As we all begin to visualise the coming cuts to Higher Education budgets, and as we begin to resist them, it’s salutary to be reminded that these cuts are designed, supposedly, to reduce a national deficit.

But one thing needs to be said: there is no deficit. There need be no deficit. There need be no austerity measures and no unemployment and no movement of debt off the government and onto the shoulders of the individual, and no inevitably deeper and longer recession. Here is a short explanation of why there need be no deficit and need be no cuts:

This is from an article by Paul Bowman in the current issue of the Culture Machine, Cut the Shock Doctrine, Radicalise Common Sense. If there’s no deficit why the big cuts to higher education? Why the proposal to fund higher education by demanding that individuals accrue future debt?

And didn’t those who are currently proposing the new system believe (and not that long ago) that education was a social right which lay outside of the (amoral) market system?