Lord Beria3 wrote:
As Ludwid says, PO will not come from energy but finance. As economies struggle to grow, their debts will become overwhelming, leading to defaults, economic bankruptsy and so on.
In those kinds of economic contexts, funding the kind of higher education system is simply pie-in-the-sky - and the protesters don't seem to realise that even on rosy BAU ideas of strong growth in the West decades into the future, the current system is STILL unsustainable.
Quite. I actually don't envisage there being any universities, except maybe Oxford and Cambridge, 5 years from now; and we'll be lucky if there are schools. That's how serious the situation is.
In principle I am a left-leaning liberal, but I'm out on a limb among my liberal friends, who all blame the cuts on the old Conservative agenda of rolling back the state and handing the keys to the private sector. While that of course is the guiding principle of the Tory party, ANY responsible government would be making harsh cuts at the moment.
I believe that tax-and-spend is the way to an equitable and happy society, but what we've had hasn't been tax-and-spend so much as borrow-and-spend, a principle I'm very much opposed to for the simple reason that it's unsustainable. Of course, most Western countries have had to borrow to keep their governments and economies functioning; on one level, Britain didn't really have any choice, not being a major exporter (at least not relative to its population). In other words, I think we were always screwed because of this fundamental problem with capitalism.
Part of me is greatly saddened by the cuts to education and the NHS, but I'm not going to be one of those protesting about them, because unlike the protesters I know that there are no easy solutions.
"We're just waiting, looking skyward as the days go down / Someone promised there'd be answers if we stayed around."
