Debate vs. Bait

To Debate
1. to discuss (something) formally,
2. to consider (possible courses of action)

To Bait
1. to put a piece of food on or in (a hook or trap)
2. to persecute or tease,
3. to set dogs upon (a bear or badger)

Debate vs. Bait: engaging with the issue.
So, cuts to higher education, further education and a rise in tuition fees affect a few different groups of people. Some are voters, some cannot yet vote, some are powerful vice chancellors of universities and some are politicians. So, what was the plan? How were each side to get their point across during this ‘debate’? Well first of all, both sides did some research. The NUS created the graduate tax model for fees under the blueprint, which was voted on at an NUS conference, admittedly not the best thing they’ve ever come up with but we’ve all been told so many times that coming to the table with only an opinion is not good enough, you need evidence, a plan. The NUS tried to sit at the table, only to be told they couldn’t. The Browne Review didn’t have any student stakeholders on the group, let alone students of the future. Instead, the NUS and others were baited with the idea that they would still have a chance to feed in to the review through consultation papers and giving evidence. The blueprint was rejected and if their views had been taken on board it’s unlikely that the result of the Browne Report would have been quite so free-market with such tokenistic concessions.

Debate vs. Bait: Education.
Its funny growing up and being told that every exam you take it ‘getting easier’ and that it doesn’t mean anything to any employers. It makes me feel like we’ve all been locked in a room being taught wrong information by some crazy scientists, only to have been set free and unleashed into ‘the real world’ of higher education where we are told that that students are inarticulate or stupid, effectively being punished for our poor educational history. Some students have managed to snap out of it and conform to the ‘real world’, those that go on to be entrepreneurs or who managed to feed off of their peers that subject to the other, probably more expensive, side of the education experiment where they were apparently all taught the right information (how to play golf with a royal etc). Suddenly, those that escaped are engulfed into ‘networks’, and are suddenly employable, they’re able to spin their extracurricular activities into employability attributes and call in favours in big business. Suddenly, they’re allowed to join the debate.

Others that didn’t integrate into this ‘real world’ were baited into carrying on learning wrong or useless information and those pesky outsiders have created institutions where they can do this. They graduate only to be told that their degrees are useless, they’ve got a load of debt and there aren’t any jobs for them. If I may be so bold as to say, these students were baited there, and not by people of our own generation but by the very generation that are now telling them everything they have worked for is pointless. Is there an answer, or is it ok for politicians to sit back and just accept that they may or may not have messed up and there may or may not be a mass youth unemployment issue? I know which is the path of least resistance, but I’m not sure that there is anything of much use to these people at the end of it.

Debate vs. Bait: Voting and political engagement.
What can we do about it? We’re fed a line that we can and should be engaging in political debate as constructively as possible. This has been particularly noticeable in the aftermath of the violence at the protests. Similar to the question of the Browne Review, you need to look at who is sitting at which table. Who is engaging in the debate? Not the unemployed youth or the hundreds of students now stuck with ‘pointless’ degrees (unable to take a new, less pointless one because of ELQ regulations) as far as I can tell and certainly not the 16 year olds about to lose their Education Maintenance Allowance. There’s no real ‘stakeholders’ forming the policies in any structured and easily accessible way. I don’t even think that there are any MPs that don’t have a degree? This in itself makes engaging politically without a degree from a good university seem completely out of reach. Imagine what sort of policies and decisions would be being made if people could engage in such a way that meant that the decisions being made positively affected the group of people they represented. Imagine.

Instead, we are all baited with the idea that we can use our democratic right to vote for a party that we think has our best interests at heart. Except that isn’t, as far as I can tell, how it happens either. The Lib Dems are an easy target here, so I won’t go into to much detail. But needless to say the last election has created a few more generations of people completely disengaged with voting and political engagement, particularly students. It seems that as a politician you can tell people you are going to do one thing, get in to power, a compromise on what ever pledges you’ve made as it suits you. This is true for all parties and all MPs, if you ask your average UK voter I’m not sure that they would know many good or effective ways of holding their MP to account.

Debate vs. Bait: Protest.
So, what options have we got left? After 2 years of personally attempting to engage constructively with the political system, trying to influence the outcomes of things that will affect me – not just higher education – I can admit that I am exhausted. Joining the debate appears to be quite simple, but affecting the change you want to see, incredibly hard. I was talking to Talk radio Europe the other day and he asked why not many of us sabbatical officers go in to politics after our years in student politics. This was precisely my answer, that attempt after attempt to engage have left me feeling dissatisfied and nothing I have said seems to have been taken on board. So we protest. This is the last resort. And as the past month has shown, it can be risky and with limited success and as Daniel Trilling recently pointed out in the New Statesman: ‘protest has been neutered’. Similar to voting and attempting political engagement – I know protesting happens but I’ve rarely seen it work. For everyone that thinks students are just throwing their toys out of the pram, ask any sabbatical officer how much of their life they’ve spent trying to persuade government and universities how important it is to fund higher education as fairly as possible and see how dead their eyes are. The government is caught in a vice because it has no money, universities are in a vice because they have no money, Students are like small animals trapped in a cage because its predicted that at some point they’ll have enough juicy meaty money to give the government and universities to make up for deficit. This isn’t just £9,000 a year in fees; it’s being trapped in a 7% interest rate debt repayment system with the government for 30 years.

I’m not condoning violence in any situation, I’m strongly against escalating a protest into any sort of violence both because I’m just generally against violence and also because I have my suspicions that the police van and the kettling incident from the 24th is beginning to look more and more like bait, creating more and more reasons to cut us out of the debate. It’s sad that we just ended up baiting and being baited by the Police. They can’t protest, and this is normally where having a good relationship with students comes in handy. Unfortunately, I know that most students hold a grudge, and that ship has sailed for the police. The poor preparation from the 10th Nov - for which I actually blame MPs for giving the impression that students wouldn’t be engaged in the debate (arrogant and wishful thinking on their part, in my opinion) – led to baiting of the police by the general public, students and parliament. Can you imagine if they hadn’t stepped up their game for the 24th? How weak they would have looked? But now we’re stuck with an artificial (yet physical) barrier between students and the police, where neither appears to be truly willing to work together, to fight for each others rights or (and I hate to say it) to ‘unite’.

Give the Lib Dems their dues, Simon Hughes has agreed to support and instigate an inquest about the Police van on the 24th, and the use of kettling in general. He’s also agreed to take on board any suggestions he receives from students regarding the higher education debate. A recently Q&A session with Hughes was laced with poor arguments that made me think that he was having trouble getting his beliefs and the work he has been asked to do to converge, but I can sympathise with how hard it is to explain yourself in front of a group of rowdy students – especially if they’re from LSE. But my conclusion here is that if one doesn’t allow people to engage wholly in the democratic system – to be able to influence policy that affects them and have confidence that their votes count for something, one is essentially baiting people. This isn’t acceptable, but I can’t see how it’s going to change unless political engagement becomes genuine and useful.