The treatment of Windrush Brits by this horror show of a Tory government is an absolute outrage, but it's vital to remember that this dreadful scandal is just one example amongst many in a pattern of callous Tory abuse against pretty much anyone who is not a member of the wealthy establishment class that the Tory party exists to serve.
Windrush Brits
The Windrush scandal has come about because Theresa May introduced some vile UKIP-pandering anti-immigrant legislation in 2014. Nobody in parliament could have been under the impression that this was anything but an extreme-right attack on British values given that May openly bragged that the legislation could be used to create a guilty until proven innocent "deport now and hear appeals later" environment.
Since 2014 the Tories have been using this legislation to dehumanise and discriminate against Windrush Brits without the paperwork to prove their nationality.
This systematic Tory discrimination has resulted in people being denied employment, denied accommodation, denied social security, denied pensions, denied NHS treatment, denied their freedom in immigration detention centres, and denied the right to return to Britain.
Other commonwealth Brits
Windrush Brits are far from the only Commonwealth British citizens to have been dehumanised and discriminated against in Theresa May's vile UKIP-pandering legislation. People from all manner of Commonwealth countries who arrived in Britain before 1973 have been denied their citizen's rights under Theresa May and Amber Rudd's "Hostile Environment". Examples already include arrivals from Kenya, Uganda, Cyprus, New Zealand, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Canada.
The EU 3 million
Theresa May has been absolutely insistent that the lives of the three million EU citizens living in the UK should be used as disposable bargaining chips in the Brexit negotiations.
In the weeks after the Brexit vote David Cameron wanted to make a unilateral offer to secure these people's rights, but Theresa May vetoed it.
Labour, the Lib-Dems, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and the Green Party all agree that providing peace of mind to the EU 3 million should be an absolute priority, but Theresa May still insists on forcing them to live under the shadow of uncertainty, despite having had almost two years since the Brexit votes to give them a cast iron guarantee that they won't be deported or denied their rights.
Sick and disabled people
One of the most shocking things about the Tories is their relentless systematic abuse of sick and disabled people.
One of the worst aspects of this systematic abuse are the dehumanising and discriminatory assessment regimes that are carried out by profiteering corporations like Atos, Capita and Maximus. Not only do these assessment procedures have spectacularly unreliable outcomes (almost three fifths of WCA cases that go to appeal are overturned), they also cost far more in corporate administration fees than they will ever save in reduced disability benefits payments.
The fact that the hated disability assessment regime costs far more to run than it will ever be able to save is conclusive proof that the Tories aren't even treating people maliciously for financial reasons, they're doing it because they enjoy it, and believe the taxpayer should subsidise their malicious treatment of some of the most vulnerable people in society.
The jobless
Another one of the malicious Tory policies that costs way more to administer than it will ever save in reduced benefits payments is their draconian sanctions regime against the unemployed.
Not only does the sanctions regime cost far more to run than it saves in reduced benefits payments, the evidence is absolutely clear that condemning people to absolute destitution (often for utterly trivial offences) actually reduces their ability to find work.
People with mental health problems
In 2014 the Court of Appeal ruled that the Tory Work Capacity Assessment regime is unlawful because of the way it discriminates against people with mental health conditions. The Tories just carried on regardless.
In 2017 the Tories were caught telling their army of corporate disability assessors to actively discriminate against people with mental health conditions.
And despite continually banging on about the importance of helping people with mental health conditions, the Tories are still ruthlessly cutting away at NHS mental health budgets.
Children
Over 400,000 more children are growing up in poverty than when the Tories came to power in 2010. The Tory government have also introduced the most extreme school spending cuts in decades.
Any country in which rates of child poverty are rising, and education budgets are being slashed is a country that has given up on its own future.
Workers
Despite all of their shtick about "making work pay" and "work is the best route out of poverty" the Tories have overseen the longest sustained collapse in workers' wages since records began, and they've also continually slashed in-work benefits for the working poor.
The Tories have also overseen an explosion in exploitative low-pay, low-security work like Zero Hours contracts and the fake self-employment gig economy.
Then there's the fact that in 2013 they introduced unlawful legislation to price low-income workers out of employment tribunals so that bad bosses could get away with treating their workers like dirt.
With an appalling track record like this anyone who works for a living and votes Tory is undeniably voting against their own economic best interests.
Brits with non-EU spouses
One of the most sickening things Theresa May did at the Home Office was to introduce a highly discriminatory arbitrary minimum income threshold for British citizens to bring non-EU spouses into the country.
These rules strongly discriminate against the low-paid, because women are far less likely to earn the arbitrary minimum income threshold than men, and people in poorer regions of the UK (north east, Northern Ireland, Cornwall) are much less likely to earn enough to meet the threshold than people in wealthy areas like London and the Home Counties.
At the exact same time as she was introducing these rules to split up relationships, or force British people to live in exile, she was also handing out British residency and British passports to super rich Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese officials, the families of African dictators, and Middle East oil barons who wanted to buy their way in.
Women
86% of the economic burden of toxic hard-right Tory austerity dogma has been loaded onto the shoulders of women.
That Theresa May persists with this brazenly sexist economic dogma is a clear demonstration that you don't have to be a man to be a misogynist.
The elderly
Given that the elderly are far more likely to vote Tory than working age people, you might have thought that they'd be somewhat protected from the worst Tory malice, but you'd be wrong.
The victims of the Tories' £4.6 billion cuts to the social care budget are predominantly elderly people. The victims of the Tory devastation of the NHS service are predominantly elderly people. And if that wasn't enough, in 2017 they decided to announce a policy of taxing people with dementia (and other serious debilitating diseases) so that they lose their houses, and lose their ability to leave even modest inheritances to their children and grandchildren.
Conclusion
It turns out that it's not just Windrush Brits who have suffered under this vile Tory government, it's almost all of us.
Pretty much the only people who are immune from this Tory malice is the mega-rich. Not only have they been spared the malicious treatment borne by the rest of us, they've also been showered in handouts, tax cuts, tax breaks, and quantitative easing cash to help them literally double their wealth since the global financial sector insolvency crisis hit in 2007-08!
If you're not one of the mega-rich elitists the Tory party exists to serve, yet you still vote for them, you're not just voting against the interests of the majority of British people, you're also voting against your own interests too (unless of course you imagine that you'll never be poor, never be sick or disabled, never be elderly, never have children, never be female, and never actually have to actually work for a living).
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
I'm going to start off by saying that Labour's Clive Lewis did something really stupid. It doesn't matter that he said the word "bitch" to a man, any elected politician should be aware that gender specific insults are not fine.
It's important to note that Lewis has admitted his mistake, issued an unequivocal public apology and he certainly won't be making the same error of judgement again.
Now we get to some of the people kicking up a stink about Clive Lewis' use of the word "bitch".
I'm certainly not the first to point out that the right-wing slobs at the Guido Fawkes blog have built a castle on quicksand when it comes to manufacturing outrage about the use of the word "bitch". The Guido Twitter feed is absolutely littered with uses of that word, and they have a sickening track record of dishing out misogynistic abuse against women, including Paul Staines posting a picture of himself in bed with a cardboard cutout of Diane Abbott, attempts to ruin the lives of two very young female Labour Party activists (1 & 2), and an absolute tide of misogynistic abuse hurled at Dawn Foster by Guido acolytes just because she was sitting next to Clive Lewis at the time.
The synthetic outrage from the Tory benches is even more sickening than that of the hypocritical Guido Fawkes shit-slingers.
Tories don't actually give a damn about women and feminist issues, if they did they wouldn't have imposed 86% of the burden of their hard-right austerity dogma onto women. They wouldn't have introduced the vile "rape clause", and they certainly wouldn't be championing a misogynistic throwback who believes in forced pregnancy for the victims of rape and incest as one of their frontrunners to replace Theresa May when they finally decide to stop using her as a human bullet shield.
All the Tories care about is weaponising feminist language in order to smear their political opponents.
If they really care so much about use of the word "bitch" that they want an urgent debate on Clive Lewis for using the word at a man, where were all the calls from Tory MPs for an urgent debate on misogynistic language when the Scottish Tory MP David Mundell was filmed calling Yvette Cooper a bitch last year? Where were the calls for an urgent debate on misogyny when Theresa May decided to quote a vile misogynistic extreme-right Twitter troll in parliament in order to score cheap political points against Jeremy Corbyn?
Of course these opportunistic Tories don't care that one of their colleagues was filmed calling a woman a bitch, or that their leader thought it fine to quote a depraved extreme-right misogynist in parliament. Because to them countering misogyny isn't the point.
Of course the Tories don't care that Clive Lewis has already apologised. Because to them a man learning a lesson about the continued pervasiveness of sexism and sexist language in the 21st Century and apologising about it isn't the point.
Of course the Tories don't care that Clive Lewis has done more to try to actually improve women's lives than they ever have (or ever will) by consistently opposing their ideological obsession with misogynistic austerity dogma. Because to them actively working to improve the lives of ordinary women isn't the point.
They don't care because literally the only value feminist issues actually have to them is as an excuse to launch opportunistic political attacks on one of their opponents before they immediately get back to their day job of actively and consciously impoverishing millions of ordinary women through their obsession with austerity dogma, and forcing rape victims to recount their trauma or face financial punishment.
Hopefully this desperately cynical opportunism backfires on them. Firstly because feminism is the kind of "social justice warrior" stuff that sickens the regressive tabloid-reading hard-right Blue-kipper demographic (which makes up a significant proportion of their voter base these days). And secondly because any remotely sensible feminist knows that a Labour politician using the word "bitch" at a man and then apologising for it is absolutely outweighed by the disgraceful Tory track record of spending seven punishing years actively discriminating against millions of ordinary women with their sexist austerity policies.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
We've all seen or heard some right-winger furiously banging on about how they couldn't vote for Labour because they're in favour of mass immigration, and enthusing about the Tories because they are supposedly against it haven't we?
The problem with this partisan political narrative, like so many other right-wing political propaganda tropes, is that it's a complete reversal of reality.
Backwards right-wing propaganda
Do you know which home secretary oversaw the highest levels of net migration in UK history?
It was Theresa May, who in 2010 promised the electorate that she would cut net migration to below 100,000, but instead allowed the biggest inwards migration surge in history, with net migration peaking at a huge 336,000 shortly before she was appointed as Prime Minister by her Tory chums.
You might be inclined to disbelieve me because you haven't heard much about this in the media, but there are reasons you haven't heard it. Last year, under pressure from Theresa May's allies in the Tory party the Daily Telegraph spiked an excoriating article about Theresa May's track record at the Home Office.
There are people who really don't want you to know how badly Theresa May handled the immigration situation when it was her remit, and they're the same kind of people who spread lies and misrepresentations about Labour's immigration policies too aren't they?
Theresa May's immigration policy is arbitrary and stupid
Politicians plucking arbitrary numbers out of thin air and making that number their golden objective is as old as the hills. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did it with their ridiculous 3% borrowing golden rule (you know the rule that drove the expansion of rip-off PFI economic alchemy schemes and was quickly jettisoned to lob £billions at the insolvent "too big to fail" banks).
Theresa May's 100,000 target wasn't just an arbitrary and ridiculous objective that drove lamentable policies, she ended up overseeing the biggest migration surge in UK history.
Two of the dreadful policies Theresa May introduced to try to repress immigration ended up driving away economically beneficial migrants like university students and tens of thousands of non-EU citizens who are married to UK citizens,
Driving away university students in order to juke the immigration statistics has seriously harmed UK universities because foreign students are a massive net benefit to the UK economy. International students contribute £25 billion to the UK economy and support some 200,000 jobs.
Using discriminatory rules to force tens of thousands of British families into exile because one of the adults is a non-EU citizen is also ridiculous. Only an intense bigot would try to argue that migrants who are married to a British citizen are the kind of people the government should be clamping down on. If they're married to a Brit they're highly likely to speak English, assimilate well into British culture, work and pay tax in the UK, and stay here instead of taking their earnings out of the country to return to their country of origin like a lot of migrant workers do.
Despite cruelly wrecking the lives of tens of thousands of families and damaging UK universities with her dreadfully ill-considered immigration policies Theresa May still missed her arbitrary 100,000 target by miles, becoming the Home Secretary who let in more migrants than any other Home Secretary in history!
She set a stupid arbitrary target, introduced terrible policies to try to achieve it, and spectacularly failed by her own measure of success.
Comforting lies
The problem of course is that a lot of people adore Theresa May's divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric so much that they ignore the fact that all of her anti-immigration rabble rousing is completely at odds with her track record.
People like the comforting lie that Theresa May is tough on immigration a lot more than they like the uncomfortable reality that she let in more immigrants than any Labour Home Secretary in history.
people like her tough-talking anti-immigration rhetoric so much that they're willing to completely overlook the fact that she created an inwards migration sure the size of Coventry in a single year and at a time when the Tories were overseeing the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s too!
Jeremy Corbyn's approach
Jeremy Corbyn's approach is very different to Theresa May's. Instead of setting arbitrary immigration targets and then missing them by miles, he prefers to look at the immigration situation to identify the aspects of immigration that are harmful to UK workers and propose legislation to sort it out.
One of the big Labour immigration policies is to prevent unscrupulous employers from undercutting UK businesses and UK workers wages by exclusively hiring cheap migrant labour.
Labour also propose that when a job to work in the UK is advertised, it must be advertised to the UK workforce, not just overseas.
This is the sensible kind of immigration and employment policy that most people would actually like to see.
Of course all non-bigoted people accept the idea that if there's nobody available in the UK to do the work, it's acceptable for the employer to look overseas (if the job needs filling it benefits the economy that it is filled).
What they don't accept is unscrupulous gangmasters exploiting overseas workers and undercutting legitimate British businesses that pay their workers decent wages.
Nobody on the left is in favour of gangmaster exploitation of migrant workers and the damage it does to workers wages, genuine British businesses that pay decent wages to their workers, and the economy as a whole.
The Labour Party policy of banning gangmaster exploitation (as opposed to setting arbitrary immigration targets and missing them by miles) is absolutely the right kind of approach our politicians should be taking to immigration.
Conclusion
Attempting to cut immigration to some arbitrary level is a ridiculous approach in its own right, but when this fixation on cutting immigration results in economically beneficial migrants being driven away, whilst economically harmful migration (like gangmaster exploitation of migrant labour to undercut legitimate British businesses) is free to continue, then it's doubly bad.
If you take a balanced approach to migration and accept that some of it is good and some of it is bad, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to support a party that proposes a policy of cutting out harmful practices like gangmaster exploitation and exclusive overseas advertising, rather than a party that insists on reiterating the same ridiculous arbitrary targets that they have so spectacularly failed to achieve over the course of seven years in government doesn't it?
What we can do
Make sure you are registered to vote in the General Election, and encourage others to register too. Non-voting isn't a protest, it simply transfers more political power to those who do vote.
Share this article with anyone you know who has concerns about immigration so that they can learn the truth about Theresa May's woeful track record of failure, and the fact that Jeremy Corbyn has immigration policies designed to actually benefit British workers, legitimate British businesses and the British economy as a whole.
Use this article to rebut anyone you see spreading the lie that Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party are in favour of mass uncontrolled immigration.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
Don't pretend you don't know. You'd have to have been living in a lead box for the last seven years to not know about at least a few of the disgusting ways in which the Tories have been systematically abusing disabled people.
Here is a far from exhaustive list of examples of the systematic abuse of disabled people that has been going on since 2010.
- Appeals against botched WCA rulings have been costing £50 million a year. This cost is paid for by the taxpayer, not the profiteering corporations that made the botched assessments in the first place.
- A United Nations investigation into the treatment of disabled people in the UK found that the UK government was committing "grave and systematic violations" of disabled people's rights.
- The Tory party claimed to be scrapping the Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and replacing it with Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in order to make sure the money went to the right people, but in April 2017 they slashed PIP payments by 33% using the perverse excuse that this would incentivise them to find work (despite there being no evidence whatever to back up this claim).
As I said at the beginning, this is a far from exhaustive list of examples of the systematic Tory abuse of disabled people.
Are you honestly going to endorse this?
If you vote Tory on June 8th, you'll be endorsing the continuation of this disgusting Tory agenda of abusing and impoverishing disabled people.
If you know anyone who has a disability and you actively endorse the continuation of this systematic abuse of disabled people, you know perfectly well what kind of person that makes you.
If you have a rudimentary level of basic human foresight, you must understand that one day it might be you, or a member of your family, or a cherished friend who develops a disability or seriously debilitating illness. Which means that by endorsing the continuation of this systematic Tory abuse of disabled people, you're stupidly inviting it on yourself and the people close to you.
Please share
Please share this article as widely as you can to help people understand how appallingly the Tories have been treating disabled people. It's especially important to share it with people who don't have social media or even Internet access. Show them on your phone, or even print it off and hand them a physical copy.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
David Cameron has been using his lucrative US public speaking tour to brazenly reinvent history but the mainstream media (including supposedly left-wing outlets like the Guardian) were too busy cooing over his Trump joke to bother holding him to account over his absurd revisionism.
Cameron made a lame jape about the best thing about having resigned in disgrace after losing his EU referendum gamble was that he no longer has to listen to wiretapped Donald Trump conversations and the mainstream press adored it. They lavished Cameron with praise for his wit, as if he'd thought of the joke himself rather than had it written for him by one of his script writers.
The press were so busy lauding Cameron for his edgy topical joke and helping him rehabilitate his ruined reputation that they totally failed in their duty to hold him to account over the revisionist drivel he was spouting.
Cameron claimed in his speech that the US and the UK have been "the guardians of freedom, of tolerance, of equality and, yes, of justice".
Freedom
As Prime Minister David Cameron was a big supporter of stripping law abiding citizens and civic organisations of their freedoms.
Cameron's government introduced the Gagging Law to stop charities, voluntary groups, community organisations and trade unions from criticising the Tory government.
One of the freedoms David Cameron and his savagely authoritarian Home Secretary Theresa May despised the most was the right to privacy. Cameron's government introduced Internet filters and legalised the unlawful snooping that the secret services had been doing for decades. Shortly after he quit the Internet Snoopers' Charter was passed, meaning that the concept of freedom from state snooping has been essentially abolished and the UK state gained unprecedented snooping powers that would have turned the East German Stasi green with envy.
Here's a genuine David Cameron quote to give you a clear idea of what his true feelings about freedom were.
"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone." [source]
What he was clearly expressing there was a desire to scrap the freedom of ordinary law-abiding citizens to go about their lives without being snooped on and persecuted by the state.
Tolerance
David Cameron's track record on tolerance is a mixed bag. To his credit he fought down the right-wing of his own party and collaborated with Labour, the Lib-Dems and various other opposition parties to deliver gay equality. But on the other hand Cameron and his government were never averse to using extreme divisive rhetoric in order to appeal to the extreme-right demographic.
Take Theresa May's trolling of high migration neighbourhoods with her appalling "Go Home" vans. Take Theresa May's regular use of divisive anti-migrant rhetoric to appeal to the Ukipper demographic. Take Theresa May's spouse visa rules that openly discriminate against women, and against people who live in the less affluent regions of the UK. Take Iain Duncan Smith's sickening dehumanisation campaign against sick and disabled people. Take George Osborne's austerity agenda that loaded the burden of cuts mainly onto the shoulders of women.
Cameron always talked a good game on tolerance, but the divisive language and discriminatory practices of his government clearly proved that Cameron's Tory party had a very different agenda to the inclusive tolerant agenda Cameron so often liked to talk about.
Equality
The United Kingdom is an astoundingly unequal country. Parts of the UK are the richest places in the world, but of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe, 9 are in the UK.
David Cameron's government made this situation very much worse by handing one tax break after another to the super-rich minority, whilst loading the burden of George Osborne's ideological austerity agenda onto everyone else. The result of which is that the super-rich minority ended up literally doubling their wealth, while ordinary working people suffered the worst collapse in the value of their wages since records began.
Cameron's government were so successful in rigging the economy in favour of the super-rich minority that the UK was the only country in the developed world to see wages falling in value while the economy was actually growing.
If the economy was growing, but the share of the wealth going to working people was in decline, where did all of the extra money go? To the tiny super-rich minority who bankrolled Cameron's Tory party of course.
Justice
If David Cameron's pretensions about being a champion of freedom and equality were laughable, then his claim to have been some kind of guardian of justice as Prime Minister was frankly absurd.
Who could forget that it was David Cameron's government that stripped legal aid to the bone in order to ensure that ever fewer ordinary people have access to adequate legal representation?
Who could forget that David Cameron's government was ruled to be unlawfully discriminating against people with mental health disabilities by forcing them through their discriminatory Work Capacity Assessment regime, and that Cameron's government ignored the ruling and carried on regardless?
Who could forget that David Cameron's government set about privatising vast swathes of the justice system creating loads of glaringly obvious financial conflicts of interest?
Who could forget that David Cameron's government trashed the concept of open justice by introducing Secret Courts where a person can have their fate decided in a courtroom they are not allowed to enter, under charges they are not allowed to know based on evidence they are not allowed to see?
Who could forget that when David Cameron's government were judged to have broken the law by unlawfully forcing thousands of unemployed people onto unpaid "workfare" placements, they stuck two fingers up at the justice system by rewriting the rules and retroactively applied them so that their unlawful rules would have been lawful had they been written that way at the time?
Who could forget that this retroactive rewriting of the law scam was subsequently ruled unlawful in the courts?
Conclusion
David Cameron gambled the entire future of the UK in order to gain a little bit of short-term party political advantage and he lost.
Instead of remaining in politics to try to fix the situation he himself created, he ran off at the first opportunity to embark on a lucrative public speaking tour of the United States in which he spouts absolute drivel about how he was some kind of guardian of the things his government relentlessly attacked.
Instead of holding him to account for this disgraceful behaviour the mainstream media overlook it all because he "did a funny" about Donald Trump.
The media are supposed to hold the powerful to account and expose their lies, not help them to polish up their tarnished reputations and laugh obsequiously at their jokes.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
When it comes to discussing what the inevitable consequences of a huge decision like Brexit might turn out to be, debate in the UK has tended to fall into two main camps.
Probably the most heavily populated camp is the pessimistic scenario that Brexit will turn out to be a costly and damaging move for both the UK and the European Union.
Another conception, one that has been widely promoted by the right-wing press, is that Brexit is going to be great for Britain, that the EU will get a jolly good beating if they don't give Theresa May what she demands, and that anyone who tries to question what is actually going on is engaging in some kind of atrocious anti-democratic treason against "the will of the people".
An awful lot of British people are particularly preoccupied with the outcomes for Britain and unlikely to spend a comparable amount of time thinking about the potential outcomes for Europe, so it's obvious that the small scale of positive coverage about prospects for the EU has been completely dwarfed by the scale of (in my view incredibly unrealistic) hyper-optimistic coverage about the UK's prospects.
Of the UK media articles on post-Brexit prospects for Europe that I've come across, a significant majority have been pessimistic. Optimistic views about the future development of the EU are pretty hard to come by in the UK media, but they're actually quite easy to envisage.
I'm never going to say that everything in the EU is going to be great, as if politics is some kind of childish fairy story with heroes, villains, dragons to be slain or happy endings, but it's easy to envisage some potential benefits. The EU has far too many structural defects for things to turn out all hunky dory for everyone, but to say that there would be no benefits whatever for our 27 former European allies would be to make the opposite kind of massively over-simplistic prophesy as claiming that everything will turn out ideally for the UK.
Aide from not having a bunch of lazy obnoxious 'Kippers stinking out business in the European Parliament with their obstinate voting patterns (when they can be bothered to vote at all), their relentless expenses scamming and their toxic grandstanding, one of the most obvious potential advantages for the EU could arise in higher education and the development of high skill economies.
Given the circumstances in the English higher education system (the highest tuition fees in the world for study at public universities) it's pretty extraordinary that there isn't already a huge brain drain to the continent where university tuition costs generally range between absolutely free to a few hundred, or maybe a couple of thousand euros per year.
Given the huge disparity in tuition costs between English universities and the continent, Brexit could give European nations a huge advantage in long-term development potential if they play their cards right.
Now that the Tories have scrapped the maintenance grant there is yet another debt disincentive to aspiring university graduates from low income backgrounds, but if the EU nations decide to continue to offer free or significantly cheaper professional qualifications to English students, the hopes of bright aspiring kids from poorer backgrounds could lie on the continent.
It's indisputable that people from ordinary backgrounds are heavily discriminated against in modern Britain. Look at parliament; look at the executive boardrooms of major corporations; look at the judiciary; look at the mainstream media - There is a huge under-representation of people from poor and ordinary backgrounds and a huge over-representation of the 7% who went to fee paying private schools.
A recent study found that workers from lower income class backgrounds are paid an average of £7,000 per year less than people doing exactly the same job who happen to come from privileged backgrounds.
The hopes and dreams of the English working classes could end up with a highly beneficial lifeline if the European Union adopts a talent-spotting higher education policy.
The neglected English lower income classes would get a higher education lifeline, and the adoptive EU member states would get a steady supply of confident and adventurous young people who are motivated to learn.
The benefit of this for the EU is so obvious it barely seems worth stating. If a certain percentage of these English migrant-graduates decide to stay in their country of study in would be a huge advantage in the building a high-skill workforce. Even if the graduate uses their degree as a passport to work in any of the other 27 EU states it would still be of significant benefit to the wider EU.
And why wouldn't these students stay in a country where their working class background and accent doesn't cost them a £7,000 reduction in their salary due to the extraordinary biases of the British class system, but their fluency in English actually offers them an actual career advantage due to the fact that English is the global language and the majority of the world don't give a damn about the particularities of the British accent it's spoken with?
This all depends on whether the EU adopt a progressive strategy of enticing UK students with low fees, and whether the Tories opt for "nuclear Brexit" where they storm away from the debating table with no agreements in place whatever.
Even under "nuclear Brexit" circumstances it would be difficult to see how the Tories could try to prevent bright kids from poorer backgrounds heading for the continent should the EU adopt a deliberate policy of attracting neglected UK talent by providing university education at the same low costs that are afforded to remaining EU citizens.
The number higher education courses taught in English within the 27 remaining EU states is rapidly increasing year on year. It would seem like a counter-productive move for EU states to impose huge fees on English students, but it's obviously entirely possible if the Tories end up turning the Brexit "negotiations" into some kind of bitter ideological battle full of bitter recriminations and self-destructive tit-for-tat retaliations.
Whether the EU adopts a strategy of offering a lifeline to neglected lower income English kids or not is a question that can only be answered by time, and it's obviously far from the only advantage that the EU could continue to seek from Brexit. An exodus of major corporations keen on retaining access to the Single Market is probably the most oft cited potential benefit for the EU. Just consider the effects that kind of business exodus could have on the perceived advantages of having professional qualifications from universities in EU member states.
If there is a shift of high pay jobs to the single market zone, and the cost of university tuition in the EU continues to be significantly cheaper than in England, why wouldn't working class kids with aspirations of a better life take the lifeline out of a deeply divided class-system ridden Tory Brexit Britain and the prospect of a vast (likely unpayable) tuition fee debt, just in order to land a job in which they're paid thousands of pounds a year less than their privileged posh-talking counterparts?
My advice to any English teenager would be to at least consider the option of studying elsewhere in the EU. That right exists now for all of us until our EU citizenship is extinguished by the Tories. Whether it continues to exist depends on the EU's specific post-Brexit strategy. If they decide to use the high fees in England as an advantage to entice bright working class/lower income kids, it could be a huge advantage.
It's obviously not possible to give guarantees under the massively uncertain current circumstances, but it's definitely worth at least looking at what European universities have to offer before deciding to lumber yourself with vast tuition fee debts or to give up the dream of higher education and professional qualifications entirely (as plenty of Tories so obviously want you to).
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
