The argument arises because, on the whole, graduates get more pay than those that didn’t make it through university. Therefore, it seems obvious that people going to university should pay the full cost of their education, doesn’t it?

The other side of the argument is that those graduates are the people who create the most wealth for the country. Therefore, it seems obvious that their education should be completely funded by the government, doesn’t it?

At the moment in the UK the funding is split between the individual and the government, reflecting the two arguments above. The problem is that the universities are arguing that they need more money than this system is giving them. Since times are hard, the thinking presently is that this funding will largely come from the students, albeit after they have graduated and have started earning enough to start contributing for their previous university education.

However, that breaks the long held idea that since both the graduates and the country as a whole benefit, then both should contribute. Quite what one can do when there just ain’t the cash around to continue with this approach is a question that’s far from easy to answer.

One notable problem in requiring the graduates to pay up later is that one would expect a fair proportion of them to leave the country before the bills start rolling in. After all, why would one stay to face a bill of £30,000 or more when one could get a similar (and higher paying) job in America and not have to pay that bill?

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There seems to be a security camera almost everywhere you look these days. In the early days they were placed in places which clearly needed them. Thus shops sprouted them like nobodies business in the hope that it would eliminate shop lifting. The snag is that they then needed to recruit security people to watch the cameras and in many cases one suspects that the losses due to shoplifting were smaller than the wages of the security guards. Of course, these days there are the security tags on the products but although I’ve seen the alarm go off many times as I’ve been going in or out of a store, I’ve yet to see anyone other than legitimate customers being stopped.

It’s going to be interesting to see if they get to the point of removing cameras. Somehow I can’t see it happening.

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The problem is that originally the idea was that people would obviously want to get back into work (and be able to) and wouldn’t want to remain dependent on benefits. That view clearly isn’t held by a number of people these days and these people can take advantage of the lack of limits on the help available. For example, take a typical family of two adults, two children who have become unemployed. Very roughly their entitlement would equate to £60 for the adults and £40 each for the children (neglecting, for the moment, any potential housing benefit etc.). That’s a total of £120 a week or around £6000 a year. Actually, it would be more as there’s child benefit of £35 a week so the total in basic income benefits is about £155 a week, £700 a month, £8000 a year (equivalent to a gross salary of around £12,000). Not a massive income for sure but, potentially, one that the family might live on as, of course, there would be assistance with housing costs, free school meals, and a few others.

However, consider instead a family with 10 children. Each child adds £55 a week so that’s £600/week, £2600/month or £32000 per year. Bearing in mind that the benefits are tax-free this equates to a salary of around £50,000. Even though I’m quite highly qualified, I would find it difficult to get that level of salary.

Now, I accept that people with large families don’t necessarily have them to pick up massive benefit payments but even if they don’t, surely there should be some kind of limit in terms of a maximum benefit payment regardless of other circumstances? If not, it would appear that the best plan would be to pop out kids on a regular basis: it can’t be right that the benefit system seems to be actively encouraging that.

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This afternoon, we received a phone call from the Metropolitan police telling us that we were in contempt of court and that if we did not immediately remove all information about the case from the website they would seek an injunction to have the site taken down. Whilst Wendy was in the course of removing this material they took it upon themselves to have all of our websites on that host taken down. That’s despite the only one that had anything about that case being Cultured Views and that Wendy had already complied with their request.

However, all of the websites which she used as her sources for the posts remain. Much as we might like to imagine that Cultured Views was the leading authority on the case concerned, in reality the authorities lie among the traditional news organisations such as the BBC, the Mirror, the Sun and, of course, the more new-media sources of wikipedia and answers.com. A number of these go so far as to list the real name of the baby concerned along with a heap of other information which, in the interests of a free society, would be best left unknown. And, yes, in a free society we do need to keep the identity of even the most “obviously” guilty party a secret until they are convicted.

The problem, of course, is that the courts continue to work on the basis that the jurors hearing the case are ignorant of the facts of the case except for those which are put across to them during the trial. In the Internet age that seems unlikely to be a realistic stance in the case of high profile cases. After all, even “deleting” the information doesn’t work when google et al cache so many websites and, honestly, could you really select jurors who knew nothing about this particular case? Surely, it’s better to assume that jurors will know at least some details of the case in advance and allow for that in the trial?

It is good though to see that censorship doesn’t work these days and you still can read the articles in the caches despite the site itself being down.

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Of course, it’s not “unemployment benefit” anymore as we have job seekers in the UK rather than unemployed people and that’s an interesting change in categorisation when you think about it. To be labelled a “job seeker” is definitely more positive than to be labelled simply as “unemployed”, isn’t it?

That relabelling brought with it a lot of other changes. For instance, in the “unemployment office” you now find two separate groups of people that deal with you. First, there’s the people who handle the benefit payments who are basically the same group as have always been there and who are interested in seeing that you’ve made the appropriate social security payments to entitle you to the benefit. Separately from them are the employment people who are there to do what they can to help you back into work and who will prod you into getting up and looking for work if needbe. Formerlly the two were quite separate and in buildings separated by several miles so there wasn’t the sense that there is now of the payment being there just to help you along whilst you’re off looking for work.

One side-effect for me is that there’s what’s almost a trick question on the form: are you currently studying? I am in that I’m doing a child development course but seeing as it’s not a full-time one that means that I’m actually available for work which is what the question is really asking.

Full marks though for that relabelling and the reorganisation that happened almost behind the scenes. Although, in theory, I have a job waiting (sort-of), it has prompted me to have a look around anyway.

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For example, if you’ve found this post by searching with google then they’ll have recorded that search against your name if you were logged in with your google account. If you’ve found it via StumbleUpon then they’ll have recorded that too. Both are “to enhance your browsing experience” or words to that effect but they certainly remove any privacy that you thought you might have in your Internet browsing.

If you’ve you’ve been using the Internet for a while no doubt you’ve commented on some forums or blogs by now. All those comments are available to everyone. Oh, you used a false name, did you? No good because the software will have recorded the IP address from which you made the comment and that can be linked to you. Ah, but your ISP allocates random IP addresses every time you login so you’re OK. Well, no, because the ISP records who gets what IP address so, yes, that comment could be linked to you.

Still, at least your e-mails are private. Not really. The Internet is structured as a network of linked computers so every e-mail you send will have gone through a series of computers to reach its destination and every one of those computers could easily record the contents and who sent it.

It seems like we’ve finally got the surveillance of 1984 and all we’re missing (in most of the world) is the totalitarian regime. Still, perhaps if we wait a few years we’ll have the complete set.

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Firstly, it’s very obvious that China is very far from the ideals of a free society that we take for granted in the western world.

To ensure that the games will go off well, the authorities are rounding up any dissidents that might cause even the slightest bit of trouble. The latest, Hu Jia, will be spending the next three and a half years in jail for “inciting subversion of state power”. What did he do to deserve that? Well, he posted five blog entries and was interviewed by two journalists. Isn’t it scary to think that you could be jailed just for writing a blog that criticised the government? That’s something that hundreds if not thousands of blogs do every day.

Should we be doing anything then that will surely be portrayed by the Chinese government as supporting their regime? Make no mistake about it, in the Chinese media it will be put over that foreign governments are supporting the regime even if it does take a lot of editing to prove it.

On the other hand, consider the amount of publicity that the regime in China is getting, pretty much all of it bad. Many people wouldn’t be aware of the issues in China today had it not been for the publicity that the games have generated.

In practical terms, I’m sure that it’ll all be ignored by the Chinese authorities. Well, perhaps not ignored: one wonders how many times they have tried to have the overseas protestors rounded up too. However, it’s unlikely to make any difference to what they do because in reality they just don’t care what the rest of the world thinks.

But they’re wrong. How many trips to China have already been cancelled? How many business details not made with the country? That’s what does make a difference.

Short term, I’m sure that we shouldn’t be supporting the regime yet long term the publicity that the event is generating can only be to the good. It’s a shame that little of that negative publicity will reach into the country (this will be yet another blog that they’ll be getting google.cn to ban, of course).

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