sheer number of students protesting. Just for the record, I'm fine with the fact that they have the right to protest, but they also have the responsibility to keep it peaceful, and I am a firm believer that people should only get their rights if they adhere to their responsibilities. I'm sure you've heard about the case with a sixth former called Edward Woolard, who threw a fire extinguisher from the roof of the Millbank building into the crowd below. A couple of days ago it was announced that he would be gaoled for (I think) a year and a half. Cases like this make me so annoyed, it's just a load of students think they have the right to do whatever stupid and dangerous stuff they want if it means they can get angry for the sake of being angry.
Something else most students don't realise is the fact that they don't pay for a degree, they pay for the chance to study for a degree. Added to the fact that a lot of students go to university to socialise, get drunk and just prat about in general, I seriously think that if anyone really wanted to go to university to study for a degree, they'd go anyway, tuition fees wouldn't stop them. Also, if you consider that one can take out a student loan for all the tuition fees with no interest, that you only need to pay back when you're earning over £21000 per annum. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me! Something for those who would attempt to counter with "but then students would be in debt for the rest of their life!" to remember is that the whole point of a degree is that it's an investment, id est you pay more early on to increase the chances that you'll earn a lot more later on in life. That would also be my argument against the ignorant fools who claim that the fees rising discriminates against the lower class - only the richest people who attend boarding schools and whose fathers go out shooting foxes while their mothers sit at home and drink tea with their little fingers in the air actually pay up-front, so in most circumstances the wealth of one's parents has flip all to do with ability to pay for university.
I could go on about this for ages, but I have a maths lesson in a minute and should probably go. I am enabling comments, so if anyone disagrees and fancies being proved wrong, they're very welcome to argue. In vain. ;)
/rant
Lowri :)
So, it has been a year since my last post here. Since then, life has gone on: I have a new way to terrorise the country (called a provisional driving licence - soon to be full if all goes well,) I am a year closer to adulthood, a potentially terrifying thought, and for once I actually agree on things with the government. In fact, I thought I'd base this blog post on politics, and in particular an issue that will particularly affect me. This issue is, in fact, the rising university tuition fees.
As you may have already gathered (and if you hadn't, you're one of those who should certainly not be going to university,) I am a supporter of the cuts, which I gather from all the abuse I receive from my peers, is uncommon for my demographic. In fact, statistically it's precisely my demographic (white, very middle-class, young and rather spoiled) who tend to be socialists, expecting everything to be handed to them on a silver platter. I suspect that had I not two parents working at university, and therefore the understanding of the system, I should probably be a whinging socialist myself. However, if one really thinks about the issue they ought to realise a few things that make rising tuition fees actually look like an OK idea.
Firstly, one must ask oneself why exactly the fees are rising. There can only be one answer to this problem: the fact that the previous, Labour government spent a load of money they just didn't have, and the massive debt owed by the country had to be paid back somehow. In fact, if one digs deeper, an interesting and entirely feasible conclusion may be speculated - the possibility arises that Labour intentionally spend more than they reasonably can to make themselves appealing to the voter, so when the voter realises that actually what they're doing isn't good at all and vote the Tories in, the Tories have to make whopping great cuts which are a worse deal than what the taxpayer are used to, so Labour get back in again. It could easily be argued that it's simply a vicious circle of dirty tactics designed to make their opponents look bad.
There is one major problem with the cuts, however, and that is simply the sheer number of students protesting. Just for the record, I'm fine with the fact that they have the right to protest, but they also have the responsibility to keep it peaceful, and I am a firm believer that people should only get their rights if they adhere to their responsibilities. I'm sure you've heard about the case with a sixth former called Edward Woolard, who threw a fire extinguisher from the roof of the Millbank building into the crowd below. A couple of days ago it was announced that he would be gaoled for (I think) a year and a half. Cases like this make me so annoyed, it's just a load of students think they have the right to do whatever stupid and dangerous stuff they want if it means they can get angry for the sake of being angry.
Something else most students don't realise is the fact that they don't pay for a degree, they pay for the chance to study for a degree. Added to the fact that a lot of students go to university to socialise, get drunk and just prat about in general, I seriously think that if anyone really wanted to go to university to study for a degree, they'd go anyway, tuition fees wouldn't stop them. Also, if you consider that one can take out a student loan for all the tuition fees with no interest, that you only need to pay back when you're earning over £21000 per annum. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me! Something for those who would attempt to counter with "but then students would be in debt for the rest of their life!" to remember is that the whole point of a degree is that it's an investment, id est you pay more early on to increase the chances that you'll earn a lot more later on in life. That would also be my argument against the ignorant fools who claim that the fees rising discriminates against the lower class - only the richest people who attend boarding schools and whose fathers go out shooting foxes while their mothers sit at home and drink tea with their little fingers in the air actually pay up-front, so in most circumstances the wealth of one's parents has flip all to do with ability to pay for university.
I could go on about this for ages, but I have a maths lesson in a minute and should probably go. I am enabling comments, so if anyone disagrees and fancies being proved wrong, they're very welcome to argue. In vain. ;)
/rant
Lowri :)
From the archives: Message to an irate United Kingdom.
(Originally posted to Lowri Greene's Take On Life on Sunday, the twenty-seventh of March, 2011.)
I should warn you now, this is going to be an extremely political blog post, in which I shall highlight why I believe the current coalition government to be doing the right thing in terms of the country's finances. I realise that this statement will make most people immediately switch off, or desire to bombard me with abuse, but all I ask is that you read the whole of this post with an open mind and see that what I'm saying actually makes a lot of sense. I'll keep it as short as I possibly can while highlighting all the points necessary to illustrate my argument. However much you disagree with it, I urge you to read it all the way through and not just dismiss is as rubbish because it's not what you want to hear.
Firstly, I would like to make something very clear. Even though I am about as middle-class as you'd expect from anyone living in inner-Surrey, one of the most Conservative areas in Great Britain, I'm putting my bias aside in order to speak the truth about what really is best for this country. Well, here goes, into the deep end.
The timing of this post (id est immediately after the protest march through London yesterday) is not a coincidence. One event during the march in particular which alarmed me was how the protesters booed Ed Miliband when he spoke about how some cuts would be necessary. Honestly, I don't usually agree with Ed Miliband on principle (I mean, have you seen that thick expression he's always wearing?) you know the government are doing something right when the opposition agrees (as is the case here - sort of: I'll go into more detail there in a bit.) The fact that the protesters booed at this just shows how selfish and ignorant we are, if we expect that the government can just magic up a load of money from thin air just so the outrageous spending spree held by the previous government can continue. I mean, Labour themselves admit that it was wrong to spend so much borrowed money, and that that level of spending can't continue, so the only way to stop that is to make cuts or raise taxes. The huge amount of money being poured into the public sector may well have been great for a few individual people (and Labour's popularity) but it's just not a feasible way for a country to prosper. It only leads to huge debts (like the ones we're seeing now) which have to be paid off, with interest. We have to raise that money somewhere, which even the culprits admit. The current government is only trying to clean up the mess the last one left behind.
To all those who argue that the cuts could have been put into place more gradually, instead of a big wallop immediately, have you no understanding of how the interest system works? The longer you leave debts, the more the interest builds up, and if you put cuts into place gradually you end up making the cuts for a far longer time, which means potentially a longer time of fewer jobs, less money being put into public services et cetera, which in the overall scheme of things is arguably worse for our country's economy. Think of it in a smaller scale. Say you have a credit card, for which you have to pay interest on anything bought on it. Do you spend a fortune on it, knowing full well you're not going to be able to pay it back? Not if you have anything between your ears. Why should it be any different for a country? The only real difference is that the scale is much larger, and therefore the damage is much greater. You know it makes sense.
Another important point is on pay rises. Now, I live close to the University of Surrey, where there have been strikes over pay rises for the majority of the last week. On Monday, when I was on the bus home (yes, inner-Surrey snobby Lowri uses public transport,) I saw a sign attached to a pole by the main university entrance which said "A 0.4% payrise is an insult" which, if I'm honest, made me wonder what people who thought like that are doing in a university in the first place. I actually felt rather tempted to return the next day and change it so it said "A 0.4% payrise is still more than you were earning before, so be grateful." I don't understand how the academics can be complaining about being given more money? Pay rises didn't ought to be seen as an entitlement, they should be seen as a privilege, and besides which, compared to a lot of workers, academics (who are responsible for the uproar in Surrey, at least) are actually paid rather well. This just further illustrates how selfish we (the UK) have become.
It should also be pointed out that the definition of happy is when things get better for said person. Likewise, unhappy is when things are worse for said person and you're more neutral when things stay the same. By definition, the population will only be happy when the government keep on pouring money into public services, which just isn't feasible. Whether we like it or not, cuts are necessary in order to reduce borrowing from other countries and pay back the debt, so the spending can start up again in the future. In introducing cuts, by definition there will be an unhappy demographic, who think the cuts should be somewhere else. It's like a domino effect.
My final, and perhaps most important point, is a reminder of what politics is all about. Getting the voter (us) to vote for you at the next election. And how does one do that? By spending in all the right places, not implementing cuts, and just generally making oneself popular. The current government are definitely not doing that. They are, quite simply, making themselves unpopular for the reason that they genuinely believe that what they're doing is right for our country. Why would any political party (or coalition) intentionally sabotage themselves for the next election?
In conclusion, and leading on from my last point, I think the best thing we can do in light of the cuts is to trust the government in what they're doing, after all, they may be politicians, but they're politicians who are willing to sacrifice their own popularity for the sake of our country (and popularity is everything to a politician,) and take pay cuts themselves (as the cabinet did at the start of their term.) In fact, protest marches are the least productive thing we could possibly do. After all, these marches tend to end up with shops/banks/et cetera being ransacked, work days being wasted when they could be generating revenue for the country, and such a degree of mob psychology that no one will listen to reason, instead of just being angry. It is for this reason that I wrote this blog post, to be a voice of reason when no one else is willing to step up and talk some sense.
Thank you for reading this blog post all the way to the end, I hope it at least made you think a bit more about how we can't just expect money to appear out of nowhere.
Lowri
I should warn you now, this is going to be an extremely political blog post, in which I shall highlight why I believe the current coalition government to be doing the right thing in terms of the country's finances. I realise that this statement will make most people immediately switch off, or desire to bombard me with abuse, but all I ask is that you read the whole of this post with an open mind and see that what I'm saying actually makes a lot of sense. I'll keep it as short as I possibly can while highlighting all the points necessary to illustrate my argument. However much you disagree with it, I urge you to read it all the way through and not just dismiss is as rubbish because it's not what you want to hear.
Firstly, I would like to make something very clear. Even though I am about as middle-class as you'd expect from anyone living in inner-Surrey, one of the most Conservative areas in Great Britain, I'm putting my bias aside in order to speak the truth about what really is best for this country. Well, here goes, into the deep end.
The timing of this post (id est immediately after the protest march through London yesterday) is not a coincidence. One event during the march in particular which alarmed me was how the protesters booed Ed Miliband when he spoke about how some cuts would be necessary. Honestly, I don't usually agree with Ed Miliband on principle (I mean, have you seen that thick expression he's always wearing?) you know the government are doing something right when the opposition agrees (as is the case here - sort of: I'll go into more detail there in a bit.) The fact that the protesters booed at this just shows how selfish and ignorant we are, if we expect that the government can just magic up a load of money from thin air just so the outrageous spending spree held by the previous government can continue. I mean, Labour themselves admit that it was wrong to spend so much borrowed money, and that that level of spending can't continue, so the only way to stop that is to make cuts or raise taxes. The huge amount of money being poured into the public sector may well have been great for a few individual people (and Labour's popularity) but it's just not a feasible way for a country to prosper. It only leads to huge debts (like the ones we're seeing now) which have to be paid off, with interest. We have to raise that money somewhere, which even the culprits admit. The current government is only trying to clean up the mess the last one left behind.
To all those who argue that the cuts could have been put into place more gradually, instead of a big wallop immediately, have you no understanding of how the interest system works? The longer you leave debts, the more the interest builds up, and if you put cuts into place gradually you end up making the cuts for a far longer time, which means potentially a longer time of fewer jobs, less money being put into public services et cetera, which in the overall scheme of things is arguably worse for our country's economy. Think of it in a smaller scale. Say you have a credit card, for which you have to pay interest on anything bought on it. Do you spend a fortune on it, knowing full well you're not going to be able to pay it back? Not if you have anything between your ears. Why should it be any different for a country? The only real difference is that the scale is much larger, and therefore the damage is much greater. You know it makes sense.
Another important point is on pay rises. Now, I live close to the University of Surrey, where there have been strikes over pay rises for the majority of the last week. On Monday, when I was on the bus home (yes, inner-Surrey snobby Lowri uses public transport,) I saw a sign attached to a pole by the main university entrance which said "A 0.4% payrise is an insult" which, if I'm honest, made me wonder what people who thought like that are doing in a university in the first place. I actually felt rather tempted to return the next day and change it so it said "A 0.4% payrise is still more than you were earning before, so be grateful." I don't understand how the academics can be complaining about being given more money? Pay rises didn't ought to be seen as an entitlement, they should be seen as a privilege, and besides which, compared to a lot of workers, academics (who are responsible for the uproar in Surrey, at least) are actually paid rather well. This just further illustrates how selfish we (the UK) have become.
It should also be pointed out that the definition of happy is when things get better for said person. Likewise, unhappy is when things are worse for said person and you're more neutral when things stay the same. By definition, the population will only be happy when the government keep on pouring money into public services, which just isn't feasible. Whether we like it or not, cuts are necessary in order to reduce borrowing from other countries and pay back the debt, so the spending can start up again in the future. In introducing cuts, by definition there will be an unhappy demographic, who think the cuts should be somewhere else. It's like a domino effect.
My final, and perhaps most important point, is a reminder of what politics is all about. Getting the voter (us) to vote for you at the next election. And how does one do that? By spending in all the right places, not implementing cuts, and just generally making oneself popular. The current government are definitely not doing that. They are, quite simply, making themselves unpopular for the reason that they genuinely believe that what they're doing is right for our country. Why would any political party (or coalition) intentionally sabotage themselves for the next election?
In conclusion, and leading on from my last point, I think the best thing we can do in light of the cuts is to trust the government in what they're doing, after all, they may be politicians, but they're politicians who are willing to sacrifice their own popularity for the sake of our country (and popularity is everything to a politician,) and take pay cuts themselves (as the cabinet did at the start of their term.) In fact, protest marches are the least productive thing we could possibly do. After all, these marches tend to end up with shops/banks/et cetera being ransacked, work days being wasted when they could be generating revenue for the country, and such a degree of mob psychology that no one will listen to reason, instead of just being angry. It is for this reason that I wrote this blog post, to be a voice of reason when no one else is willing to step up and talk some sense.
Thank you for reading this blog post all the way to the end, I hope it at least made you think a bit more about how we can't just expect money to appear out of nowhere.
Lowri
print "Hello World!"
Yes, that was a Python reference. OK, from now on I'll keep the humour to my Take On Life blog, as I decided it was becoming too difficult for one to hunt down the humour there amid my more recent political posts. It is for this reason that this blog came into being, as I needed a place where I could collate & archive my political writings and anyone interested could read through them. Seeing as there's plenty going on in the political world at the moment, updates will frequently be made here, as opposed to LGTOL which I have rather neglected for the past year and a half as I became more and more disenchanted with life in general, and any takes on it I may have would not be fit for publication.
As soon as I publish this post, I shall dig through the archives of LGTOL and post anything political here, instead of clogging up a supposedly mildly humerous blog with ramblings nobody really wants to read. I am also going to write a new post today, on this blog.
I shall say no more in this post, as it was simply an introduction and I daresay you have better things to do than read about literally nothing. More shall be up in the next few hours.
As soon as I publish this post, I shall dig through the archives of LGTOL and post anything political here, instead of clogging up a supposedly mildly humerous blog with ramblings nobody really wants to read. I am also going to write a new post today, on this blog.
I shall say no more in this post, as it was simply an introduction and I daresay you have better things to do than read about literally nothing. More shall be up in the next few hours.
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