Everyone wants welfare reform until their niece's PIP is cut. Everyone wants fewer universities until their grand kid's gets closed mid-degree.
Replies
Basically alot of people are, self seeking, make simple.cost benefit analysis and focus on optimisation, but unlike the touted rational choice/capitlism they do not have all the available information and are not rational actors. So capitalist rationality is hegemony, but without all the info.
may 9, 2025, 7:34 pm • 2 0 • view
I wanted welfare reform in the sense of making it less of a humiliating and exhausting procedure for people who need it to get it.
may 11, 2025, 10:35 am • 7 0 • view
Mike Tyson's got more erudite and policy focused over the years...
may 9, 2025, 4:49 pm • 8 0 • view
may 11, 2025, 10:41 am • 0 0 • view
I think it's more accurate to say that everyone only wants university places and benefits like PIP for the deserving. However, definitions of deserving vary.
may 11, 2025, 10:42 am • 2 0 • view
And I would add everyone’s in favour of net zero until they face increased fuel duties, higher taxes on flights or have to replace their gas boilers at their own expense.
may 9, 2025, 7:03 pm • 9 0 • view
Can’t somebody else’s choices be impacted?
may 9, 2025, 9:24 pm • 0 0 • view
Yes. Years of people voting to tax other people or to cut other people’s services/benefits has got us here. I blame FPTP where you get a huge majority for a minority vote share. Minority groups used to getting everything they want at someone else’s expense.
may 9, 2025, 7:12 pm • 14 0 • view
I blame David Cameron. He set fire to the country, now everyone is scrambling in the ashes and *furious* at the easiest thing to be furious about
may 9, 2025, 9:16 pm • 6 0 • view
Also, in as far as "performative cruelty" was a hallmark of the Sunak government (on benefits, Rwanda scheme etc), I don't think Downing Street has clocked the degree to which the sense of anything similar repels much of its own base "We're only being cruel to look tough" The base: "THAT'S WORSE!"
may 9, 2025, 4:13 pm • 49 3 • view
one reason for that is that everybody embraces the constant use of the word "reforms". If we said what they meant, ie "cuts" people might think about it differently.
may 9, 2025, 9:14 pm • 5 1 • view
The welfare system is particularly kind (or quick) in the first place, which doesn't help attempts to restrict it further.
may 9, 2025, 7:01 pm • 0 0 • view
I think you’re underestimating how many voters know people who could and should be working! And it’s hard to argue that the last Tory government ballsed up everything apart from welfare specifically, and that what we need is an ever increasing number of the working age population to not be working 💀
may 9, 2025, 4:36 pm • 0 0 • view
This is fine, but who’s gonna pay for it?
may 9, 2025, 9:21 pm • 0 0 • view
I was genuinely stunned when my Dad very kindly rung me to check whether I was going to lose my job because he had read that Wes Streeting was going to fire NHS Managers. Especially as the last time we spoken about my work he was clearly confused/bemused about what I actually did for a job.
may 9, 2025, 4:15 pm • 18 0 • view
No, not everyone.
may 11, 2025, 10:52 am • 4 0 • view
People want scrutiny of benefit claimants until it means they’re checking their bank accounts
may 10, 2025, 12:05 am • 1 0 • view
Or having to answer ‘intrusive’ questions or complete ‘complex’ forms.
may 11, 2025, 12:16 pm • 0 0 • view
Does anyone want fewer universities? Like their ideal voter seems to be a person who would probably like their child to read Business Studies at UCLan
may 10, 2025, 12:12 pm • 22 0 • view
I think there's a "fewer people should go to university" thing that kicks around, "no mickey mouse degrees" etc which is always about other people's young people.
may 10, 2025, 7:28 pm • 28 0 • view
Fond memories of a couple of regulars in the pub I worked in explaining how good their son's degree in Golf Management had been for him
may 10, 2025, 7:39 pm • 12 0 • view
A friend's former flatmate made quite good money going to Saudi Arabia for a few months at a time to teach rich guys gold, but tbf I suspect this may be a line of work where a Scottish accent is an advantage
may 10, 2025, 7:47 pm • 5 0 • view
This guy had parleyed it into a career as a Company Secretary. Seemed like a good deal.
may 10, 2025, 7:59 pm • 4 0 • view
It's almost like the skills are transferable, even if you learn them in a specific industry.
may 11, 2025, 1:16 pm • 1 0 • view
That’s always very revealing because Telegraph readers don’t think that golf course managers shouldn’t exist & they certainly don’t think the sort of people who manage golf courses should be allowed to study an academic subject. So it’s just “we’re annoyed the golf course manager has a degree”.
may 10, 2025, 7:58 pm • 0 0 • view
It’s jumble of confusion & rejection of modern life. Do we want vocational degrees or not? So is golf course management vocational or Mickey Mouse? Also we need to take into account that jobs like teachers & nurses were in the past trained in a form of higher education, it wasn’t called university.
may 10, 2025, 7:56 pm • 1 0 • view
And a lot of institutions became universities partly because it avoided having a hodge podge of things to regulate
may 10, 2025, 8:00 pm • 2 0 • view
And thus Oxford Brookes took over two teachers training colleges and got two collections of racist children's books
may 10, 2025, 8:03 pm • 1 0 • view
Tell me more ?
may 10, 2025, 8:07 pm • 0 0 • view
may 10, 2025, 8:18 pm • 0 0 • view
Strong "Our Island Story" vibes.
may 10, 2025, 8:20 pm • 2 0 • view
Well, it got the libraries of the two TTCs, someone did an art thing for their degree exhibition (MFA I think) where they had used bits of racist children's books , they were astoundingly racist. I may have pictures I took, let me have a look
may 10, 2025, 8:10 pm • 1 0 • view
The other angle to this is that things like nursing training are more complicated & extensive and so require more formal classroom time than in the past. This is why healthcare is better than in 1975. The flip side of that better healthcare is more people with degrees.
may 10, 2025, 8:04 pm • 2 0 • view
I also think the class mismatch is part of this. Well into the 80s you had traditionally middle class like surveyors or accountants or business executives, even lawyers or the City, who hadn’t been to university (a mandatory degree for barristers only came in at 1984 I think) but now people who…
may 10, 2025, 8:09 pm • 1 0 • view
…were considered working class historically by the middle class - such as nurses, state school primary teachers etc - have degrees. So that retired accountant or company director or surveyor who never had a degree is annoyed that nurses & physios now have degrees. end
may 10, 2025, 8:10 pm • 1 0 • view
They want their child to go to university and everybody else's not to, in the same way they want their own house to go up in value and everyone else's to go down.
may 10, 2025, 12:20 pm • 7 0 • view
(There is also an absolutely insane level of delusion about which degrees are massively popular/sucking up huge numbers of students, but that's a different matter.)
may 10, 2025, 12:20 pm • 3 0 • view
If I was being very dark I would note that Business is probably more employable than most STEM degrees
may 10, 2025, 7:24 pm • 3 0 • view
Probably, yes. Quite aside from the reality that students aren't undifferentiated lumps of potential...
may 10, 2025, 7:38 pm • 1 0 • view
So as someone who pivoted from a "soft" humanities degree to doing something "employable" its amazing how weird people can be about this.
may 10, 2025, 7:43 pm • 1 0 • view
Which is particularly odd, because the rule used to be 'do something that shows you're intelligent/interesting'. Though admittedly that didn't seem to work even by the time I'd graduated. IIRC I spoke to one recruitment agency after my BA, who spoke to me once, and then never got back in touch.
may 10, 2025, 8:41 pm • 1 0 • view
Recently had to tell a recruiter to fuck off who implied because I have an English degree I was unsuitable for a finance job despie being the fact I am a Chartered Accountant
may 10, 2025, 7:43 pm • 7 0 • view
It's very varied IIRC, at most unis you're grand but business degrees at low-prestige unis often feature on the list of worst-value degrees
may 10, 2025, 8:47 pm • 6 0 • view
(most of the others are things like fine art where I feel like people know what they're getting, but I also feel like most people study business because they want to make money and people getting business degrees that on average make them worse off are getting a bit scammed)
may 10, 2025, 8:48 pm • 10 0 • view
Yeah, completely agree. What I find very frustrating about the “low value courses” debate is that it has absolutely no relevance to the real “low value courses”’problem of “this accountancy & finance degree at a million plus uni has a 98% employment rate - this seemingly identical one has 12%.”
may 10, 2025, 8:57 pm • 14 0 • view
No, it's mainly used to punch subjects like mine (Egyptology) for not producing enough CEOs and corporate lawyers. Which feeds back into the point that there is a delusion about where most students are going (it's not Assyriology/Egyptology; it's not even English or History).
may 10, 2025, 8:59 pm • 8 0 • view
Indeed. It’s incredibly obvious from what students pick at post-18 that most really, really care about employability! Often too much IMO!
may 10, 2025, 9:01 pm • 13 0 • view
a friend who worked in Cambridge admissions once pointed out that a huge problem for them is that (esp ethnic-minority) students from lower-income/first-gen uni families will only apply to courses with A Clear Job at the end of it - law and medicine, essentially
may 10, 2025, 9:59 pm • 9 0 • view
My first job in the mid 80s immediately after leaving school, I was order-picking alongside a 30something geology grad who had just been laid off along with _all_ the other geology grads, owing to the then-prevailing oil glut.
may 10, 2025, 9:07 pm • 4 0 • view
I think classism comes into it a little bit as the people doing those business degrees at low prestige universities are often doing it because it sounds like it’ll make you money and don’t have anyone (that they trust) with a very specific type of knowledge to guide them to better options
may 10, 2025, 9:00 pm • 4 0 • view
I got super lucky as I took part in a week long computer event as a kid so I met loads of people who were in the tech industry who gave me decent advice on where/what to study (as well as the extracurriculars that would help), but most of my peer at school didn’t have that advice
may 10, 2025, 9:01 pm • 3 0 • view
Yep completely agree, those kids just deserve better information all round
may 10, 2025, 9:03 pm • 3 0 • view
People who want fewer universities and fewer people using higher education are disgusting philistines who should be kicked in the teeth and spat on. Who is this "everyone?"
may 10, 2025, 7:49 pm • 1 0 • view
And 54 per cent of people want less immigration. But noone wants their own medical queue to get longer. This is a critical problem with the “voters have made their mind up on immigration” discourse amongst young Labour politicos (as well “no we didn’t say a million a year”)
may 9, 2025, 4:15 pm • 18 1 • view
Maybe I'm wrong about numbers and my own personal experience may not reflect the nation as a whole but weren't there quite a lot of medical professionals who were immigrants, meaning some of the queues were shorter because we had more staff to deal with them?
may 11, 2025, 10:38 am • 1 0 • view
Yes, that's the @theangelofhistory.bsky.social's point. Hence 'no-one wants their medical queue to get longer'.
may 11, 2025, 10:40 am • 3 0 • view
The reason I find Cooper’s intervention inexplicable is that it’s true that Dr Kapoor the GP fits a definition of a skilled immigrant & as a social concept is popular, even amongst most of the right, but correspondingly no one wants “complete collapse of the social care sector” either.
may 11, 2025, 10:47 am • 5 0 • view
At this stage we have to assume anything can happen now: from a total collapse to a hypothecated income tax rise to Starmer bringing about Theresa May’s 2017 care levy. Labour have decided the people have spoken & will give it to us, hard. end
may 11, 2025, 10:49 am • 4 0 • view
Remember Michelle on Question Time, who voted for a crackdown on "benefits scroungers" but hadn't reckoned that tax credits for running a loss-making nail bar in her front room would be affected www.theguardian.com/money/2015/o...
may 10, 2025, 7:02 am • 9 0 • view