I was talking to a policeman friend of mine today and he reckons the reason that most of the coppers were as laid back as the peaceful protesters was because they're all fearing for their own safety as well as ours. The police are not exempt from the ConDem cuts; in fact, considering the Tories have built themselves up for years as the party of law and order, there doesn't seem to be a lot of sense in their axing of police budgets. Surely our police deserve more protection than our troops; who really shouldn't be doing anything but defending our own shores - not that they'd need defending if we didn't go following the USA around as their world police sidekicks.
My policeman mate has essentially been a bit right wing for most of his life, not just his 28 years as a copper; but even he thinks the current government are being a wee bit Draconian with their proposed cuts. He thinks, and rightly in my opinion, that doing too much too quickly is just going to piss a lot of people off, a lot of whom voted Tory.
There's not a lot of point talking about people like me, who unwisely voted Liberal. The reason for that is simple - after this parliament, the Liberal party will be as significant as the BNP and just as hated. You can't escape the Tories, they get everywhere and it doesn't matter what a miserable bunch of bastards they are, there will always be some poor misguided fool (or rich wanker) who will vote for them. The Liberals on the other hand have slowly inveigled their way back into British politics and mostly because disgruntled Labour voters saw them as more centre left than their own party. Mr Clegg put paid to that and it's going to take another 80 years before they can class themselves as worthy of the floating voters' cross.
At first I thought that some of the Liberal MPs who had consciences might rebel against these essentially Tory policies, but I'm coming to the conclusion that they realise that their collected gooses are cooked, so they're just holding out as long as they can hoping for a peerage or a nice paid job on the board of some corporation. I have to say, even if he looks uncomfortable, I expected more of Vince Cable; but he's getting on a bit so I suppose the previous sentence applies to him all the more.
Going back to yesterday; it was a shame that a handful of idiots and wannabe anarchists ruined a good day out for the students, at least it got them out of bed, prevented them from giving pot noodle manufacturers more profit and made sure the viewing figures of Neighbours was halved. I do think our students are a wee bit misguided; they should pay for their education - all of them. That means that Jacosta and Quentin also need to pay for their educations rather than get Daddy to pay for it for them. I quite liked the idea of a percentage of their wages being deducted from their salaries (when they eventually get one), it sort of made it sound fair; and that way if you came out of Bog Standard Uni with a 2:2 and end up as a shelf stacker on £15k a year, your 1% will be nothing compared to Quentin's £200k a year job working for Daddy's Porsche dealership.
The chilling thing is that even The Guardian went with the headline that this is just the beginning; obviously there is a large school of thought out there who believe that the students revolting is just the tip of an iceberg. No one is denying that changes need to be made to drag back some of the money we're in debt, but at the expense of our future? Or the futures of our kids? The Tories have never seemed to give a damn about those who will inherit the mess, but they wouldn't, because their children are all going to be well off.
The government claim that people don't understand how their new fairer education system is going to work and that worries me; if our brightest and best students don't understand it, it can't be that easy to follow, can it? I mean, they wouldn't have been marching on Westminster if it was a fair system, would they?
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