As a country, we’re spending more than we’re getting in, and we have debts.

If I were spending more than I was getting in, and had debts, I would look at it this way:

• I can’t much cut spending without hurting myself. I need to pay rent, bills, buy food and generally not be a hermit. I could not go out of the house, see friends or buy the occasional album on iTunes, but I would steadily go quite out of my mind.
• I can buy cheaper food. I can have one pint and drink it slowly, rather than getting drunk, and that won’t hurt me. It might annoy me, but it won’t do me any harm.
• I can supplement my income, by making a little money on the side through photography (in my case – it could be through anything, so long as it’s legal…), or by getting a new job that pays better.
• There’s not a lot I can do about my debts. They’re a regular monthly outgoing (hello, student loan of £25k, I’m looking at you), and can’t realistically be reduced any more than my rent. There’s no point trying to pay it off faster than my creditors want me to – or I’d end up being a hermit.

Osbourne wants us to focus not only on efficiency (buying cheaper food), but also on cutting back – not going out, seeing our friends. While it might look like a good strategy, it’s going to hurt the country in the long-term, just as if I stayed indoors all day every day would start to hurt me.

Supplementing income is the best strategy – our creditors aren’t knocking on our door trying to evict us just yet. Growth is the key, not cuts. We can ill afford to ignore the deficit – but we can afford even less to damage this country, inhibit growth and inflict 1980s misery on the less fortunate sectors of society. Not everyone is a millionaire, unlike much of the cabinet.

Cuts just don’t make sense.

• It was quite dull as an event – no attempt made to make it exciting for us as an audience. Even a little bit of music while we were waiting would have been welcome!
• Pre-vetted questions. We were asked to submit questions in advance, which made it a little bit more dull. I don’t know if the candidates were told – or agreed – that they would answer on particular issues, but this is something that needs to change. Our leader needs to be comfortable answering any question on any subject.
• The host was awful. It’s a youth hustings, not a children’s hustings. Fiona Phillips was nothing more than a mistake.
• Friday early evening in London? Hardly accessible for young party members unable to travel due to cost or distance. There was apparently a live feed, but it wasn’t publicised very well. One tweet I saw suggested it had fewer than 100 viewers.

Anyway, onto the candidates.

As a general observation, I do not want to hear two months of policy debate. We have years of work ahead to move our policy to a position where we can win a general election. All the candidates are Labour MPs, so of course they occupy similar policy positions – ten minutes of ‘Ed was right, we need to…’ or ‘I agree with Diane…’ isn’t helpful in a leadership contest.

We lost the last election. The candidates need to tell me how they’re going to rebuild a party that can win the next one.

Diane Abbot
I was more impressed with Diane than I thought I would be – she made good points that we should ‘recapture the civil liberties agenda’, do more for children under the age of 5 to make sure that educational inequalities, and even dropped in a Bonfire of the Vanities reference with regard to so-called Masters of the Universe, which as an English graduate I particularly liked. That said, her first answer and general attitude was all wrong – she didn’t look like she really wanted to be in the room. Verdict: not leadership material.

Ed Balls
You couldn’t argue that Ed Balls isn’t an intelligent man with incredibly strong Labour principles. I’d be more than happy with Balls as our chancellor . However, he just didn’t strike me as very inspiring. He can help write the manifesto, sure. But take that manifesto to the electorate and convince them that his party should win? I wasn’t convinced. Verdict: he wouldn’t be on the ticket if he wasn’t a great politician, but he falls short of the other candidates.

Andy Burnham
I really warmed to Andy Burnham, not really having come across him before. He was the most honest about our recent electoral defeat, admitting that we had made mistakes that we need to come to terms with. (He didn’t actually specify what those mistakes were and how to come to terms with them, of course…)  This is the kind of guy we need around right now, to make us re-evaluate our position and rectify past mistakes. But taking us into the next election and running the country? No. His body language was worrying – sat on the end, he kept leaning away from everyone looking uncomfortable. Verdict: Happily have him around to rebuild, but lack of vision was disappointing.

David Miliband
The ‘obvious’ winner for most people, he seemed a bit aloof. He doesn’t really understand the graduate tax proposal backed by all four other candidates – quite a blow in a youth hustings when he basically accepts the status quo as a system to be tinkered with, not replaced. He has a great idea to train 1,000 future leaders over the course of his campaign – but to then say ‘with the money I’m raising for my campaign’ takes it a little far. Well done, David, you’re the candidate with the most money; do you want a medal? That said, he gave an inspiring summing-up. Verdict: clearly a credible candidate, but he’s not the candidate for me.

Ed Miliband
I’ve seen Ed Miliband speak before on the environment. He’s passionate, committed and inspiring. Where brother David says he wants 1,000 future leaders, Ed wants to build a new grass-roots campaign with a focus, a purpose. That’s how we rebuild a party: not just recruit people, not just train people, but put them to work on an issue they too feel passionate about. Verdict: I’m backing Ed Miliband.

Ed Miliband speaking at a Copenhagen Q&A in Brixton

I simply cannot believe what I am hearing. The quick-fire round of spending cuts – amounting to over £6billion across government departmentss – was merely ‘efficiency savings’. If these are minor, I really start to dread what’s coming next: because a lot of the cuts aren’t mere efficiency.

(I particularly blame the Lib Dems for this one.) Child Trust Funds (CTFs) have been completely axed. I am waiting for someone to tell me how trying to ensure that every child in this country had a decent chance of having even a small amount of money waiting for them when they grew up is an inefficiency. At least the Tories had originally said they were going to limit it to the poorest families – let’s all thank our progressive friends for pushing that saving grace out of the way, shall we?

There are fewer university places than promised. Please, point me to the answer: how is having fewer graduates to boost the economy an efficient way of getting us out of the economic low we’re currently in?

BECTA is being disestablished. Yes, it cost the taxpayer money. But its work was to reduce the cost to schools of IT – and it did that job very well. This particular cut is going to cost more money. How is that efficient?

No, a Labour government couldn’t have avoided cuts entirely. I’m not saying that at all. What a Labour government would have done is actually sat down and thought about cuts, and how those might have impact beyond the immediate term.

Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian puts it far better than I could:

This was supposed to be the easy, painless, efficiency savings, the no-one-gets-hurt waste-cutters. It won’t feel that way, especially for the young.

Who else is looking forward to budget day, then?

Those who know me even passingly well will know I have a particular interest in social/new/online/different media. It’s this interest that led to hundreds of new UCL students being made aware who their Sabbatical Officers were this year before they’d even enrolled, thanks to a lovely (if embarrassing) little video we made and publicised via Facebook to our incoming freshers. I’ve been tweeting and blogging my way through the year, encouraging our student-led campaigns to raise awareness through more than just environmentally-unfriendly flyers and posters (I have responsibility for overseeing UCLU’s campaigning activity), and generally kept in touch with the rest of the movement online.

Anyway, that’s all a bit of boring background stuff out of the way. It should come as no surprise that I was quite intrigued that ‘The Rise of Digital Media’ featured as a specific section of Surfing the Wave. Some of the ideas within it already form part of UCLU’s own strategy – better information sharing across departments (e.g. a single membership database, rather than a database of club and society members, a database of people who’ve volunteered, a database of voters and so on).

A single database of seven million voices, however, is a different kettle of fish. I have no problem with it in theory – but I’m not sure if individual members would at present be comfortable with it. For a Union to gather data? Students – by and large – recognise the benefits of their own Unions, and recognise the importance of such a system. But for their data to be sent to the national union, when it is not always clear what the benefits to students on the ground are?

First, let’s make sure our members know what the NUS can do for them, beyond storing their data and sending otherwise unsolicited messages about national campaigns. A database of seven million voices sounds great – but could quite easily manifest as a spam machine. (At least JISCMAIL isn’t mentioned. I’d have killed someone.)

Secondly, while I can understand that being able to reach out to all its student members is something the NUS legitimately wants to do, it has a great capacity to piss a lot of Unions off. Currently, we at UCLU have strict free education policy. If the NUS emailed our 23,000 members with a conflicting message, like promoting the blueprint, that would kind of render us pointless as a policy-making organisation.

Still on digital media, I’ve picked up a slightly annoying lack of vision in parts of the document. Phrases like:

This would enable us to use our collective strength by achieving economies of scale

and

For this vision to be achieved it requires a viable, cost effective and capable system.

Has no one at NUS heard of open-source software? If every students union adopted WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal, none of them would have to pay a penny for website software. (There’s still the hosting issue, but I know many unions’ websites are hosted by their institutions.) If everyone used OpenOffice.org, they wouldn’t have to pay for MS Office licenses. Ditto with a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, over Windows.

Even more than the price-point of these systems – free! – is the philosophy behind them. If any sector more closely embodies the idea of collaboration, community and participation, it’s the student movement. No, wait, the open source movement. Oh, hang on: both. We’re a perfect match. (Plus, we have thousands of CompSci students…) The document even talks about ‘working collaboratively’ – and yet fails to mention this wide community of collaboratively-produced software at all.

Anyway, that was a bit of a rant, but it’s a consultation document after all, meant to provoke people to respond. I only hope some of this makes it into UCLU’s response, and then gets heard…

The video pretty much speaks for itself – I figured it would be best to show you the book, rather than describe it in writing, as it’s all about the form, and you can describe form best in a visual medium – but there’s a few things to add:

Why’s it taken 5 years to get hold of?
When I first discovered B.S. Johnson, The Unfortunates wasn’t in print here, and I had no money to fork out for a second-hand edition. I’ve only checked on and off for the past 5 years whether it’s in print and available, and when I’ve found it I’ve often needed the cash for more pressing things (like surviving 3 years at uni in London!). When writing my Special Subject Essay (almost-but-not-quite a dissertation for those studying English at UCL), I wrote about B.S. Johnson but only with reference to The Unfortunates, even then not being able to get hold of a copy. Yes, the British Library was just down the road, but with so much other material to fill 6,000 words, and being a lazy arts student, I never got round to it. (There’s a much more interesting discussion to be had about it, in terms of whether a novel written to demonstrate something about the form of a novel even needs to be read to be discussed, if you know what the form is…)

Why is it all chopped up?!
B.S. Johnson liked to do things differently. Albert Angelo has a hole cut through several pages, letting you see the text ahead of where you are in the novel, showing how an author creates meaning in the mind of the reader. House Mother Normal has pages of increasingly incoherent text (culminating in several blank pages in a row) as he attempts to represent the degeneration of the mind. The Unfortunates is all chopped up because, like his other novels, he had a point to make: this time it’s about remembrance; I shall leave it to you, dear reader, to discover the rest. [Albert Angelo and House Mother Normal I own in a lovely 3-novel omnibus which is no longer available first-hand on Amazon , but I recommend you try and find a copy.]

Who is this guy and why have I not heard of him?
Bryan Stanley Johnson took his own life in 1973 after a remarkable literary career. In my opinion he is an heir to the literary estates of Lawrence Sterne and James Joyce, and all the other authors who have shaped and defined the Novel (with the all-important capital N!), and it’s a travesty that you’ve not heard of him. I recommend you pick up one or two of his novels, and the excellent biography by Jonathan Coe. There are many reasons he fell into obscurity, which Coe can explain better than I can!

If you’ve got any more questions, ask away in the comments!

Day Eight

Day Nine

(Apologies for wearing a dressing gown in this one…)

Well, it’s certainly getting there. Remember you can still donate, and all money goes to the Prostate Cancer Charity.

It’s not fair. My friends doing engineering get much more contact time than me, and we’re paying the same.

Now, this student was an Arts and Humanities student. She doesn’t need lots of contact time. In fact, as an English graduate myself, the fewer lectures the better – teaching (whether in lectures or seminars) is not there to give you the answers and hope you understand. It’s there to stimulate that latent creative reading genius in your head, so you can come up with your own answer, in your own time. That own time should be spent in the library, or reading at home. I was never under any doubt that I was expected to put in a full week of work to get a first. I didn’t, and I didn’t get a first.

Yes, there needs to be an adequate amount of teaching time, in a form appropriate to the subject. But measuring the ‘value for money’ of a degree in terms of the hours given by university staff towards it (which doesn’t count preparation time, of course…) is a false economy.

This brings us on to the second point. Studying at university isn’t an ‘I pay, you give’ relationship. If I’d paid my £3,000 up front in my first year (when it was £3,000) and failed my sessional exams, whose fault would it be? My own. It’s not like paying £3,000 for a Mac Pro that never turns up – in that case, you could make a fuss and expect some compensation because it’s a consumer relationship. You pay, you (expect to) get.

University, however, shouldn’t be a case of students complaining they’re not getting value for money. You can’t, when so much of the responsibility lies on your own shoulders.

Obviously, universities need to maintain standards. Teaching spaces need to be clean, comfortable and adequately sized. Feedback needs to be of a high standard so you can learn from it; assessment criteria need to be explicit before you start. If you’ve been told you’ll be taught by experts in their fields, a first year shouldn’t feature only PhD students teaching you. None of these, however – none – have anything to do with an arbitrary cash transaction that doesn’t even really happen until a year after you finish. (Sorry to ignore international students here – there are other issues to deal with in that case.)

If anything, tuition fees are a misnomer. We pay to join a community of learning. (At least in the current funding regime; previously, there was no ‘joining fee’, and as one alumni told me the other day, he came out of university with a cash surplus!) That’s what the arguments should be about – not whether a particular university course is ‘value for money’ or if students get ‘enough’ time with lecturers (bearing in mind, lots of us in the Arts and Humanities skip lectures because we might view particular lectures irrelevant to our own interests!).

The question we should be asking – of ourselves, of universities, and of the public – is, “Should we have to pay to join a learning community?”

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

I didn’t take a pic on 5th November – mainly because I was too busy having a pound of flesh removed from my side. No, not like that – just a bit of routine minor surgery to keep me fit and healthy.

Day Six

Finally some progress! Also, managed to raise £25 so far, which is fantastic but not enough. To add your pennies to my pounds, visit my donation page and hit up the big ‘Donate’ button. You can’t miss it. But The Prostate Cancer Charity will miss out if you don’t.

And after just one day of growth:

I’ll try and provide a daily facial-hair update as Movember progresses…

Firstly, rather than wait for freshers to arrive and – hopefully – see us Sabbatical Officers in the traditional publicity we use to whore ourselves out (posters, our own distinctive t-shirts, that kind of thing), we produced a short video to introduce ourselves:

This got plugged on my twitter feed and on the Freshers facebook group, and got lumped on the front page of uclunion.org – resulting in hundreds of views. We hope that translates into at least a few of the new students being able to recognise us as we go about running their Union for them.

We spent quite  a lot of time on that video (being new to the massive camera, and to Final Cut Pro), although after a chat with @Documentally, I realised this wasn’t quite the effort we needed to go to – a small, flip-style handheld with software to upload straight to YouTube was all we need. (Of course, we still need to buy a camera or two for us to tote around campus. If there are any manufacturers needed, I can offer you a plug on every video I shoot this year…)

Then there’s twitter itself. There’s @UCLU (and plenty of other SUs out there), and my own account, @jkblacker. Problem is, I don’t have many UCL students following me. I’m mainly using it for connecting with others in the SU world – from @wesstreeting and @aaronporter from @nusuk, to our arch-rivals @kclsuVPAAEmilie and @kclsu_ryan.

Our @UCLU account has around 250 followers – just over 1% of the student population of UCL – although I can’t guarantee they’re all students, and all at UCL. Surely a Union is only for its own students  - so what would be the point of reaching out to ‘random’ people like this?

Simple, really. The bigger reach @UCLU has – whether that’s to our own students or not – the more important it becomes. The more we get retweeted, the more important everyone sees us as. If we become famous among even those people who aren’t our own students, maybe more of our own students will take notice. Carpet-bombing on the internet is cheap and quick, and although it might take some time to have an impact on our own demographic, it may well have a large impact. Just as when it took national press coverage over our AGM to make our own members stand up and take notice of our democratic structures, having the UK’s most popular SU twitter account could make our members take notice of us – it’s all about reputation.

So this year, I’m going to throw my spare minutes into creating content for the web. I’ll keep a video camera with me and record what I’m doing – whether that’s my thoughts on the College committee I’ve just attended, or a quick catch-up with the Debating Society on a Monday night. I’ll tweet my heart out (as usual) and let not just my members, but the world, what I’m doing. And I’ll blog, here and on uclunion.org as appropriate. Hopefully, someone will take notice.