What's the point of the monarchy?

We have a country full of pomp and tradition, and in its place that can be welcome. But as much as it may excite the tourists to head to London and see the changing of the guard, why exactly in the 21st century do we still have as our Head of State someone who did nothing more than be born from one particularly lucky womb?

It really is quite bizarre when you think about it that we still give so much money and status to someone based on their class when we live in one of the most developed democracies in the world. We long ago decided that no-one's bloodline should mean that they are given more power than someone else, but we forgot about the monarch.

We all pay for the grace and favour lifestyles of people like Prince Charles, who without the ability to piggyback on the position of Prince would never be able to function in a normal society. The idea that this man could one day be King should frankly be terrifying.

The man had the most prestigious education money can buy, and yet came out with a B and a C in his A-levels. With those grades you'd laugh at most people if they applied to Cambridge, but no, he used his position to get into one of the world's best universities where he again spectacularly failed to live up to his position, scraping out with a 2:2. Now, many people come out with hard-earned 2:2's from university, but not only did he only scrape this despite the UK's best possible education, but this is the man who claims that when he becomes King he will speak up for the country's interests? I'd rather you stayed out of it Charlesy boy.

So what are these views that he'll be 'standing up for'?

Well, he's an ardent critic of modern science, saying it lacks a soul. As such, his charity, The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health (now closed as of this year due to accusations of fraud), were fervent supporters of 'Alternative Medicine', and huge lobbiers trying to force the NHS to pour ever more wasted funds into these quack treatments. They spent money on teaching medical students to 'embrace complementary approaches to medical care. You could replace the word 'complementary' with 'bogus' and it would make much more sense. (For more on why I hate Alternative Medicine with such a passion, other than the fact it doesn't work, read here.)

He also claims to be an environmentalist, standing up against GM crops and warning of climate change. Whilst its a rare positive that he's standing against climate change, and I applaud that, it'd maybe be a little more convincing if he didn't undo all that good work by taking private jets for all manner of trivial visits.

But even if he wasn't an idiot, the argument would be no weaker for scrapping the monarchy. It's a bygone from an age that has passed, and we should be rid of it.

Right now as our Head of State we have someone who was unelected and who is totally unaccountable. The monarch may not have as many powers as they once did, but don't presume they have none. It's through the Crown that some of the most undemocratic aspects of our government are allowed to remain.

• The royal prerogative allows the Prime Minister to start wars and sign treaties (amongst other things) without having to ask parliament. Laughing in the face of democracy.
• The privy council, senior politicians who act as advisors to the monarch, can enact laws without having a vote in parliament.
• The power of the monarch to appoint whomever they likes as Prime Minister. In reality, this goes to the leader with the majority in the commons, but it is not impossible for this to be unclear, (as in 1957) and the monarch could have the deciding vote.

What we need is a change, a change so that we can elect our Head of State. The campaign group Republic have an excellent example of how this could be introduced, with us keeping the power of parliament, whilst gaining an elected head of state who would have the limited powers that are needed to be held outside of government. By being elected that person would be accountable, and finally we could rightly claim that we truly live in a democracy.

We can't afford the Browne review.

The final lie has been given to the idea that we need land students in ever larger mountains of debt because of the country's finances. The change will cost us more, not less. Not only is it unfair, it doesn't even make sense in the warped economic policy vision of the government.

Clegg's pledge, the one he abandoned in exchange for his ministerial car.

Some brilliant number crunching by Andrew Harding at 2me2you has shown that rather than us needing to increase tuition fees to save the country money, it will do the opposite. Implementing a doubling of the tuition fee cap will actually cost the taxpayer an extra £3bn a year, thus quashing the very last defence of all who support it.

We'd been led to believe that that Lib Dem's had been 'forced' into changing their policy due to the need to cut the deficit. As Alan Johnson neatly put it, "Somewhere between the ballot box closing and his ministerial car door opening, Nick Clegg changed his mind". Never mind that their arguments made no sense (for the bazillionth time, we are nothing like Greece! As confirmed by a Nobel laureate.), we had to raise fees because the country couldn't afford it.

I'd like to see if they change their minds now that it's come out that increasing fees will cost the taxpayer more in the short-term.

Because the government will have to cover the fees up front, and then be paid the money back in the long term, the cost of the Browne review per year in the short term is up £3 billion, and that's after you include the £6 billion cut to core funding that universities receive. In short, the whole things a bloody mess, pushed through by people who have taken no effort to listen to the people who actually frequent these universities, the students.

Annual government spend on HE funding   Current Browne Core funding £7,478,145,985.80 £1,637,700,686 Fees maintenance £10,824,313,850.00 £19,740,390,000.00 Total (core + fees) £18,302,459,835.80 £21,378,090,686

Not only will we have this extra burden on the taxpayer, but you'll at the same time land student's with massive debts that will leave those on the middle incomes paying more than those on high incomes. And whilst they may claim to have made provision's to keep attracting poorer student's, the reality is that the insecurity about possibly being landed with a lifetime of debt will put off those from the poorest backgrounds. We should be attracting the best, not the ones with the best childhood.

I am glad to see the Lib Dems telling us there won't be a free market in the university fees, which would inevitably lead to a two-tier system, but it really is a tiny bit of silver lining on the edge of a hurricane. It's the equivalent of them telling someone they'll shoot them in the head, and then deciding they'll just kneecap them instead. It's better, but not exactly good.

Let's move on from this calamity, and actually have a serious discussion. And I don't mean the kind where people simply say, 'Oh, you want a pure graduate tax, how quaint, it won't work.' Nobodies arguing for a pure graduate tax, but there are other variations out there that we should be looking at. If the argument for not tweaking a graduate tax is that it doesn't work as it stands, then how is that different to the Browne review, which patently doesn't achieve any of its objectives.

Time for a serious debate, and this time round, let's include the students yeah?

Guest Post:- Cyber Warfare: Fact or Fiction?

You may have noticed, my last post was also on 'Are you reading?', so today Liam has retured the favour and wrote a post for this blog. You should check out his blog sometime, there's plenty of different topics covered and they're all well written and thought out, even if some come from a slightly different viewpoint to mine. Worth a look! Anyway, here's his thoughts on 'Cyber Warfare', unedited.

Today's blog is actually being posted as a guest blog elsewhere, so you might see it twice!

Last week the government released it's newly-published National Security Strategy, which listed cyber-terrorism as a Tier 1 threat, alongside international terrorism such as July 7th bombings in London.

Cyber attacks are actually very common, for example identity fraud, in 2009 one in ten people in the UK was a victim of online identity theft. On an individual level this shows how frequent the problem is, but this isn't terrorism. So what could happen?

Well the threats stem from the fact that a terrorist organisation (or another state) could hack into the UK's systems and turn off what they please, or leave massive viruses, corrupting the systems. These systems include the stock exchange, the national electricity grid, security systems etc.


Stock Exchange Attack

A bit of fact and (hypothetical) fiction here. The UK's reliance on the internet when it comes to the stock exchange is paramount. In May this year, the American stock exchange crashed for ten minutes, resulting in the US' top 30 firms to lose one tenth of their overall value, pensions and savings of Americans were lost in an instant.

Now imagine if the UK stock exchange was hit for an hour, billions of pounds instantly wiped from the economy, thousands of jobs lost, pensions and savings vanish, the pound loses it's value, making UK currency worthless, more job losses, the country truly plunges into a depression. Starvation and poverty would be rife, food prices would rocket, anarchy could reign. All because of our over reliance on technology.

National Electricity Grid Attack

Very similar consequences, even worse in fact. All of the above would still happen, but on top of that hospitals would crash, people would die on the spot, train crashes, food wastage, the country plunged into not only darkness but chaos.

Security Systems Attack


The problem here would be two-fold, not only would the UK be totally defenceless to an attack, but there is the possibility that a terrorist could hack the systems and launch an attack from the UK on another country, killing millions in an instant either way.

An improvement in our technological defence is needed. The £500m being spent seems like a wise investment to me.

To win the 'War on Drugs', we have to legalise them.

(This is a guest post written for Are You Reading?, check it out)

For this first post I've been asked to do, I settled on writing about something which I think both our respective parties are getting wrong, as is the country as a whole. Drugs.

One of the most annoying things to me is the way the prohibition of drugs is somehow lauded as a moral stand and the banisher of evil. It does the opposite, prohibition didn't work with alcohol, and it's certainly not working with drugs today. But bring this up, and somehow you've 'gone soft' and the whole country would turn into drug-crazed maniacs if you had your way. It's ridiculous.

Politics demands you're 'hard' on drugs. The evidence says that being hard on them is stupid and counter-productive.

Our idea of drugs is warped, and completely against what science tells us the truth is. We gleefully retell stories from when we were so drunk we ended up sleeping in a dog shelter but take a less harmful drug than alcohol and you could end up in jail. But my problem with drugs isn't that people don't understand the relative harms, it's that by banning them we're making the situation many, many times worse.

Did prohibition work in America in the 1920's with alcohol? Why do we think that banning other drugs will have a better outcome than it did back then? Prohibition these days has exactly the same problems as it did back then, only magnified because of being international.

We should be blunt, you can ban things all you want, the fact is people are going to be able to get hold of drugs. If I hadn't already realised that before now, a year at university certainly has made me. If someone like me who really has no interest in taking drugs knows how I could easily go about getting them, what does that say about who's winning the 'War on Drugs'?

I don't doubt that the people who defend this 'war' have their hearts in the right place, but when faced with the bare facts it really is hard to defend.

Drug gangs scar the face of communities right around the world, with ordinary people getting caught in the crossfire of turf wars. There is such an immense profit to be made that dealers can simply pay off anyone who might get in the way. The only thing they fear is legalisation, because then they'd be out of business. When something's legal, you have no need for shady gangs to get it for you illegally. In America it's been known for dealers to bribe politicians to appear excessively keen on prohibition precisely so that it wouldn't be legalised and they could stay in a job.

Then you have the issue with the quality. Contrary to what you might read in the Daily Mail, you are not going to die the second you take your first puff of a drug, so long as it's pure. And that's the key point. Drug's are much, much more dangerous when bought on the street than they should be because of all the extra shit that's mixed in with them to increase the quantities. With no legalisation, you have no regulation, and without regulation you have drugs which are far more deadly than they might otherwise be. Is a dealer really going to be overly concerned about your health?

I always worried that legalising drugs would lead to an explosion in drug use, but that's just not backed up by any real facts. Portugal decriminalised personal possession of all drugs in 2001 and there was no impact whatsoever on usage, in fact, there was a small decrease in usage amongst the young.

Imagine we could replicate that, but go further. People taking drugs wouldn't be criminals, but addicts who can ask for help. And being able to ask for help earlier would mean they were far easier, and cheaper, to treat. Drugs would be regulated, they would be kept pure and safe, with nothing dangerous mixed in, so many lives could be saved. And armed drug gangs would be out of a job. Nowhere would be left to peddle their imported goods and the turf wars that blight the streets would be over in one fell swoop.

We could have that, if only politicians would look at the facts, and not what the scaremongers would have you believe. When the last governments drugs advisor, David Nutt, said it was more dangerous to ride a horse than it was to take Ecstasy, he was simply stating scientific fact. Yet what did he get for looking at the evidence? He was sacked. Not one party in parliament complained, and that's a sad illustration of how little debate we have right now.

Talking about legalising drugs is taboo for senior people. It's a dangerous taboo, and one we need to break.

The Case for Universal Benefits

This isn't specifically an attack on the government's decision to scrap child benefit for the most wealthy (with it's clear problems of allowing a family on £80,000 to keep it whilst a single mother on £45,000 would lose it), but more a general defence of the idea of keeping some benefits universal, and that means the rich keep them. Hopefully, it'll answer the questions about why the left is keen to keep money going to those with the most as much as it is those with the least.

It may seem a little out of the ordinary for me to defend money going to the rich, it would seem progressive to scrap it, but at the end I hope it'll be clear that you can help the poorest more by keeping it universal than you can by targeting it at them. I'll use Child Benefit as an example, but you could substitute any universal benefit and it'd be the same arguments.

We have had universal child benefit for more than 60 years, and it's been vital to countless family's over that time. One thing that CB has going for it is that it has an uptake of near 100%, as you might expect for a universal benefit, but it shouldn't be forgotten that it has a very high take up rate compared to other means tested benefits. That's for two reasons.

First, because it's available to everyone it's very easy to claim, there aren't pages and pages of forms assessing your income and circumstances which get in the way of many people trying to claim means tested benefits. Plus, there is no doubting whether or not you are able to claim. Many people don't receive all the money they're entitled to because they assume they aren't eligible for it. Universality gets round both these problems effortlessly, meaning that no poor family misses out on this vital money.

Second, a problem with many benefits is that people don't claim them because of the stigma attached to them. Regardless of what some rags will tell you about benefit scroungers, there are a great number of people who refuse to claim the benefits they're entitled to because they want to be self-sufficient. Whilst this is very noble indeed, it means they miss out on money that is rightly theirs, and that the benefit is failing in its plan. As was said near the time CB came into effect, 'services for the poor will always be poor services'. We shouldn't automatically simply target money at the poor, because in some circumstances it only serves to ghettoise people into class statuses.

As research from the Fabians has comprehensively shown:

“… both the coverage of welfare policy and the distributive principle underpinning it are crucial in shaping attitudes to welfare… policies with narrow coverage divide the population into groups, who may then think about their interests and identities in terms of ‘them’ and ‘us’, whereas policies with wide coverage align interests and identities so that we are ‘in this together’.”

They have shown that welfare initiatives which focus on the poor don't do as well in their job of reducing poverty as similar schemes which focus across the board and promote a sense of shared responsibility.

Which leads onto my final point. If you take away everything the state does from the rich then you will gain money in the short term, but lose something much more fundamental in the long term. If the rich see no gain from the state then their support for it will fail, and there will be less support for the state being as generous, indeed there will be calls for it to be scaled back. Once that happened, it would be the poor hit hardest. So, you would gain in the short term, but lose so much more in the long term. The rich already put more into the system through tax, so it isn't the poor paying for their benefits, more a recycling of money if you will. And for that small price you can keep confidence in the system from those who contribute the most.

The poor already get more in benefits, and arguably should get more help, but to take away all benefits from the rich would be counter-productive.

So, hopefully now you can see how giving money back to the richest can actually benefit the poorest, and how taking away universal benefits from the richest shouldn't automatically be considered 'progressive' as it could end up meaning the poor get less.