What began as a North London community’s anger at the police shooting of gangster Mark Duggan, soon escalated into disturbances around the country.

Commentators in the media, politicians and students were quick to diagnose the cause of the malaise. The events of August were used by both sides of the political divide to project their own deep-rooted views about wider society. For some these riots were a cathartic release of rage, a dispossessed, disenfranchised underclass kicking back at a consumer society in which they had no stake and nothing to lose. For others it was feral outpouring of thuggery. Those in the latter camp point to the co-ordinated nature of some of the violence by gangs. The debate on the origins of the violence continues to this day.

With these events still in our collective subconscious, it’s worth examining events of the past to see what lessons can be learned for the future.

A forty-minute bus ride from Piccadilly Gardens takes you to a place swimming with rich history. Oldham, just seven miles north east of here, is known for many reasons. Once recognised as the most productive cotton mill town in the world, it made its name as a powerhouse of the Lancashire cotton industry during the Industrial Revolution. It was in 1899 that one Winston Churchill became this area’s MP. As if this wasn’t enough, 1978 saw the world’s first test tube baby born in the town.

For all too many people, however, these achievements are not the first thing that come to mind when the town’s name is spoken.

Between the 26^th and the 28^th May 2001, Oldham was the scene of violent race riots, eerily familiar to the carnage seen in Brixton and Toxteth 20 years previously. These events formed part of a wave of racially motivated violence that erupted across the North of England that summer. Burnley and Bradford saw similar scenes of unrest in June and July respectively. In the media Oldham, however briefly, earned the grim mantle of ‘Britain’s race-hate capital.’

Since then the authorities have made concerted efforts to improve community cohesion in the area. Have they been successful? In order for to answer this question it’s important to understand the background to the unrest.

Unlike the events of last August, there was in fact a very clearly defined focus to the violence. Gangs of white and Asian youths waged running battles both against each other and against a police force totally unprepared to deal with the fighting.

There are conflicting accounts about what started the disturbances in Oldham. One catalyst was the mugging of a 76-year-old white man by an Asian youth. Another account tells, rather trivially, of a fight starting outside a chip shop after some racist name-calling. Before long larger groups of young white and Asian men (and it was mostly men) were fighting in the street.

In the aftermath of the riots the government set up an inquiry to investigate what had caused the disturbances and to see how community relations could be improved in the future. The result of this investigation was the Cantle Report. It found in Oldham a “depth of polarisation”. However, it didn’t take an official inquiry to see how savagely demarcated the town was.

In almost every respect, many white communities and those of Asian origin lived ‘parallel lives’. In Oldham and Bradford, many spoke of the existence of so-called ‘no-go’ areas, such was the divided nature of the towns.

The lethal combination of a fall in the amount of heavy industry and social decline led to mutual suspicion on the part of many in Oldham. Despite these factors, however, not everybody saw the unrest which emerged as inevitable.

Kashif Ali, a life-long resident and the Conservative candidate in last year’s Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election, sees things slightly differently: “I think many of the problems that Oldham had were problems that many northern towns and cities had.

“Traditional industry had seen a decline, large immigrant populations had moved in and yes there were problems with housing and schooling and so on, but those applied in many places across the country. Towards the end of the ‘90s things were looking good, generally there was economic growth and socially there was mobility. Looked at relatively [the riots] came as a bit of a surprise.”

David Ward, a journalist who worked for the Guardian for 33 years and covered the disturbances, has his own assessment of the situation then.

“In Oldham, it’s very hard to separate the particular kinds of problems that rose through tensions between racial groups and the economic situation that Oldham found itself in anyway. It was a classic mill town, all the mills go and the Asian blokes who come over to work in the mills end up driving taxis. And you can imagine if you were 17/18 coming out of school with a couple of GCSEs perhaps and seeing your dad driving all hours in a taxi, taking hassle from white kids in savagely demarcated areas you start thinking ‘what the hell has this place got to offer me?”

Ward, now retired from the Guardian, relays his observations from reporting on the aftermath of the riots:

“We began to get this sense of division between what you might call the community elders and the young (Asian) lads. What we did discover was that there had been a background. It had been building up for a bit. The British National Party was flexing its muscles and had been around Oldham causing a bit of bother. They’d been leafleting. The Daily Mail had run a story I think about an elderly white man who’d been attacked apparently by Asian kids and quite badly bashed.”

What lit the touch paper to the violence, Ali says, was the rise in activity by the BNP in the area. The strength of feeling over ethnic divisions was shown when, in the general election shortly following the unrest, the party polled their strongest result in a decade. Michael Meacher, the Labour MP representing the seat of Oldham West and Royton said in 2001 that the BNP’s election gains were the result of a “systematic campaign of violence, intimidation and bigotry…perpetrated on the people of Oldham”.

This was already very fertile ground for the far-right. Ward recalls in 2002, speaking to a number of older white residents in an entirely white area. The overriding impression he got was that a number were ‘baffled’ at what had happened to the town.

Given all of this, is community cohesion in a much healthier condition than it was a decade previously?

While advancements have been made, the picture is indeed a mixed one.

Ali’s outlook is decidedly pessimistic. “How things stand ten years on, certainly from my point of view, I think not enough has been done and I don’t see the situation very different from where it was back then,” he says.

“In terms of perceptions and the way people live their lives, sadly it’s still very segregated and that’s true of both communities.”

One big driver of change was a concerted effort at integrating the town’s schools. The Ritchie Report, an independent enquiry looking at Oldham’s problems before and after the disturbances, saw a causal link between housing segregation and educational segregation.

One of the recommendations to come out of the above mentioned Cantle Report was that all schools should ‘consider ways in which they might ensure that their intake is representative of the range of cultures and ethnicity in their local communities.’

The report continues, ‘Ideally admissions policies should avoid more than 75 percent of pupils from one culture or ethnic background in multi-cultural areas.

One of the headline changes to occur in the area’s educational provision was the foundation of the 1,500 pupil Waterhead Academy. The Academy was founded in 2010 and is the result of a merger between two of the town’s most racially segregated schools. Of course, this is part of a long-term plan; at this stage it is too early to tell how successful the project has been. However, early signs have been positive.

With integrated schooling and economic renewal seeing the community becoming more cohesive, what does the future hold?

Ali has his own view:

“With our generation where most people drive, everyone can speak English, all those factors that limited where you could live and how you lived don’t really apply so it’s more of a shame when you see our generation or the current generation behaving in that way. It’s sad and it’s true and I think there’s got to be action across the board to change that and it’s got to be voluntary.

“I don’t think you can force it and you know this is one area where I perhaps disagree with other people. You can’t just tell people they have to live somewhere they don’t want to or go to school somewhere they don’t want to but its got to be cleverer than that and genuinely change the way people think about things.”

But, of course, no story is complete without the villain. The ‘madman’ Colonel Gaddafi was cast in the role he was born to play: the despotic, reckless tyrant, driven mad by his own power; and not to forget his crafty and evil sidekick, Saif; or to give him his stage name “mini-me”. And then finally, as if by fate, on 20th October the curtains were closed by a figure so well established in Hollywood tradition; the man with the golden gun.

There will eventually be a Libyan film made about the events of the Revolution, even more dramatised than my version of events. And though it will be the greatest piece of kitsch since William and Kate, it still exemplifies the single most important gain of the revolution: the freedom of expression. A freedom won by the people, for the people.

The past eight months have not been a political coup. Power was not seized quickly by a self-interested few, (as was true of Gaddafi’s rise to power), but there has been evidence of political change promoted from the lower levels of society, from the middle and working classes. It did not begin with political pressure, NATO diplomacy, or even with gunshots. It started with a far more explosive boom; a cultural one that could not be extinguished.

Graffiti art appeared on the Benghazi stonewalls before any armed conflict began. Propaganda posters around the city became the canvas on which the common Libyan could vent their anger at the regime. Gaddafi, the feared and immovable dictator, soon became a figure of public ridicule. One infamous and striking piece expertly exposed his sadism. This, an annotated propaganda poster, once displayed the leader with welcoming open arms, giving off vibes of friendliness and approachability. Now it shows him holding an umbrella, shielding himself from streams of blood falling like rain from the sky. Now his body language appears differently: the nonchalant open arms seem to say, who cares?

Other pieces are less dark, and more absurd. One shows a strong arm ramming a flagpole bearing the Libyan flag straight into to Gaddafi’s forehead, who takes the form of an octopus. Another, rather than showing his indifference for the apparent bloodshed shows a thirst for it. This displays Gaddafi, in military uniform covered in blood, with piles of skulls reflecting in his token sunglasses, and fangs ready to strike.

These representations have become so typical in eastern Libya that they now verge on cliché. In some ways this satire is distinctly Arabic, with depictions of Gaddafi as a whole range of undesirable animals; Gaddafi the octopus, the insect, the camel and Gaddafi the dog. Nowadays in Libya his title of Colonel has virtually been replaced by the prefix “mad-dog”. With every stroke of the brush, or aerosol spray, his credibility diminished. The once statuesque leader became a figure of ridicule and hilarity; closer to Colonel Sanders than Colonel Gaddafi.

Having begun with images, the Libyan voice was soon to be heard all the more literally; in the form of rap music. This is of course not a typically Arabic genre, yet it is one which has galvanised the frustrations of the country’s youth, who are, after all, the ones who will decide the eventual success of a democratic Libya. Once despised by Gaddafi due to their blatant western symbolic associations, rappers have been among Libya’s most unlikely figureheads.

Until recently they were forced to play underground, quite literally. Groups such as Guys Underground and Music Masters would meet in friend’s basements in order to practice their art, while evading the authorities. Yet they have spearheaded the cultural shift. Unlike anonymous graffiti artists, they have provided more compelling leadership by providing a face and personality to admire, while creating revolutionary anthems which have served to intensify the will and unity of the rebels.

One such group, named “Revolution Beat” has provided the foremost revolutionary song; “Hadi Thowra!” or “This is Revolution!” The song reads; “This is Revolution, the height of victory, freedom for the free people!” Another, by a rapper operating under the religious pseudonym “Ibn Thabit” offered a forewarning to Gaddafi; ““Muammer: You have never served the people…You’d better give up…You cannot escape.” This method of protest has proved extremely popular. The galvanising affect of song should not be underrated. Just ask any of the Sans-culottes who sang “La Marseillaise”, any US Marine fresh from exercise or any local student in the early hours paying homage to Oasis, and they too will confess to this. The power of many voices all singing together to the same tune, all in a single direction towards the same goal, can be quite inspiring.

But it was not just the poetic and intricate language of rap music which offered a voice of revolutionary spirit. Often it was something more akin with the Stretford End than the music studio. Early on, protesters adopted a “mob mentality” so as to be heard in their numbers. Chants translating to “The blood of martyrs does not go to waste” and “to hell hell with Gaddafi” first rang around Benghazi, and despite Gaddafi’s best efforts, were eventually heard on the streets of Tripoli. This, a classic form of protest, was another which allowed self expression to challenge the status quo of dictatorship. Yet, one rather more articulate form of protest, and perhaps more politically important, was the freedom of press; allowing masses of new publications to be produced.

From a journalist’s perspective it is easy to overemphasise the impact of press in shaping political events, too ready to declare that the pen is, of course, mightier than the sword. Clearly it would be unfair to draw such a conclusion. Armed conflict was necessary, and without it Gaddafi would have remained, but the freedom of press was hugely significant, and will become increasingly so.

After the liberation of Benghazi, in order to prevent the ‘enemies of the state’ from coordinating movement, virtually all information channels in the city were closed down. There was no mobile phone signal or internet, and naturally no reliable state coverage of events.

This is where the youth independent media stepped in. Lacking in training or expertise, but full of enthusiasm, they have been highly commended for the information provided to civilians in the midst of the conflict. Information will have undoubtedly been fabricated, but this, in the circumstances is excusable. In the days of total warfare, free press is vital to sustain the morale of a city, whatever the situation on the front. How for instance might World War Two have unfolded if it wasn’t for the “Dunkirk spirit” inspired by the British press? A catastrophic military failure became a victory. Without this spirit the vital supply line serviced by the local population is broken. No oil, no ammunitions, no troops- no revolution.

Recently when sitting on a train bound for London Paddington, a man, seeing me write this very article, struck up a conversation. By pure coincidence this man, Mourad Lagraa, an Algerian living in the UK, is formerly of Fallowfield, Manchester. I posed a few questions to him about his perspective on the tactics employed by revolutionaries, and the wider questions about maintaining the freedoms that have been gained. “The Graffiti in Libya is the first stage” he told me. “Forms of protest will become more political, as the people become more political… What we see now are the basic forms of expression, but soon we will see people taking political positions to join with the revolution.” Participation will then, in one opinion at least, become increasingly articulate as a democratic Libya blossoms. Aided perhaps by his distance from the heat of the conflict, he gave a forewarning however; “I am worried about the future of the Arab countries…in Libya there could be an Islamic uprising.”

This certainly reflects the fears of western governments, who are keen to see secularism throughout the newly independent Arab block. The dangers of a state tied closely to religion have been plain to see over the past ten years, as the Taliban have increased as a political force in Pakistan, and Al-Shabaab have dominated Somalia. This is further exacerbated when one considers the political bedlam apparent during any post-revolutionary “honeymoon” period. Without an established government to rule a country effectively, a power vacuum appears. A politically savvy group can fill this, and implement their own self-seeking agenda. Yet, in the case of Libya itself there is still plenty of cause for optimism.

Gadaffi as an octupus

Many had feared that support in western Libya for Gaddafi was genuine, and that partition of the country was the most likely eventual outcome. As Gaddafi’s power diminished, until his final pleas for mercy, this possibility became increasingly remote. Residents of Tripoli did not organize in any significant numbers to resist the wills of the revolutionaries.

As opposed to total civil war, the war began and ended with Gaddafi and his army versus the disaffected rebels. This allows for a range of interpretations. Perhaps the citizens of Tripoli never supported Gaddafi and were forced to sing his name, for fear of the Libyan secret police. Or perhaps they partially supported the regime, but were unwilling to sacrifice their lives to resist the rebel advances into Tripoli. Either possibility signals at the most support for the new regime and complete unity of the country, or at the least political apathy. Either makes the scenario of a civil war or chaotic political struggle less likely.

Libya also has some of the ingredients necessary to succeed as a democratic nation. There exists an established middle class who are capable of taking up positions in government, allowing the state to function efficiently. These are essentially beneficiaries of the Gaddafi regime, which would raise ideological questions over whether this group deserves to maintain political power. But the argument for a pragmatic approach is a good one. Without these people the revolution will fail, as can be seen in the case of former British colonies such as Zimbabwe, in which the privileged white class, on whose expertise the economy depended, were expelled, causing political chaos. This is where South Africa has to some extent succeeded. Mandela did not look to “purge” this political class, but showed his strength of character to recognize their importance in forming a new South Africa. The Libyans must take heed.

The future of Libya is bright. There have been early signs of political and cultural advancement into democracy. The hope is that these two significant progressions can combine and complement one another. Can the graffiti artists of today become the political figures of tomorrow? Can today’s rogue journalists expose the future corruptions of future government officials? And ultimately, can Libya remain democratic and Libyans remain free? Time will tell.

Betamax

We were the last generation of VCR users and it was a dark time looking back on it. No self-aggrandizing audio commentaries, having to spend £20 for just four measly episodes of The Simpsons and fuzzy pauses that made squinting for a potential side-boob almost impossible. In the gizmo-fueled world of today, it makes it difficult to comprehend how it could be the glorious victor in a technology battle with anything higher-grade than a moderately sophisticated potato peeler. But, it’s destruction of their rival – Sony’s Betamax – and VCR’s subsequent emergence as the standard for watching tapes is now a textbook case study for economists, with millions squandered by Sony trying to get its product into our living room.

The war between Betamax and JVC’s VCR took place in the late 70’s and early 80’s. At the time, Betamax offered far superior sound and picture quality and were backed by the bigger company. So why did they lose? Well, they failed to grasp that it’s not just what’s in the trunk of the car that counts. VCRs were more affordable for one (although this claim has been exaggerated over the years. In truth there wasn’t much in it).

You also had the shocking marketing decision by Sony to ban pornography on the Betamax format in an age before the Internet. It showed, let’s be honest, complete naivety towards the perverse and shallow male psyche. The importance of this is debated, but many (single male) economists believe it to be a decisive factor.

But the main problem with the Betamax was its inability to record more than an hour of content. That meant no films and no sport, making for many the recording function redundant (so even if they had allowed porn, people would be reduced to a solitary hour. You’d never fit the epics of Gangbangs of New York and Lord of the G-Strings in that time).

The rise of the mp3 and pirate movies has since shown that people are willing to sacrifice quality for price and convenience, but Sony remained dogmatic in their faith in superior specs. They refused to allow others to use their patent, meaning the cheaper VCRs were going into more homes, thus more enticing for video distribution companies.

Even an advert featuring Uncle Junior from The Sopranos couldn’t save it. In 1988, Sony began producing VCR machines, effectively signaling the end of the Betamax, a product they’d sought to be in every home in Britain. A victory in sensible marketing perhaps, but you have to admire the technological leaps taken by the Betamax.

Sega Dreamcast

The Dreamcast was, in many ways, a really promising games console. Unveiled in 1999, it opened to strong sales, making $132 million in the first four days of its USA release. It emerged with some strong titles too. Games like Crazy Taxi; Resident Evil and Marvel Vs. Capcom gave us plenty reason to be optimistic about its future. The graphics too were superb, easily a match for the early days of Playstation 2. Nintendo, the giant of gaming at the time, was in retreat. Sonic was kicking the shit out of that Mario and, to a lesser extent, Wario.

But, they were unlucky – well, stupid really – in the timing of release, being drowned by the hype of the Playstation 2. Current owners of the original Playstation were content to wait, whilst the undecided were put off by the catastrophic failure of the Sega Saturn before it. Their finances and credibility took a further hit when they were embroiled in a hardware lawsuit with 3Dfx, costing them $10.5 million.

Sega also couldn’t afford to match the aggressive and powerful marketing campaign Playstation launched with, and the offer of a built-in DVD player was too tempting for many.

But the allure of the PS2 wasn’t the only issue. Developers at EA became frustrated with the uncertainty surrounding the Dreamcast’s hardware and decided to grant licensing to Playstation alone. No FIFA. No Madden. Instead, it was hoped that Sega Worldwide Soccer would be enough to entice sports fans. Not a great decision in retrospect- you don’t see many ‘Sega Worldwide Soccer apologies’ on guys’ Facebook walls.

Financial woes continued and Sega faced more problems when a team of hackers found a way of putting the games available online to download for free. When you’ve got few games being released and the ones that are can be easily copied, it’s a long way back. With the announcement of Microsoft’s Xbox and the Nintendo Gamecube, it was all too much and Dreamcast and Sega announced its discontinuation in 2001.

The Dreamcast should be remembered though; it was in many ways a seriously innovative product. All future consoles took up their idea of trigger buttons and they provided an adapter to play your games in HD (even if your televisions weren’t ‘ready’). Most significant of all though, it was the first console to offer online play. It was flawed, delayed and often flakey, but it paved the way for what is now at the core of gaming. Think about the Dreamcast next time your arguing about the American War for Independence with a 12-year old boy on Call of Duty.

Sinclair C5

The British inventor Sir Clive Sinclair will be remembered for a great many things. He gave us the first pocket calculator, and sold the first affordable home computer. But all of that takes second fiddle to the enormous failure of his Sinclair C5 electric car. This was meant to usher in a new era of transport, but instead came to represent eccentric catastrophes. Launched in 1985, the electric motor should’ve excited environmentalists and commuters alike, but it was riddled with practical problems.

The design of the car alone is enough to explain its demise. The size of it alienated the cash cow that is the ‘overcompensating male’ market and the ‘open top’ feature meant that you were never protected from the perplexed and often sniggering public. Apart from being completely lame, the low design was totally unsuitable for British weather, with no protection against the cold or rain- unless you wore a Burkini that is. On top of that, it was accused of being dangerous in traffic too, something Sinclair vigorously denied. No fatalities were recorded, but then nobody really bought it.

Piddling along at a top speed of 15mph, the ludicrous notion that this would transform travel was finally put to bed when it was discovered that driving up hills would overpower the motor and stop the car. Well, at least you didn’t need a license. With only around 15,000 units sold and losses of up to £10 million, the Sinclair C5 was put into receivership in October 1985.

But let’s give Sir Clive some credit. He was the first to have a real go at putting the electric car to the mass market. It had its problems, but today the electric car is a growing industry and, with the world destined to suffer cold turkey on their oil addiction, they are in increasing demand. Companies like Nissan and Mitsubishi have begun developing these vehicles, learning from the mistakes of this inventive pioneer. Even Sinclair himself hasn’t given up, unveiling the Sinclair X-1 this year. Given that the Wikipedia entry is a single sentence, its safe to say lessons were learned…

Amstrad e-mailer

Alan Sugar is often used to highlight how far business ingenuity can get you. But he doesn’t always get it right. In one of his famously scripted quotes on last year’s The Apprentice, he told Jedi Jim, “What I’ve forgotten in bullshit you haven’t even learned yet”. Well, this may just include his Amstrad E3 superphone, a product he will want left in the past.

The Amstrad E3 superphone was released in 2004 and was designed to provide all your communication needs under one product. It had a small LCD screen that allowed video calling as well as Internet browsing. Pretty good you might say, like a giant iPhone. It came with a pullout keyboard, the screen was a decent resolution and it had a text-messaging feature that could come in handy. Also, at £99, it wasn’t an outrageous price for the claimed features on display.
But it never took off. For starters, the video function required both users to have the ‘superphone’, so you had to convince your mates to get one for it to be of any use. Also, who wants that feature anyway? The majority of telephone conversations at home will be to arrange something. Unless you have an unrequited crush, you’re unlikely to be interested in seeing their faces. Most ‘you hang up- no you hang up’ conversations are done on mobiles, not giant homephones.

Then there were the hidden costs. It was 50p to send an SMS or make a video call. An ‘e-mail session’ would set you back another 15p a day, with any e-mails with attachments incurring another 25p per message. Who is going to pay 25p per e-mail when they can do it on their computers for free?
The primary market was, of course, business. But the emergence of Skype shot that out the window. No business is going to sign up to 25p e-mails when they’re also forking out for computers at every turn. The slender demand was also being split by 3’s new videophone. Prices for the Amstrad E3 slashed and slashed, but they were eventually discontinued. In the end, it cost the company millions and Sugar’s refusal to give up led to the resignation of prominent CEO’s.

But what makes this case interesting is that now videocalling is a huge business. Every student at Manchester has Skype, a company bought by Microsoft for $8.5m. Plus, the iPhone 4 launched its advertising campaign on the ‘facetime’ feature. Whether it’s used much by users is open to debate, but it certainly convinced people to hand over their cash. The idea was sound, but the costs were out of sync with reality. Sugar must be kicking himself.

Gone and long forgotten…

But not every failed idea has its place in history.

Gizmondo- Released in 2005, the woefully titled Gizmondo was a handheld games console designed to rival the Gameboy. It had some promising features. EA licensing, widescreen screen. But sadly, it just lacked named recognition and its £229 price tag put the punters off. Oh, and it turned out that one of its executives was in the mafia and was using the business as a front. Not the best PR strategy.

Microsoft Clippy- Probably the most hated animated paperclip the world has ever seen. Designed to help users of Microsoft Word, it became infamous for crashing systems and popping up out of nowhere. Even The Simpsons took a pop at it. It was so annoying that Microsoft had a marketing campaign for Office XP that centered on the sacking of poor old Clippy.

Hydrogen blimp- Oh the humanity! Herbert Morrison’s line when reporting the Hindenburg disaster has become engrained in pop culture. The tragedy, where in 1937 the Hindenburg zeppelin caught fire while attempting to land, signaled the end of hydrogen fuelled travel. The blimp also had some good features and for a few years was a popular travel method. So why do people always focus on the ‘extremely flammable’ side of it?

New Coke- If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. New Coke was an attempt to spice the Coca-Cola brand up in the 80’s, but they forgot that people hate change. Die-hards launched a revolt; the streets were filled with protestors. It was the ultra-capitalist version of the Russian Revolution. The sweeter drink was promptly taken off the market.

Japan Smile Check- Don’t you just hate miserable public transport workers. Well, in 2009 Keihin Electric Express Railway in Japan had had enough. They introduced software that measured the happiness of their employees. Each day, workers were required to smile into a camera, where a computer would measure their smile rating from 0-100. It took into account lip curves, cheekbones and eye movements to calculate each person’s mood. Fascism in action.

Smell-o-vision- Have you ever watched a film and thought; “I wonder what it smells like”? Well, maybe the German thriller Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. Apart from that though, the smell is rarely the captivating feature of a movie. Not so, thought Mike Todd jr, who in the 1960’s developed a technology that was going to change the way we were entertained. Except that obviously he didn’t, because Smell-o-Vision is a massively shit idea.

AB: It’s very broad – essentially any government’s foreign policy has got to be based on what is in the United Kingdom’s interest, but it shouldn’t be seen that that is solely a selfish interest. Very often our interests are coincidental with those of others. Essentially we believe that the world is best when it is safe and when it is peaceful – clearly we believe that governments are most stable when they are in a position to be elected, there’s freedom and various basic principles like that. So you have a general governance thing where we work with others, whether it’s through NATO, the European Union or through the UN, to promote peace and stability. But there are also other interests. We have interests in UK citizens abroad. Our consular work, to protect UK citizens if they get into trouble, to advise them, to help them – that is very important to us. Prosperity – our business interests are important. This means jobs. Jobs in the countries we go to, jobs in the countries that will invest in the United Kingdom, so there’s that as well. So when you’re thinking about the UK’s interests, it’s very broad. It involves students. It is in the UK’s interest that students from abroad come to study in the United Kingdom. It gives them exposure to the UK, they go back with knowledge and understanding, so that whole concept of what’s in the UK’s interests – it would be wrong if people said that it is focused very narrowly, very selfishly. It can often be very wide in terms of what might be in the UK’s interests in a country or a region.

Okay, so security, diplomacy and development are all interlinked. In terms of withdrawing combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014, is the biggest risk with placing Afghan soldiers in charge that the Taliban return to fill a sort of ‘vacuum’, or is the plan that there will not be that vacuum?

You’re right on both counts – the risk is that that might happen, the plan is that it should not. By the work that is being done in training and working with Afghan security forces, the aim is that they should be in a position where they can look after their own affairs. Our evidence is that the training is going well; the number of people being trained has exceeded expectations. There is something like in total 370,000 split between Afghan police and Afghan army who are being trained up. The quality is high and you could see in events like the recent attacks in Kabul, it has been the Afghan security forces who have led the operations to deal with that. The forces who are working with them say that they are continually improving, so the aim is that they will be in charge, the risk is that the Taliban will feel able to come back in, but we believe that the process will ensure that Afghan soldiers are responsible and able to do the job.

You said that intervention in Syria is not possible at the moment as there is no appetite for it. Is that because of public opinion, or because there is no international appetite for it or because actually the British public couldn’t put up with another war?

Well firstly, we don’t do anything like this now unilaterally. It is not just a question of what we think. Anything that we would want to do in terms of that sort of intervention to deal with an acute crisis would come in conjunction with others. It was very significant the way in which we worked to get an international agreement to go into Libya. It was led by ourselves and France, but the support of the Arab League for what was being done, the willingness of Russia and China not to create a veto – all of this was absolutely essential. My point about appetite was that the international appetite to do this in relation to Syria isn’t there, for a whole series of reasons. Syria is a much more complex issue in terms of the nature of the protest against the Assad government. As I indicated, it is much more difficult for Arab nations to take a clear stance, but we are encouraging them to increase pressure. We have done everything we can through sanctions and things like that, but Russia and China as recently as 48 hours ago refused to support a resolution condemning the Syrian regime, and therefore the UN Security Council couldn’t pass it. So they are at present responsible for preventing the world from speaking with one clear voice on this. But we have made it clear that military intervention wasn’t part of that resolution, it isn’t being considered, it’s a wholly different situation. Pressure must be applied on the Syrian regime in other ways.

So going forward is the plan to try to persuade Russia and China that they should back a resolution?

That’s part of the plan, absolutely, because we think if the international community speaks with one voice that is an added pressure on the Syrian regime. They must know they are doing wrong. Plainly, they believe that they can remain in power by doing what they are doing. We have come to the conclusion they cannot, so we have publicly called for that regime to stand down and begin a transition of power, it’s a view they are not heeding. But the more people are saying the same thing, we hope that the regime will recognise that it has lost its legitimacy by its actions.

0.7% of GDP is devoted to international development, is that a legal (UN-led) requirement?

No, it’s what the UN believe that nations should be spending on international development. It was a figure arrived at some years ago as an aspiration; the UN said, this is where countries should be heading. We are one of very few countries who will have actually achieved this. We’ve said by the end of 2014/15 that’s where we will be. So the United Kingdom has taken this extremely seriously. It is a matter of common policy between all parties, including the opposition. We all believe that this is important – it is in Britain’s interests, as well as the world’s interests.

What would you say to people who say that 0.7% of GDP is going overseas when, in a time of austerity, some might say that it is money that could be spent in Britain on British people?

We would argue two things. Firstly, it is in the UK’s interests. The better countries are developed, the more trade we have between them, the more prosperous they are, the less need there is for aid from outside. Our work is no long about giving handouts to nations, it is about supporting their own development so they are more able to look after themselves and their own people. Spending money on development projects – let’s take education for example, particularly education of women – in countries where women are spending hours a day finding water for example, they are not doing anything else, they aren’t engaged in employment, children are not in school – all this retards a nation’s development. Accordingly if you are spending money on this you are improving these countries in the way in which they want to develop themselves. So it is in our interests to do this. It is also in our interests in terms of preventing some of the root causes of terrorism or people’s sense of injustice. If people are living in miserable conditions, and people come along and say “it isn’t like this is America, it isn’t like this in the UK, you know why that is – they are able to do this because we live like this” – that can be a very seductive argument. So we have got to work to ensure that people don’t feel that sense of injustice. Secondly, and more straightforwardly, there is the moral case. Anyone from the UK who has been out on any development project; if you see the way in which some people live, the conditions in which babies are born and kids are in school, it breaks your heart, and the fact that you have got the ability to help your neighbour is a good thing. We do a great amount through charity in the United Kingdom, it good to do it through government support as well.

You talked about the franchising of al-Qaeda, when the leadership was slowly picked off – is it a real concern going forward that new groups will emerge, that copycat al-Qaeda’s will spread abroad and that new cells with spring up in different countries?

It’s been a risk, it’s been a threat and it’s something which has actually happened. We have seen what became known as ‘AQ Core’, the original heart of it being disseminated to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, al-Qaeda in sub-Saharan Africa, so we know those threats have been created and they are being examined and they are being dealt with. But generally I think long term, al-Qaeda’s future is poor. It is very clear if anyone wants to take up leadership in these areas, they know that someone is going to prevent them killing people. But also, the philosophy is wrong. The more things like the Arab Spring can explain to people that there is a different way of changing things; it is certainly not through violence and terrorism towards innocent people, you don’t change things that way. You change things through what people have done democratically. That will actually weaken the basis of al-Qaeda more. So a combination of pressures on al-Qaeda will, we hope, make the world safer.

But naturally the threat is more difficult to deal with if it is spread all across the world rather than just contained in one place?

That’s why it’s a threat. That’s why we work on counter-terrorism, that’s why we work on counter-radicalisation, and when we talk about it being a threat, it’s very real. You only need one outrage in a capital to remind people of what can happen, and we do see it all over the world popping up in different guises from time to time; it’s a very real danger.

Faith obviously plays a massive role in the Middle East conflict – would you say that the lack of understanding of different faiths and lack of tolerance towards faith is the biggest problem in that conflict?

It’s a good question. I think my experience is that faith has been used as an excuse over the years for all sorts of things. I don’t think it is primarily about faith in terms of Israel and Palestine now; it is about a huge sense of grievance by the Palestinians in relation to how they feel they have been treated by the international community over a long period of time, and it is about a deep-rooted sense of insecurity in Israel, who have faced wars and threats of their existence being destroyed over a similar period of time. It’s essentially about balancing those two things; faith plays a part because, by and large, Israel is a Jewish homeland and the Palestinians are predominantly Muslim, but neither of the countries are exclusively so. It is about wider and deeper things. The greater understanding there is between people, the better things are. There are numbers of NGOs who work with both populations. There are people who want peace on both sides of the line. There are leaders who want peace on both sides of the line. But they are very afraid of making the wrong peace. We are trying to encourage them to make the right one, to realise it will take risks on both sides. Israel has to feel secure; the Palestinians have to feel a sense of justice. I think that’s at the root of it.

Is it correct that Netanyahu only acknowledged the viability of a Palestinian state two years ago?

You’ve asked me a question I don’t know, I can’t answer that. That’s a matter for him, it wouldn’t be a matter for us.

If that is the case, what are the chances of finding peace while he is still in power? Is the current Israeli government a stumbling block?

We are assured that both sets of present leaders are looking for peace. Prime Minister Netanyahu has made it very clear that he is prepared to sit down at any time in order to discuss peace; we believe also that President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayed are also partners for peace, although there are some in Israel who don’t believe that. We are convinced that both are able, have the capacity to deliver, have the strength within their own people’s to deliver a difficult settlement, and we are urging both to do so. So we don’t see either as an obstacle to peace, we do know both find it hard with certain things going on to sit down together; we are urging them to overcome that.

Could you talk a bit more about the Prevent scheme – the question from the Muslim student who asked a question suggesting she was being persecuted or unfairly targeted?

When the United Kingdom was examining the threats of terrorism to it, we became aware that a certain section of the population was targeted by those who would seek to cause harm, be duped into terrorism and radicalised, and we believe they needed to be protected. The work that was started then and as my colleague explained, it has evolved over time, was to identify those that might have been at risk from radicalisation, work with them, and this work now encompasses the wider community. There are many people in the Muslim community in the United Kingdom who are vehemently opposed to the violence and terrorism that people are projecting, they want to protect their own people from it and they work to prevent it. This work is not just done in this country; it’s done abroad in order to tackle places where, again, people would imagine things about the UK and tell people things about the UK in order to stir them up, and we try to transfer information both ways. Again, as I made clear, we are conscious that anyone can fall into this trap, people can be radicalised from any background, though the evidence is – and we have to be absolutely brutally honest about it – the Muslim community is most at risk from this pressure. There is absolutely no sense of targeting or persecuting the Muslim community in general – that isn’t the way it works – we are trying to protect that community from these unfair slurs and accusations by finding the people who really cause them harm.

A couple of the presidential candidates in the US have been talking quite strongly about what they might do if they were to win the presidency – in terms of Iran, being quite brutal, really. Hypothetically, were Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann to become President, would that pose a problem for UK/US relations and peace in the Middle East?

What would be a problem for UK/US relations would be a Junior Minister offering a view on presidential candidates!

Well it was worth a go!

Tempting as it is… no. We have confidence in the American political system that they will produce good presidential candidates, and the President of the United States will as always be in a position where he or she can make the best judgements for their nation. Our relationship is very strong. It’s just not necessary to talk about individual candidates positions or anything, it would be inappropriate.

You said that we’ve learnt a few lessons from how the previous government dealt with going into Iraq. When you say “a few lessons”, what are you going to do differently going forward?

There are two things, and we can demonstrate that we’ve learnt lessons by seeing what happened in Libya and contrasting it. Firstly, we did make every effort to ensure that a UN resolution was complete. It enabled the coalition forces to take physical action to prevent attacks on Libyan civilians, and that we all knew what we were talking about at the same time. Virtually without exception – I know that the Russians and the Chinese have alleged that we’ve gone beyond the bounds of the resolution – but there is nothing like the sense of doubt about whether the resolution was sufficient or not as there was surrounding the Iraq resolution.

Much clearer.

It’s much clearer, and we believe that one of the successes in Libya has been that there has never been any doubt about it. Secondly, the way in which our part of the conflict was conducted. There is a National Security Council now; it’s met nearly sixty times in relation to Libya. Decisions taken by that group – and I’ve been present at about a dozen of those meetings – have been minuted, documented. ‘Sofa government’ is not part of what the present government does and it is essentially to do that. And thirdly, the sense that there were no boots on the ground. Everything that was going to be done on the ground has been done through Libyans so that there can be no resentment against foreign forces. There was good preparation for what would happen afterwards – because again it has been clear that, with the best will in the world, that hadn’t been done effectively in relation to Iraq. All this was considered and thought through and that’s why we can say that we did learn lessons and there is evidence that we learnt lessons.

Is there a danger that when we have elections next year in Egypt and Tunisia, those governments could very quickly adopt similar dictatorial regimes to the previous governments? Is that something that we think is inherent in that part of the world?

In answer to your second point, absolutely not. There has been a current of thought for some time – if you Google ‘Arabiceptionalism’ you will find people saying “oh well actually the reason why post-1989 collapse of communist rule and freedom and Europe didn’t happen in Arab countries is because they are different”. I think the events of the last year would suggest that’s probably not the case. In terms of what might happen after the elections, nobody quite knows. I would have thought as an outsider that anyone who might wish to re-impose a form of dictatorial rule might be conditioned by what has already happened. The people have made very clear their views about that, and I have no doubt that people would take to the streets again if they found the government moving in the same direction. I think there has to be a degree of trust – there is nothing the United Kingdom can do about this, this is a matter for sovereign people’s themselves. But you have to hope that people who were prepared to take huge risks in these countries for freedom are not easily going to let it go. We will wait and see the governments that emerge, we hope that they will have an adherence to basic democratic principles, pluralism, freedom, freedom of assembly, speech, media etc., and we will judge them accordingly.

“It’ll be a shot to the head of the NHS.” The proposed Health and Social Care Bill 2011 has been dubbed the most radical plan in the history of the health service – and it certainly has proved controversial. It’s been labelled as both the end and the saviour of nationalised British health, but with all the mud slinging between politicians, unions and healthcare groups it’s tricky to know what all the fuss is about? Where do we, as present and future patients and potential employees of the nation’s largest employer, stand?

Perhaps it’s wise just to take a step back and look at how many people it’s going to affect. The University of Manchester is the largest face-to-face teaching university in the country, having over 3,200 current students on nursing, midwifery and medicine courses. Without taking into account psychologists, life scientists and every other student with ambitions of working in the healthcare system, it makes up fewer than 10 percent of our student population. The NHS employs over 1.4 million people- that’s more than 5 percent of UK’s working population. But most importantly, these are changes that affect almost all of us. No matter how strong we think or feel we are, one day we will probably need NHS treatment. As such an important feature in our lives, any change to the NHS needs to be understood and supported by the public. I’m going to explain the current structure, outline the why and how of the reforms and discuss the numerous views surrounding them.

Why are the reforms being proposed?

There’s no getting away from it; the world is in financial meltdown. With governments all over the world scrounging for pennies cuts are being made across the board and the NHS (although technically ‘ring fenced’) is undergoing readjustments to make it ‘more efficient and cost effective’. Essentially, the NHS is attempting to save £20 bn by 2014-2015, which kicks David Cameron’s electoral pledge “Cut the deficit not the NHS” into the dustbin. Considering this reform will be rolled out in 2013 at the earliest, you’re looking at a whopping £10 bn saving per year across the NHS. However, Cameron has promised that the actual money put in to the NHS will still rise year on year. Critics argue that this is a facade; that in reality he’ll be reducing the annual increase in the NHS budget. The extra money that is being put in each year will be swallowed up by rising inflation, meaning that the actual monetary value the NHS gets will decrease.

A quick look back at history has seen spending on the NHS triple since 1999 from £40 bn to over £120 bn. However, looking at figures relative to British GDP per capita we still put in less money per person than almost every other nation in Western Europe and North America. Despite this, all major political parties have described a need to curb the rising costs in the NHS whilst making it more efficient. The Health and Social Care Bill 2011 is the coalition government’s proposal to do this.

How is the NHS currently structured?

At the moment the Department of Health controls the NHS. The Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley, is the head and reports to the Prime Minister. The Department of Health controls England’s 10 Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs), which oversee 152 Primary Care Trusts (PCTs).The PCTs control local NHS activities. The devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their local NHS services separately.

Primary Care Trusts control approximately 80 percent of the budget and are responsible for distributing the money to GPs and hospitals as well changing their services to suit the needs of their populations. So, if Manchester had an increase in patients with diabetes, then they would be expected to provide more services to support those with diabetes. The PCT would plan effectively how to use their budget to accommodate their new needs.

The role of the Strategic Health Authorities is to provide leadership in the area they serve by organising workforce development and ensuring PCTs are looking after the needs of their populations. Essentially, they are the overseeing body that will dictate the numbers of staff needed across the region in different areas. For example, if the North West were low on anaesthetists they would call on deaneries responsible for training them to increase the numbers they train so that the whole SHA can benefit. They also are responsible for finding specialist services for conditions that some PCTs can’t treat.

Currently there is a large emphasis on cooperation between PCTs to provide the best possible service for patients by taking a national, regional and local perspective on health.

What are the proposed reforms?

The NHS will undergo a radical pro-market shakeup with hospitals, private healthcare providers and family doctors competing for patients who will be able to choose their own treatment and care options.

They will do this by abolishing all PCTs and SHAs, therefore culling more than 24,000 management jobs. Budgets will be directly paid from Department of Health to newly formed GP consortiums, which will be groups of GPs responsible for a certain area. A National Health Commissioning Board will be set up to supervise the GP consortiums to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to.

The increase in competition will provide a change from a unilateral service to one with more ‘choice’. Say for instance someone went to his GP and was told he had a funny looking lump on his shoulder that the GP wanted to have a closer look at. The GP would then request an X-ray. At the moment the patient would go to a local hospital to have it done. If the reforms take affect the GP and patient would now have a choice between several providers. For this example we’ll say a Private Hospital is charging £60 and a local NHS hospital is charging £80. Most likely the GP will try and convince the patient to go to the cheaper one because he is mindful of his budget. If the patient doesn’t, he can then go and complain to the ‘Monitor’, who is there to ensure ‘patient choice’. The powers of the ‘Monitor’ haven’t been well defined so it is not known if they will actually be able to intervene effectively. This also raises questions over the effect it will have on doctor – patient relationships as the patient will know the doctor’s decision may be influenced by the budget the doctor himself set out. He could directly ask him,

“why haven’t you set enough aside for my X-ray?”

This increase in competition you might think could lead to a decrease in NHS patients going to NHS hospitals, causing the NHS to shrink. Well the government has a plan for that. There are already a number of hospitals that have ‘Foundation Trust’ status and the Government are pressing for more and more hospitals to convert into them. These ‘Foundation Trusts’ have several powers that enable them to chase private patients (those with individual health insurance) and therefore bolster their own revenue so that they are not solely dependent on the money given to them by the government for NHS patients, thus enabling NHS hospitals to challenge private healthcare providers. However, this has raised concerns that these ‘Foundation Trusts’ will lead a charge by the NHS for private patients causing a decrease in access to healthcare for NHS ones.

Who is against the reforms?

It all sounds rather good, with more choice for patients and reduced costs over the whole of the NHS. But the plans have drawn sharp criticism from many interest groups. UNISON, the biggest trade union in the UK with over 1.3 million members, said

“NHS patients will be the biggest losers if the Government pushes through its Health and Social Care Bill.”

More opposition comes from the Royal College of Nursing. With over 400,000 members, they took the unprecedented decision to vote 96 percent in favour of a no confidence vote in Andrew Lansley. You might think that the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), whose members will be handed increased power, would be happy but they have also expressed concerns with the changes,

“They [our members] worry about the financial pressures, and the competition culture of ‘Any Willing Provider’. They fear that these reforms could cause irreparable and irreversible damage to the NHS.”

The British Medical Association (BMA) who is to all intents and purposes a trade union for doctors working in the UK said;

“The BMA continues to call for the Bill to be withdrawn or, failing that, to be subject to further significant amendments.”

Finally, Ed Milliband, leader of the Labour party, went a step further and attacked the Prime Minister,

“It is an insult to the people who work in the health service, it is an insult to the people who use it and the Prime Minister should be ashamed of the way he is running the NHS, the proudest institution of Britain.”

It all sounds pretty fiery with anyone and everyone getting hot under the collar about it. So why are so many vehemently against the reform? The issues stem from several key areas.

The first being that GPs are now expected to become managers of their accounts whereas before much of the administration of the NHS was done by trained experts on PCT boards. Dr. Azeer, a GP of the Bury PCT, stated,

“I’ve had 15 years of clinical training, how am I expected to suddenly be an accountant as well?” A concern echoed by Conservative MP and GP, Sarah Wollaston, “It is one thing to rapidly dismantle the entire middle layer of NHS management but it is completely unrealistic to assume several hundred inexperienced commissioning (GP) consortia can take their place.”

Worries have also been raised that GPs will now have even less time with patients as they are forced to spend valuable time organising finances for their regions. Ironically, it is feared that GPs will resort to paying increased fees for managers that originally worked for PCTs absolving GPs of their new responsibilities and completely negating the desired effect. For students there may well be a reduction in training opportunities. Medical training is carried out entirely at NHS hospitals and under new proposals a lot of patients will now be going to Private Hospitals instead. Even Lord Nebbit, a Conservative pier in the House of Lords, has expressed concerns;

“It’s fine for the private sector, which doesn’t have responsibility for teaching and bringing on young surgeons, to take the straightforward and easy stuff. But that means the public sector is then left without the base of work to subsidise the more difficult surgery and the teaching of surgeons.”

With the abolition of the SHAs and PCTs there could be a lack of national oversight on health policy which will leave a fragmented NHS struggling to cope with the needs of patients on a national level as well as a local one. An example of this, is there being no government body to acknowledge the need for changing numbers of different types of doctors.

Regardless of these fears, a massive question remains that these changes may not actually see a decrease in costs in the NHS as the implementation of the reforms will cost over £2 billion in themselves and then the further re-organisation of the NHS could cause costs in the NHS to spiral out of control.

What next?

The reforms have passed through the House of Commons and are now in the House of Lords at a committee stage. This stage can take several months where infinite details are haggled over until a compromise is met before a final amendments stage. Groups such as the Trade Union Congress (TUC) and 38 Degrees have online petitions calling for the Health and Social Care Bill 2011 to be halted. Whether these reforms go through or not could be monumental for the NHS and as one of the future generations it is our responsibility to let our voices be heard. If I am to leave you with one final thought, it is to consider our trans-Atlantic cousins who, also struggling in a financial crisis, have given the go-ahead for a national health service of their own. Is this really the time to start unraveling ours?

Liberateyourself is an innovative new website designed by the UMSU to address the prejudice and ignorance prevalent in British society today. The site is divided into specific sections that address the different walks of life that experience discrimination. Speaking to Hannah Paterson, the Welfare Officer behind the idea, she told me about the mission of the website.

“We want it to be a safe environment where you can explore issues you may never thought about before. It’s to fight ignorance and stigma but in a way that is really open. These issues are often talked about but in a way that makes people angry and it just turns into a heated debate. We want to remove the ignorance by answering questions some people might be afraid to ask in an open and frank way”

The website is divided into five sections. They are categorized as: LGBTQ, Women, Disabled, Mental Health and Black. Each section has much to explore and offer personal stories, links and resources for support groups, opportunities to get involved and a candid FAQs page.

Who are the contributors?

“Each section is taken by people who self-identify with that group. They’re mainly people who are heavily involved with campaigning and can provide an experienced voice,” Hannah Paterson said. So, if you ask why some Muslim women where a burka and others a hijab, the response you will get will be from a Muslim who can offer a first hand response. All questions are anonymous and can be sent either through the website or to the section editor via e-mail.

The personal experiences are genuine and thought provoking. Some detail problems with friends while others discuss the often-casual nature of discrimination. They’re completely anonymous, but offer a personal perspective and many really bring home the brutal effects of prejudice on people’s lives.

A sixth section also is available to friends and relatives of those that suffer from bigotry or ignorance. Perhaps you’re best friend has come out to you and you want to know the best way to be supportive. Or maybe you’re nephew has been born with a disability that you don’t know much about.

“We were getting stories that related to people’s friends having problems and felt this needed a space. On the website there is really good support not just for those suffering, but for those wanting to help.”

While still in progress, site creator Hannah Paterson is hopeful of the website continuing to evolve as more contributors come forward and more questions are asked.

“You can get involved really easily. Either look at our facebook group or you can find details on the homepage.”

Though most of us would never consider ourselves bigots, this website, which is still in early days, certainly educates its readers on the controversial debates surrounding discrimination in this country.

OCD

I started my course in September 2010 after taking a gap year. I’ve suffered with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) for about 10 years.
Coming to university was particularly hard at first. Not only did the obsessive thoughts and rituals that I have to go through become much more important to my everyday life, but I felt that I had to hide that side of my personality away from my flatmates and new friends in order to avoid being labelled a ‘freak’
After a while (and after my flatmates remarked on some odd habits I had), I found the courage to discuss it with them. They’ve been really understanding and done their best to help where they can. It’s not easy by any means, but helps a lot. I think the advice I would give is to not hide away completely. Find someone you can trust to talk things over with and see if they can help.

ME (CFS)

I have M.E. Also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), it’s a much-misunderstood and much-maligned condition. I have good days and I have bad days, and today was a mediocre day. What I couldn’t do however was move without pain, or do any normal task without feeling extremely drained at the end of it. By normal tasks, I include having a shower, reading and paying a credit card bill, and making a sandwich.

On a bad day, I can’t move from bed. I’m in constant pain: ever get that feeling the day after the gym when you haven’t been for a while? Imagine that times ten, without the satisfying feeling you get from knowing it’s done you good. I lose the ability to form articulate sentences as I’ve forgotten the words and I’m completely unable to read.

I’ve learnt over the past 9 months to a year that M.E. isn’t just something you can ignore that flares up occasionally: it requires significant changes to your lifestyle to manage a normal life. I’m normally in bed by 10 every night for example, because I know that if I stay up later I will feel extremely tired and start to get pain and brain fog the next day. And I can manage the physical exertion now, for the most part. Mental exertion has to be planned or compensated for. But I count myself lucky that I still can have a normal life with this kind of planning. I know people much worse off than me who simply can’t hold down a job or full-time study, which makes it even sadder that much of society considers their condition to be either trivial or invented.

LGBT

When I first started uni at Manchester, I never ever considered joining the LGBT here. I was never fully out back home and found the idea of joining a bit intimidating. Instead, I quite happily sailed along through first year, but I still wasn’t very out about my sexuality. I never really thought about the gay village or the LGBT community at all. But that all changed when I went home for summer. My homophobic Mum and Dad sat me down and told me that they had started to think about arranging my marriage. My whole world fell apart!

I felt so scared and alienated. I was confused about what to do. It was all I could think about. I finally bit the bullet and told my tutors everything. Their response was fantastic. They were so supportive and understanding. They knew I couldn’t come out to my parents yet, so instead they helped me persuade my parents that I was too busy with my education to think about marriage.

It was at this point that a friend suggested I go join the LGBT. I was a bit hesitant to begin with, but I finally took the plunge and went to a social at a local pub. It was so relaxed and had a great vibe. I met some incredible people, had a great laugh and even won second prize in the quiz! Over the year I got more and more involved. Thanks to these guys, I’ve never felt so proud and so assured to tell them exactly who I am.

University of California, Los Angeles
Shaurna Cameron

My trip was to the one and only Los Angeles, CA. Initially when I arrived I was taken aback by the palm trees and the friendliness of the people. I was called ma’am so many times that I started to believe that people thought it was my name! But when I stepped out of the airport and into the immense heat that envelops Los Angeles it was love at first sight. After a year in rainy Manchester, feeling the sun beating down on my back was great.

In terms of academics I am finding that everything is more relaxed. You’re allowed to eat in lectures and ask a lot of questions without being told to wait until the end of class. Professors encourage you to come to office hours and are more than happy to help with any issues you have. They especially love an English accent!

Although losing the familiarity of Manchester is a little hard to get used to, I can honestly say that I could complete my degree in LA. You miss your friends for a while but everyone is so polite it’s easy to meet new people.

I think Manchester could definitely benefit from the sense of belonging that UCLA students feel to their university. The “Bruins”, as they are known, see their university as a family despite the fact that it so big. If Manchester’s students had that kind of kinship it could make for an even better experience.

Have I got any advice for people thinking of studying here? Well, firstly Americans find the English accent really difficult, so make it easier on yourself by learning the idioms. Throw out your trousers and embrace the pants!

Also, you come here not knowing anybody and you can’t go home on weekends. As such, I’d really encourage you to make an effort to speak to people and take part in the international programs, clubs and activities the university offers.

Study abroad is not just something that looks good on your CV. It’s an opportunity to mix with a wide variety of people from different backgrounds and hopefully learn things about yourself that you never knew before. If for nothing else coming to UCLA gave me the opportunity to meet Spiderman in Hollywood!

Sydney University
Imogen McRoberts

Welcome to Sydney University. ‘Arrive and thrive’ is the motto, which repeatedly rolls off the tongues of the very witty, very helpful and very ‘Australian’ Study Abroad team. However, at that point I was more thinking ‘Hello bed!’ with the jetlag. The first two weeks were a daze, a hazy blur of confusion. Frustrating though it was, it was also very thrilling. Upon arrival I was struck by an excess of warmth from various different people from an array of ages and backgrounds. I thought, “You don’t find this in England, no one’s that helpful.”

Since being here, I have discovered the wonders of good weather and the impact that has on University life. There is usually a free BBQ somewhere on campus and a range of activities and events going on throughout the semester, much of which take place outdoors. Walk to classes and there is music is playing; kids are flyering about one issue or another, free t-shirts during the elections and free sweets. Even the most British of Brits couldn’t moan about that.

Probably the most enjoyable aspect of life at Sydney so far has been the diverse subjects I have been able to take. Whilst being here I have studied MEN: Masculinity, Mateship and Men’s Lives (yes boys, we’re on to you!). This seems to be a subject that, although not strictly Australian, has much focus within Australian intellects. I have also taken two subjects with regard to the Indigenous people of this country. One about their contemporary art and another regarding their place in ‘Modern’ society. These two subjects have opened my eyes and my mind to an issue I would have never been aware of. I have been introduced to some amazing Australian culture, whether it is film, art or people in general. It’s a far cry away from the stereotypical Ozzie that I had preconceived before I arrived! There is some truly inspiring creativity taking place here.

In my semester break I took a ten-day holiday and without exaggeration, it has been one of my favourite holidays yet. I went up the coast, chasing the sun and found the beaches and the sea. There were three main parts to my travel, a sailing trip, a tour on Fraser Island (‘Oh no, a Dingo ate my baby!’) and lastly to Byron bay, the land of love and freedom! On this adventure I met some beautiful people, mostly backpackers but the few Ozzies I met were gracious and generous. This includes the three inbreeds who were attending a wedding – ‘Yeah we’re, like inbred, you know. It’s kinda weird but we’re a close family.’ The trip made me want to travel and see the rest of Australia because it is so large and so diverse from place to place.
Overall, the experience I’ve had in Australia has been heart-warming. I have had the opportunity to interact with people from many parts of the world and have been shown generosity beyond belief. Although I have missed friends and family, it is important to step outside one’s comfort zone and by doing this in Sydney, I have reaped many rewards!

Singapore University
Oliver Reynolds

I arrived in Singapore on 29th July 2011, as term starts in early August here, flying straight from Ho Chi Minh City and thus experiencing a double culture shock as Singapore was unlike either Vietnam or the long-distant UK. A megacity-state with a population of 5 million: ultra-clean, green, organized, urbanized, modern and overwhelmingly humid.

I was shown around by my Welcome Buddy, but spent the rest of the first day milling around trying to infiltrate a group of exchange students or else target a loner and form my own group. I found one in the shop at my new halls, but as I desperately tried to start a conversation with him I discovered he was the 14-year-old brother of another student! After that fail, I just went back to my room to unpack. Luckily, I met my next-door neighbour, a Canadian guy called Sam, who introduced me to his new friends.

From there it was fine, as I’d done the whole meeting people and heavy socialising in Freshers’ Week (or Welcome Week is it nowadays?) in first year.
The first couple of weeks felt like being in Disneyland. We went to the well-kempt Botanic Gardens, to a beach party on the heavily-manicured and artificial (but nonetheless fun) Sentosa island, hiking round the MacRitchie Reservoir Nature Reserve among cute, yet teeth-baring, macaques and sampled a collection of very plush but extremely expensive nightclubs (where I purchased one bottle of Tiger beer for $20 – or £10! It was no Fifth Ave).

Singapore has so many laws, including no spitting, public speeches, jay-walking, or smoking/drinking/eating on the immaculately clean MRT (metro) system. I frequently forget about the no drinking law, which incurs a fine of $250 (even for water), always glancing around guiltily and hoping nobody will report me. Yet on the other hand, drinking alcohol in the streets is perfectly legal, as is prostitution. It’s a bizarre country of contradictions.

The National University of Singapore campus itself is absolutely stunning: dotted with exotic banyan trees and set among gentle hills with hi-tech and state-of-the-art academic and sports facilities all served by (usually) efficient shuttle buses, which also visit the main halls of residence.

Finally, arguably the best thing about Singapore is the incredible opportunity to travel around Southeast Asia very cheaply, taking budget airlines and staying in hostels even just for the weekend due to its proximity to some of the world’s best travel hotspots. It’s only halfway through the first semester and I’ve already been to Malaysia, Brunei, Bali, Java and Bintan (Indonesia) with trips to climb Mt. Kinabalu and tour Thailand on the cards. And I’m not at all rich, especially after having my wallet (and all cards) stolen in Bali.

The food is immense, the culture diverse, the transport cheap and efficient and most of all it’s a very safe city. It makes a pleasant change from living in Longsight.

University of Tennessee
Jessica Higham

Before I left Manchester for Knoxville, Tennessee I thought it would be no competition. I have always loved Manchester and felt that it could never be kicked off its number one place in my heart. It was a case of city vs. campus, my own room vs. sharing, and rain vs. sun (though that latter competition wasn’t too hard fought).

However, Knoxville surprised me and won me round. Those who know me know that this took a while – I was incredibly homesick for the first month or so and found it hard to be somewhere where I only knew a few people, but I don’t think I could have been anywhere more welcoming. The school spirit at Tennessee is mega, and possibly something Manchester could take on board. Everyone is dressed in swathes of orange, with big T’s emblazoned across their chest. You can’t avoid it and it definitely helps that you feel a part of the university.

Sharing a room might seem outrageous to most people back home, but you really do get used to it. Yes, you have to learn to embrace the other person’s alarm and their strange sleeping habits, but after a month or so it becomes second nature. In fact, when I came home to my room it felt strange to be on my own. You get so used to having someone else there. There was one thing at Knoxville that I didn’t succumb too, and that was the backpack and gym shorts combo that everyone sports. When we arrived in Knoxville it was snowing, so I went for the shorts and tights look that many of us in Manchester wear when the weather gets a bit chilly. The stares I got. They had barely ever seen tights before, let alone paired with shorts. If you ever have a doubt about whether you’re fashionable or not, head on over to Knoxville and be put at ease, they adore the English way of dressing (not to mention the accent).

If going to America on study abroad has done one thing for me, it’s completely boosted my self-confidence and what I know I’m now capable of. I would recommend it to everyone, even those home birds who think the idea is a bit daunting – you do come home eventually, and when you do you’ll feel like a new person.
Jess Higham, American Studies, went on exchange to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in semester 2 last year.

If you are feeling inspired by any of this and would like to find what options you might have to study abroad as part of your Manchester degree, then here’s a date for your diary! The annual Study Abroad Fair will take place Tues 25 October, 12 – 4pm in the Whitworth Hall. There you can chat to Manchester students who’ve already been abroad on exchange as well as Study Abroad Unit staff to find out more about the programme. There’ll also be representatives from the Study China and Seoul Summer Study programmes, and the Careers Service who can help advise you on internships abroad/ postgraduate study abroad. Do remember though, the application deadline for many destinations are 15 December 2011. For more information see: www.studentnet.manchester.ac.uk/studyabroad or email: goabroad@manchester.ac.uk. Nothing to lose by having a look.

John Rylands

‘John Rylands’ is perhaps name we all refer to most. Rylands was Manchester’s first multi-millionaire. Born in Lancashire in 1801 of humble origins, he was the third son of the cotton manufacturer Joseph Rylands. Clearly something in his blood then, as it was in cotton that John Rylands also made his own fortune.

In 1819, at the age of 18, he joined up with his father and two brothers to form Rylands and Sons. Selling cotton and various other textiles, the business started well and they became manufacturers as well as merchants.

The company continued to develop and John became the sole proprietor in 1838. It was here that, using his extraordinarily shrewd business mind and keen eye for trading, he was able to accumulate such a large fortune.

Rylands became part of a trade with a world-wide network of commerce. With his 17 mills and factories, he employed over 15,000 people and produced over 35 tons of cloth a day. At the time of his death in 1888 aged 87, his estate was worth £2.5m (£213m today).

Despite amassing such a large fortune, John Rylands remained a modest man. He rejected the chance to join the social circles of landed gentry and aristocracy in London, preferring to focus his attention on business. His Christian beliefs were unwavering however, and the majority of his philanthropy was driven by religion. This included the building of orphanages and houses for aged widows and public baths for his hometown of Stretford. Indeed, he never forgot his roots, and much of his philanthropy took place here in Manchester.

John Rylands is one of the best examples of the emerging ‘Manchester men’ at that time. With few advantages to facilitate growth, Manchester’s early boom relied on these ambitious businessmen and traders. It is the place it is today because of innovators like this one.

So why the library? Well, the University links are merely incidental. With the money left to her, Rylands third wife Enriqueta founded a public library in Deansgate in her husband’s honour. Opening in 1899, she continued to privately support it, donating hundreds of thousands of pounds for published works and expansions.  It was not until 1972 that it was merged with The University of Manchester. Today the library in Deansgate remains a popular attraction due to its architecture and wealth of resources.

Sir Joseph Whitworth

Sir Joseph Whitworth was one of the great mechanical engineers of the Victorian era. His name can be found dotted around Manchester, including Whitworth Park, Whitworth Art Gallery and of course, the Whitworth building at The University of Manchester.  As Whitworth Hall hosts the annual clapping marathon that is your graduation, it might be interesting to know a bit about him.

Sir Joseph Whitworth was born to a schoolmaster in Stockport, 1803. By the time he reached his teenage years, he was working for his uncle’s cotton mill and his enthusiasm for mechanics was clear. A man of great ambition, Whitworth left this job against his family’s wishes at the age of 18 and took up a position at Crighton and Co., a leading mechanics company in Manchester.

By 1833 he was showing no signs of slowing down. After working under tool inventor Henry Maudsley in London, he returned to Manchester and started his own company. It focused on machine tools, which Whitworth realised was in great demand there because of the expanding railway network. During this time, he invented a new way of creating flat surfaces that became the standard method within industry.

Whitworth also developed the world’s first standard for screw threads, offering new levels of precision. Enormously influential, it came to dominate British manufacturing and railway networks, drastically improving the capabilities of mass production.  The Whitworth thread, or variations of it, is still commonly used today.

In the latter stages of his career, he worked for the military and developed the Whitworth rifle, intended to replace the Enfield. However, despite its obvious superiority, it was deemed too expensive and a disgruntled Whitworth instead controversially sold it to the Confederates for their Civil War across the pond.

But as Whitworth grew older, he would spend more of his time in Monaco. It was here, in Monte Carlo, that the great engineer died aged 83.

Though today not carrying the name recognition of Industrial Revolution figures such as James Watt or Richard Arkwright, Sir Joseph Whitworth is undoubtedly a major player when one is looking at industrial growth not just in Manchester, but all of Britain. He was perhaps the greatest mechanical engineer Britain ever produced.

Manchester duly pays its respects to Whitworth, but there are reasons behind the building selections. In his lifetime he emphasized the value of technical education, starting up the Whitworth Scholarship and helping found the Manchester School of Design. The University honour him today with the Whitworth Building and Whitworth Hall because this devotion.

After his death, philanthropy in his name continued, for he directed his trustees to spend his fortune on philanthropic projects. The Whitworth Art Gallery was founded from this, as was Whitworth Park.

Ernest Rutherford

Though the fifth of thirteen children, physicist Ernest Rutherford was certainly a unique mind. His contributions to nuclear physics were historic, and much of his greatest research was completed while working at the University of Manchester.

Ernest Rutherford was born in New Zealand where he was educated, thanks to a scholarship, at the prestigious Nelson College. He showed early interest in physics, and was eager to take up further study. Having achieved a double first in Mathematics and Physics at The University of New Zealand, Rutherford took up positions at Cambridge and then Montreal. It was at Montreal where he developed his disintegration theory. This treated radioactive phenomena as atomic – not molecular – processes. Several radioactive substances were discovered and Rutherford’s work here would win him a Nobel Prize.

But unusually, Rutherford’s best work was completed after this honour. In 1907 he accepted a position at The University of Manchester and irreversibly transformed the Physics department here. His attitude and enthusiasm flowed through the department and his disarming yet determined personality brought resources and supplies previously unattainable.

Rutherford’s research shifted focus from radioactivity to atomic structure and in 1909 he proposed the Rutherford Atom. It came from the research done alongside Hans Geiger and Earnst Marsden and disproved the old ‘plum-pudding’ model. The Rutherford Atom theorized the existence of an atomic nucleus- the implications of this to nuclear physics needs no explanation.

But Rutherford was still yet to ‘live the first line of his obituary’ for in 1917, he theorized the splitting of the atom by converting nitrogen to oxygen. It was – according scientist Manjit Kumar – the true dawn of the nuclear age.

As a man, Rutherford was as engaging as he was brilliant. A tall figure with a loud laugh, his friend Mark Oliphant described him as jovial, humble and energetic. He had a capacity for great compassion, too. In the 1930’s, Rutherford served as President of the Academic Assistance Council, a group that assisted Jewish scientists escaping Germany. He would go to great lengths to assist them, scraping money together for them until they found permanent posts.

In 1937, Ernest Rutherford died aged just 66 from a partially strangulated umbilical hernia. His wife Mary survived him, but sadly not his daughter Eileen, who had died in 1930. Rutherford lectured in the building holding his name, a reminder that the University was graced with the greatest nuclear scientist in history.

Alan Turing

The story of mathematician Alan Turing is both enthralling and heartbreaking. Unlike the previous names, the building here is named after him perhaps less for his contribution to the University or the city, and more to serve as a reminder that the freedom enjoyed here today was not without great sacrifice.

Alan Turing was born in 1912 to a middle class family. By the time he reached 10 he was already expressing interest in science.

This enthusiasm continued into his education. Attending the independent Sherborne School, Turing initially felt lonely and isolated. However, his ability shone while developing his first homosexual love interest for his friend and fellow science enthusiast, Christopher Morcom. Devastatingly for Turing though, Morcom died from Tuberculosis during his first year at Cambridge. It would scar Turing permanently, proving a barrier in future relationships and kick-starting his fascination with Artificial Intelligence.

He attended Cambridge also, obtaining a first-class degree in 1934. Three years later, Alan Turing had his first major breakthrough with the ‘Turing Machine’. Designed initially as a thought experiment, it proved that such a machine could perform any mathematical computation if representable as an algorism.  The Turing Machine was a giant leap in the evolution of computing.

When World War Two broke out, he turned his attention to cryptology. With this, Alan Turing was about to become not just a great innovator of mathematics and technology, but a British war hero of epic proportions.

The Germans were anxious not to allow their communication lines to become compromised and used the Enigma machine to scramble messages. Alan Turing and a team of experts were recruited to work at now-famous Bletchley Park to decrypt these machines. Here, Turing invented the Bomba, a specially designed machine intended to do just that. Intelligence gained was referred to as ‘Ultra’, and by 1941 the Bomba successes were paying serious dividends. The anticipating Allied forces ambushed German U-boats again and again and helped keep Germany out of Egypt.

Turing’s war heroics led to an OBE and a position here at the University of Manchester in 1948. However, by now Turing was focusing his attention on the more abstract idea of Artificial Intelligence. He wrote pieces on the potential of computers and what constituted ‘intelligent behaviour’. It is a debate that rages on today.

Relatively speaking, Turing had long accepted his homosexuality. But post-war Britain was a different world for gay people. In 1952, while still living in Manchester, Turing embarked on a sexual relationship with a man named Arnold Murray. Murray betrayed him though, attempting to burgle his house. He believed that Turing would be too fearful of having to reveal their criminal sexual behaviour to the police when reporting him. Murray underestimated Turing. A man of immense personal integrity, he admitted to the affair in order to prosecute Murray.

What happened next was pure tragedy. Turing was charged with gross indecency and faced the choice of prison or castration. He chose the latter, knowing prison would cost him his job at Manchester. Two years later, he committed suicide by biting an apple filled with cyanide.

His work and mood had begun to suffer somewhat, but it remained a shock to his friends and family. Historian Andrew Hodges says of his motives,

“To ask what caused his death is like asking what caused the First World War.”

Alan Turing’s story is unique in its ability to provoke simultaneous feelings of both immense pride and absolute revulsion towards our nation’s history.  It is the story of an eccentric, homosexual mathematician who took on Nazi Germany. A man Winston Churchill once remarked had made the greatest single contribution to Allied victory. A man Winston Churchill’s government condemned to misery and reclusion.

But that is a measure of how big a deal social networking is for young people now. Facebook alone is so huge it could have had a UN vote on the Libyan intervention. Blogging and twitter have led to the free spread of ideas that inspired the Arab Spring. No need for bald Russian communists waving red pamphlets any more.  But do students really appreciate the permanence and widespread accessibility of what they are writing?

What a worrying thought it is that in 20 years time our children might go on facebook and see all of our student shenanigans. How unsettling that potential partners can look you up and discover things you might prefer to keep private: like who you used to date or what your family are really like. But perhaps most seriously, how disturbing that an employer you hope might hire you can, with just a few clicks, ‘google’ you  -  stumbling onto posts or pictures that seem to say anything but “employable”.

When social networking emerged it offered the opportunity for free expression, putting a megaphone to the unfiltered voice of the common man. Now though, it appears to be doing just the opposite. Obsessed and restricted with who might see our content, the damage it can do our career, or what it says about our identity, are we now simply on a personal ‘branding’ exercise, selling a version of ourselves crafted for the attention of employers and peers? It’s worth looking at how widespread social network screening is on the part of employers.

Dangers of a digital footprint

When you made your latest status update I doubt if you were thinking, “I wonder if this will help get me a job”. But it seems you probably should be. Careerbuilder.com reported that 45% of employers admitted to researching their candidates on social networking sites before hiring them.

And it doesn’t stop if you’re lucky enough to get the gig. Just look at Kimberly Swan, the 16 year old girl fired from her office job after calling it “boring” on facebook. Or 28 year old Matthew Brown, a supervisor for Starbucks. He was sacked for criticising the company on his travel blog, despite using a different username and having a limited audience. Some might argue that employers are well within their right to use your online material as a kind of second, informal reference. You could make the case that, despite the fact that office jobs like Kimberly Swan’s often can be boring, employees are the front line of the company they work for, with a duty to respect it. But then, Michael Brown’s blog was for his family. Kimberly Swan’s facebook was for communicating with friends. How can she be allowed to complain that her job is boring to her friends in conversation, but not able to write it to them on a website designed for social interaction. Not at least without seeing it as a risk.

Who’s following your footprints?

Besides, it could go far beyond careless remarks that reach the boss: because tracking your ‘digital footprint’ is so easy now. Consider this hypothetical example. An employer is choosing between two equally qualified candidates that he will have to work closely with for months. He checks them out on facebook and notices that the first candidate is, like him, a staunch Labour voter while the second is a Thatcherite Tory. Believing he will connect more with the Labour voter, he rejects the latter. You can sympathise with the rationale of the employer, but the rejected candidate has been turned down because of information about him that is irrelevant to how qualified he is and only available thanks to facebook.

And don’t think your safe with a pseudonym. In a competition challenging you to provide the best idea for improvements to their online content, the DVD rental website Netflix gave all entrants access to their entire database. Despite making it anonymous, two PhD students from the University of Texas were quickly able to cross-reference the database with reviews posted on IMDB (Internet Movie Database). It exposed private matters, such as people’s sexuality and political affiliations. What makes this especially worrying is that people, when under the guise of another name, usually decide to be more open than they would in the real world.

Facebook- A second CV?

Career advisors have clocked onto this and will now strongly emphasise the importance of your online identity. It’s not unusual to be advised by them against posting racy or controversial blogs and images – because you never know who could see them. Instead, increasing numbers of professional advisors will tell you ways to create a “positive image”. There are even companies, like Reputation.com, that will do it for you. They can swamp the first few pages of a search for your name with your website and career information while simultaneously removing your name from other objectionable websites.

But what are the consequences of this? Well, we now find ourselves reluctant to write anything controversial for fear of putting off companies you may want to work for one day. Is it now the case that if you want a job at the BBC, you shouldn’t write critical blogs about their programmes? If you want to be politician, should your Twitter be forever clean of references to drugs? At the rate social networking is expanding, the requirement may soon be to keep your politics centrist, your nights out tame, and even your friends ‘respectable’.

I find that very worrying. Consciously stopping yourself from writing a potentially interesting blog on a taboo subject or even just refusing to allow pictures from a stag night to appear sets a dangerous precedent. Do we really want an online community populated by heavily edited people with nothing but self-made propaganda to their name? I don’t think so, but it seems ‘branding’ yourself is becoming a paramount consideration.

People as brands

This kind of ‘branding’ is also apparent within our personal relationships. In the real world, varying social contexts will naturally shape your persona. When you’re with your work friends, you might be very different to how you are with your with school friends. But on facebook, you can’t interchange so easily and you’re forced to create a universal identity for everyone you know. It’s an issue for students, especially because we are starting a whole new chapter in our lives when coming to university. New friends, new hobbies, new surroundings. Yet, if you were hoping to reinvent yourself, you’ll now struggle when your uni friends can see all the pictures and online correspondence you ever had with your friends and family back home. Boyfriends and girlfriends can read up on ex’s and your life at school on a scale never before possible.

So, as with careers, the thought that goes into our personal ‘brand’ is not just centred on what we would like people to think of us now, but what they might be led to think of us in the future. You can’t click ‘undo’ on the Internet. For example, once you have made your relationship ‘facebook official’, there may be a part of you that dreads the possibility that one day you’ll have to change it back to “single” and everyone you’ve ever met will know all at once. Or it could just be that your mother pesters you to be her friend on facebook, meaning you might have to change the tone of your comments and pictures that appear.

Ultimately, the sheer enormity of social networking has brought with it some fantastic benefits and innovations of communication that are plain to see. But with that scale of impact comes risk, both personal and professional, because your ‘digital footprint’ can be seen by anyone. With our mothers and employers scanning through our material, is a reverse phenomenon taking place? Social networking created openness and visibility, but this visibility has developed into a big brother style “everybody is watching you” culture, Then, all that is left is at best a neutral, inoffensive and probably a bit unrealistically ordinary identity, and at worst a carefully constructed advert of ourselves.

But for those of you still a little anxious about the coming days, weeks and months, I’m going to try and ease those nerves with some advice drawn from my own calamitous experiences. The point is: whatever could go wrong is never as bad as it seems at the time.

To start this, let me take you back a year with one embarrassing story of mine that took place during Freshe- sorry, ‘Welcome Week’.

On my second day at Manchester, having noted down the wrong room for an induction, I attended a post-grad sociology seminar. I managed to arrive at this wrong seminar late. So, the tutor had already started when I sat down and I slowly realised my mistake. But with my stupidity matched only by pride, I just sat frozen, unable to leave and beginning to feel like Mr. Bean.

I desperately looked around for a way out- a fire exit or an open window maybe. Time passed and all rationality left me. It was the worst thing that had happened to anyone ever. My now frantic eyes caught those of the tutor. Shit. She asked me, in front of everyone, to rate the supervisor I’d been allocated the previous year. What could I do? She had seen me nodding along to what she was saying. I was in too deep. I cleared my throat and pondered over the performance of my imaginary supervisor. I gave him a 4 out of 5.

But she wasn’t done. Then she asked what it was about him that impressed me. “Organised and approachable” I blurted out. Well, you can’t argue with that. There aren’t many jobs that prefer disorganisation and hostility. Ok, so I blagged that. But then the tutor split us into groups to collect ideas. It had finally gone to far. 15 minutes too late, with three smiling sociologists staring wide-eyed and waiting for my thoughts on their discussion, I stood up and simply walked out with my head held high. Ok, it may have been a brisk walk. With a hint of a short run. And I don’t even do sociology.

There is a point to that humiliating story. While this edition of The Mancunion will be filled with some great advice on how to make the most of everything, I don’t feel I am any expert on getting it right. So my initial concept, to tell you about cool places to go and the importance of being yourself etc. etc. is now being thrown away in favour of a “it really doesn’t matter if you screw things up” theme inspired by some of my own mistakes.

Control the purse strings

Avoid rash purchases. When I got all that cash suddenly in my student account, I spent £80 on a pair of Adidas limited edition Chewbacca trainers, complete with wookie fur… Ok that’s a bad example for a rash purchase; everyone knows those things are an obvious babe magnet.

For most of us though, the student loan will be the first time you will have access to that much free (sort of…) money in one go. But student loans do have to go a long way. Save money pre-drinking. Make your own lunch instead of going for the ever-enticing £5 Dominos deal. Or share stuff with your flatmates. And by ‘share’ I mean mooch off. You won’t need 6 sets of pots and pans, so see what you can get away with using. And I know it’s tempting, with all that money now available, to go straight to ASOS.com and convince yourself that, because its been reduced from £150 to £100, you are actually up £50. But you’re not. Believe me, you’re not. Overdrafts can only be extended so much.

Keep it all organised

Make sure your stuff is well coordinated and safe. I thought I didn’t need a keychain, which was just plain stupid.  I quickly lost it at a club and spent £40 replacing it the next day. Of course being a massive idiot, I decided I still didn’t need a keychain and went to Squirrels bar that night, where I lost it for a second time in 2 days. With the one available replacement gone, I spent the week with an unlocked room, where my flatmates hilariously turned every single thing upside down. An unlocked room seems translate into “group space to play FIFA and Call of Duty”, where you come home to find your Kettle chips raided (not a sustainable choice of crisps on a student loan even without theft) by a man with a seemingly endless appetite. This advice goes for your notes too. I can tell you from experience, losing all your lecture notes two weeks before an exam makes revision a complete bitch.

Life and soul of the party, not live entertainment.

Get completely ‘MC hammered’ by all means but just try not to be the worst, or unshakable nicknames may be bestowed upon you. Residents in my halls were quick to do this last year with one exceptionally drunk girl, resulting in her being given an almost mythical status for drinking. Show signs of losing self-control before everyone else and you will be targeted during drinking games. Stand back a bit until others are beyond the point of return and you won’t end up having to explain, like a peckish friend of mine did, why you’re buttering a folded tea towel for a post-nightout sandwich.  But, if you are one of the ‘usual suspects’ back home: relax, most people will make idiots of themselves and as such, no one is judged. Just mocked profusely.

Ignore your old reservations

For example, I’ve always been a fan of the football game Pro Evolution Soccer. But in university halls, everyone seems to play FIFA. People assume Pro Evo players are a socially odd breed who skype their cats. I guess everyone just tired of playing Merseyside Blue Vs Teesside and playing Roberto Larcos at the back for Brazil. I took the plunge, moved to FIFA and never looked back. Put aside misgivings and be open to anything. You may be raising your eyebrows to that inane example, but jumping ship was a painful decision.

Other bits of info

Ok, the advice I’ve dished out is probably a bit of a given to more sensible, organised folk. But there are some other small ways in which you will find yourself re-thinking a few assumptions, finding a few new habits and taking a fresh approach.

For instance, when it comes to clubs this week try and buy your tickets in advance and get to the desired venue by 11 at the absolute latest to avoid ‘one-in-one-out’ queuing.

Also, check out the city early on by having a wander, it makes it seem far less daunting once you get to know the place. Stagecoach bus passes are worth investing in, too. Anyone that tells you, “I’m just going to walk, it’s better for you” has obviously never lived in Manchester in January and God will reward their healthy smugness accordingly.

Finally, lecturers will tell you time and time again this week that Wikipedia is the root of all evil, the web-spawn of Satan. It isn’t. While I would never reference it in an essay, Wikipedia can usually give you a decent overview and often gives some good links to other, more respected sources. Lets be honest, Wikipedia has taken us all this far. Don’t let lecturers panic you into thinking you’re now on your own.

Hopefully, you can see that if a buffoon who pretends to be a sociology post-grad can get used to the overwhelming surroundings and tricky essays, then you will have no problem. The important thing to remember when reading this is that, despite feeling like I was making endless calamities, I’m still here. You’re unlikely to make or break lifelong friendships or ruin your degree in week one.

On second thoughts, the only real way of avoiding a shallow and lonely university experience is to come and write with me for the features section. Best unbiased piece of advice I can give you. So get in touch.

Anjelique Stevenson-Taylor

As you may well know, thousands of people from abroad depend upon special visas in order to live here in the UK. People from all over the world travel to the UK for everything, from business trips, for holidays, to be with their loved ones, or to further their education. In order to receive a visa, we have to go through the nightmare of gathering all relevant documents and proof that you can pay, and send these off to the nearest UK Borders Agency home offices whilst waiting with bated breath. If you manage to get through, then kudos, if not, you’ve just wasted many weeks of your life, and that’s not including the hundreds of dollars, euros, or yen to get here.

What is being proposed?

UK Borders Agency and the government are trying to bring in measures designed to crack down on the number of bogus colleges, which exist only to give out fake qualifications to immigrants so that they can stay and work in Britain. They also wish to abolish the Tier 1 Post-Study work visa option (see box) and abolish the ability for students to work whilst studying in their undergraduate or postgraduate courses, whether they’re bringing family or not. This is based on two premises. Firstly, that international students that come here for study to the UK should only come to study, and are obligated to leave once they complete their studies. Secondly, that they have the option to stay longer for work by applying for a Tier 1 Highly Skilled Worker, or Tier 2 (General) Skilled Worker routes within the four extra months given to them to stay in the UK in their student visas after graduation.

The main advantage of this major overhaul of the student visa system is the guarantee that International students will be going into schools that provide excellent education with evidence of exceptional standards of regulation. This should ensure that whichever courses we apply for will be readily available, marketable, worthwhile, and not a waste of our money. These changes will also ensure that wherever the international student comes from, their credentials are satisfactory, true, and exceptional in their own merit. It will also ensure that the reason for students to initially come to the UK is, in fact, for study purposes, and that they wish to study at high-end institutions, (and not necessarily the most expensive).

In light of the subject, I must also protest the one advantage that the government seems to be especially keen on, and that is the complete eradication of the Tier 1 post-study work route. They would like to impose tighter rules on the tier four general student visa. There are several major, blinding disadvantages to this case.

Work

The eradication of the ability for students to work outside their degree is a severely abstract and unrealistic idea. As a child in the United States, going into school or college for the first time, I had no clue of what I’d like to do once I graduated. We must be mindful to not impose such harsh restrictions that will cause those who really wish to come and stay in the UK for study, and possibly for work in the future, to subsequently not come at all. Not everyone is looking to stay here. It should not be impossible for people to look for work where they can find it, regardless of which country they are in. If they have applicable skills and education for a job in a specific sector, then it should be justifiably utilised for the benefit of everyone.

Whether we have paid in hand, or borrowed the money from our own governments or banks we still need to pay that money back – at the end if the day it is our own personal cost. If getting a job in the UK for a year or two can suffice to help ease the pain after graduation to pay these institutions back, the better off everyone is. When we come here we still go to shop at Marks & Spencer’s. We still buy coffee in Manchester’s cafes. We still fill our rented cars with your petrol, buy your bicycles to get around, and pay your fares for the trips on public transport.

The government are stooping low when they say that international students “don’t do anything but overfill the bill of immigrants to the UK” and it is unfair. It’s easy to say: “we want you out after you done, thanks for coming and giving us your money’, but for many students who have spent every last penny on getting their high-end education, it is not as easy to just get up and leave afterwards.

Money

I come from a family who had nothing. I am the first generation to have ever even tried to go beyond high school for further education. Truth be told, I try to make my family proud with this costly endeavour, and yes, after I’m done, I will need to get a job, be it here or back in the US.

I’ve come to love England since I’ve spent time here, and in all sincerity, would like to stay and further my education. But if it has to come at a larger financial risk, I would have to just say screw it. I, and many others like me, have come here on these difficult terms, with less and less, just to even have a possibility of surviving the world financial crisis or to achieve our goals in life. If our sacrifices, blood, sweat, and tears are not enough to sway the hearts and pockets of those in the immigration sector, then I say to hell with it.

Some of us will undoubtedly go back home after the academic venture is over, others of us will want to stay, for numerous different reasons, and not just because we’re trying to escape one side of the fence to another. I have found many good friends here, and even found the love of my life, and to suddenly get shuttled back with nowhere to turn to after I’m done with my study would be devastating to me. These are very trying and stressful times. We worry about students, who are at most trying to be compliant with the huge number of rules and regulations atop of their studies and private lives.

The scale and reasons for this cut-down have some legitimacy, because immigration all over the world in certain places has gone array, but you have to seriously look at the consequences of such actions.

If we look at this from another angle, what if all the international students simply never came here in the first place? I have been told by my own professors and teachers in this University that international fees are the bulk of incoming resources and finance for many UK institutions, for new skilled employment, and for research and development.

Ending a lot of the perks for international students would stifle our commitment and ability to come here or go anywhere else, and it would end up causing a lot of hurt in the business and education sectors for the entirety of the UK. Fewer institutions are giving money for international students to come and study. Certain courses have gone through budget cuts already, to the point where some course programs like Fine Arts, Psychology, and other humanities are looking to become second rate options, and possibly cut out of college altogether.

So before you act, think of this: do you want England to end up on the bottom tier of lists of possible places to go to work or study? People think times are tough now. If controversial acts like this come about, it could possibly unnerve others around the world, weakening ties to other countries, on an economic, academic, and political scale. It may fix things in the short-term, but the long-term consequences are inevitable. If born and bred British people cannot seem to fill job vacancies for specific reasons, (and I do see them quite often on jobs.ac.uk), then some hope does lie in outsourcing from students, especially if we do have the skills to do the job and that is not a question or issue at all.

Anjelique Stevenson-Taylor is a Masters of Research postgraduate student from the United States, attending at the School of Psychological Sciences in the University of Manchester.

Words and photographs by Gareth Lewis

So how well did you eat last week? I enjoyed Hong Kong’s finest Michelin Star Dumplings for the princely sum of £4.70. I bet you couldn’t even buy peanuts for that price at Heston’s Fat Duck. Tim Ho Wan is renowned by food magazines everywhere for its hours long queues, tiny dining area and of course the best Dim Sum this side of Kowloon. It’s something I felt I had to experience whilst here.

My personal bucket list for Hong Kong rates a lot of eating activities near the top, along with drinking the night away in the Lan Kwai Fong district, ‘boosting my Buddha count’ in the city’s many temples, trekking around Hong Kong’s country parks and seeing one of the world’s most iconic skylines lit up by the ‘symphony of lights’ from the romantic setting of the Star Ferry. One might be forgiven for thinking I’d come on holiday. To be fair, having spent my reading week in Laos and Cambodia (yes, Angkor Wat is amazing), it’s hard to remember that I’ve got lectures to attend at the University of Hong Kong. For, in reality, I am not an intrepid traveller, but a humble exchange student. Though it’s difficult to keep focus sometimes.

This, it seems to me, is the classic exchange experience. The first month I arrived in Hong Kong, I had a blast and in this city-like-no-other, it’s easy to see why. From gambling at horse races to drinks at one of the world’s highest ‘skybars’, there is almost nothing you can’t do here. At the back of my mind however, I knew this wasn’t the real Hong Kong. It wasn’t a real student experience either. I wouldn’t do all that stuff back in Manchester. So this has been my mission these past weeks: To find out how an actual Hong Kong University student experiences life in the fast lane. This much I know.

It’s appropriate that I begin writing this article at 2am. It’s very reflective of the work/life balance here. I write to you from the 13th floor of my hall of residence, accompanied by the group screaming of my hall sports teams. The screaming, for the life of me I still don’t understand the purpose of the screaming. Students start their work late, very late. Just last week I came back from a night out, wandered into my hall kitchen to see one of my friends settling down on the sofa to read some article for a tutorial for the next day. It was 5am. But this commitment to work isn’t the respectful obedience Manchester students may expect from a Chinese university. Many local students don’t turn up to lectures and when they do, I can hardly hear the professor through all the chatting and snoring. I asked a friend why Hong Kong students do this, and the answer was surprising. Apparently lecturers at HKU aren’t held in very high esteem, either for their grasp of the English language or expertise in their field. My friend thinks most students trust themselves more than their lecturer – I suggested this might not be a mutually exclusive decision. At HKU the idea that learning can be conducted beyond the textbook is not something students are comfortable with.

In some ways, this can be refreshing, but also stifling. It means that during tutorials, students are generally well prepared and an informed discussion of academic points of view is possible. Exchange students will often find that trying to debate opinions with a local student is like trying to draw blood out of a stone, but this is not my experience. Possibly the most enjoyable tutorial of my university career was a discussion on the merits of a Confucian society. The news is often full of stories about China taking offense to slights against its culture but I didn’t feel at all inhibited from criticizing the central figure of Chinese philosophy. This is perhaps a good example of the difficulty of explaining modern Hong Kong’s role in China.

Certainly when I talk to the local students, there is no love lost for the mainland. They are highly critical both of their own government and of the mainland’s attempts to disenfranchise Hong Kong. At Beijing’s insistence, direct elections for the Chief Executive office of Hong Kong (basically the Prime Minister of Hong Kong but with more executive powers) and for the Legislative Council (Hong Kong’s parliament) are deferred to 2017. HKU Student’s Union voted overwhelmingly in 1998 to house the Pillar of Shame, a monument to the Tiananmen Square massacre, on HKU grounds; candle-lit vigils are held there every year in May.

Beyond this, little can be seen of students’ political activism. You won’t find any ‘Free Palestine’ leaflets shoved in your face and not one copy of the Socialist Worker strewn across campus. Beyond Hong Kong’s own sovereignty, politics is generally a subject kept to oneself. It’s not an impolite subject, just not talked about. Indeed, this privacy about higher ideals can be seen in the University’s approach to its students.

I can’t walk five minutes around campus without coming across at least two different career fairs, business society stands or CV workshops. The point of a degree here is clear – to get a job and get on in life. Private companies sponsor societies and their activities. Financial executives speak at forums where they are fawned over by suited and booted business undergraduates. This career-focused (almost obsessive) education can be confusing to the foreigner. If you ask any HKU student, they will tell you that high academic results are the be all and end all of your career.  This is an educational culture where work experience is held in very low regard. Westerners may ask, in these job-straightened times, how you can get employed without professional experience?

This is where Hong Kong’s rapacious capitalist culture comes into its own, through the form of networking. Both studying at university and working at the heart of European politics in Brussels, I have never experienced networking practiced with such ease and on such a scale as I have here in Hong Kong. A business card is a must for students. Indeed, I was handed one in the University coffee shop earlier today. Had it been given to me in John Rylands, my private prejudices about that person would most likely have involved unprintable expletives, but here it is the norm, expected even. Having to write down my email on a scrap of paper on several occasions has left me more than a little self-conscious of the incredulous stares of my newly made contacts, stunned that I might use such a primitive means of communication. The exchange of contact details is an automatic part of any conversation here. It’s not necessarily as cynical and exploitative as you might expect. People here are genuinely interested to know you, regardless of what use you may be to them professionally.

And of course, Hong Kong University’s position as the best university in Asia gives it a certain star power in attracting speakers like former British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion as well as hosting smaller, career focused events such as the excellent ‘Green Jobs for a Green Economy’ forum. Walking around campus, one gets the sense that the university has been built for a single purpose, and for local students the only escape from this seems to be within the strictures of hall life.

Hall life was a bit of a culture shock for me. Even for a former boarding school boy, sleeping  less than four feet away from your roommate leaves you yearning for a privacy that is impossible to achieve in this city. Each floor of the hall tower block is called a village and your floormates, villagers. We meet for village soup every Tuesday at midnight and have village dinners at a restaurant every month. All this contributes to a sense of family. Indeed, that’s exactly the point, say my fellow villagers.

For exchange students, the family can seem a bit dysfunctional. I know I am not alone in struggling to integrate or make friends with the local students, but I hesitate to distinguish between myself and the locals. For one of my HKU friends recently spoke to me of similar problems he had when moving into halls: whilst immersed in the sound and fury of Hong Kong life, he still found it possible to be lonely, to be removed and isolated from the energy of his hallmates. Given how close at quarters we students are to each other, I found this a confusing and humbling thought.

The students were perfectly welcoming when I arrived in halls, but it’s hard to get beyond this. There isn’t a pub culture among students here to help to break the ice. The only options really are coffee or a meal, neither of which really provide the necessary social lubrication. Besides, it’s not really how Hong Kong’s students like to make friends. It seems that they either decide they like you and spend their time with you, or not. But I don’t want to seem unsympathetic to the culture here. After going out of my way to join in with societies and club activities, I have found firm friends among HKU students.

I know exchange friends who haven’t got that far yet, or wish they had been able to make friends, or tell me they need to make more of an effort to do so. It’s really not an insurmountable difficulty when you get over the idea that it’s the same as making friends in Manchester. Suffice to say, when you make friends, experiencing the city becomes something different and more intense than the extended holiday it can seem like with other exchange students. You get taken to the cheapest dim sum cafes at 3am, calmest barbeque beaches and most bustling markets as if you really do live in Hong Kong. You have to see it to believe it.

Photography by Nicholas and Michael Bojdo

The words ‘Canal’ and ‘Manchester’ may nowadays be most associated with a famous street, but 250 years ago they became synonymous with the dawn of a new era in Britain. The world at that time was changing dramatically, as pioneers of new technology invented machines that would bring the fruits of manual labour to the wider world and propel standards of living to levels beyond imagination. Between 1740 and 1901 the population increased fivefold thanks to improved living conditions, sanitation and healthcare. During that time the urban landscape of Manchester changed considerably, thanks in part to the emergence of a new transport system: the Canal.

Early Beginnings

The first waterway to penetrate Manchester was the Bridgewater Canal, built by Sir Francis Egerton in 1759 to transport coal from the mine he owned at Worsley in west Manchester, into the city centre at Castlefield. Having been inspired by the French canals he witnessed on a ‘Grand Tour’ of Western Europe, Egerton was keen to set up a direct connection between his vast coal resource and the burgeoning city. Goods at the time were already being carried by boat along navigable rivers, but at the cost of tolls, increasing congestion, and most importantly the rivers’ self-made, inconvenient route.The construction of canals allowed products to be transported directly from sites that had become established in the absence of fresh water, such as coal and fragile pottery. Up until that point, the only means of reaching such sites was a horse-drawn cart on a bumpy road. Pulling a fully-loaded 30-tonne barge, the same animal could transport 25 times as much coal in half the time. As a result the price of coal in Manchester plummeted, attracting investors to increasingly mechanised industry and workers to heated factories.

As Egerton reaped the rewards of his endeavour, the benefit of canals became clear to all. Constructors found no trouble in finding funds from prospecting share-holders eager to make a quick profit, and started laying out routes to potteries, mills and coal pits nationwide. The period of ‘Canal Mania’ had begun, and soon the network was reaching out all over Britain.

Industrial Revolution

By the turn of the 19^th Century, Britain’s Industrial Revolution was in full swing. An improved, coal-powered steam engine invented by James Watt in 1775 was soon integrated into the cotton spinning process, facilitating rapid production rates in the textile industry. Coupled with the expanding network of canals, such changes negated the need for proximity to a fast-flowing river when building a cotton mill. Industrialists exploited this benefit by building new mills closer to a workforce and raw materials. The canals played their part by supplying the mills with coal and cotton (imported from North America) and delivering finished products around the country.

One route that really became the backbone of the textile industry in the North of England was the Leeds & Liverpool canal. Covering a distance of 127 miles, it traversed the Pennines, cutting through towns such Bradford, Burnley, Blackburn and Wigan, contributing to their emergence as centres of industry. Also lying on the canal’s route on the outskirts of Bradford is the model-village of Saltaire, a beautiful example of Victorian socialist utopia. Its founder, Sir Titus Salt, built the village to house the workers of his new textile mill, providing their families with all the amenities to enjoy an elevated standard of living: a local library, a school, a concert hall and a church, plus accommodation with running water. It remains a physical legacy of industrial Britain, and an ever-present reminder of the importance of the textile industry.

But you don’t need to travel to God’s Own Country to see evidence of industrial Britain. Much of Manchester’s urban landscape owes its form to the status the city held in the mid 19^th century. Thanks to its prime location, abundant workforce, and high concentration of investors, inventors, and innovators, Manchester had become the global epicentre of the cotton industry. The 100 or so cotton mills that emerged in Manchester, shaping in particular the area of Ancoats, led to the city being dubbed ‘Cottonopolis’. While signs of the factories still remain in Ancoats today, it was the construction of almost 2,000 warehouses in the city, to which Manchester owes its legendary look.

These warehouses were built by factory owners, not only for storage, but also the displaying of finished products, and can still be seen today along Whitworth Street and Portland Street. To make large-scale cotton trading easier, Sir Oswald Mosley built the glorious Victorian Royal Exchange in the city centre in 1829, which served as a trading hall. Equally impressive were the many lavish banks that also became established in the city to lend money to traders and keep safe investors’ returns. Many banks still serve the same purpose from the same buildings today, in Manchester’s Central Business District.

The city of Manchester was well and truly on the global map. In fact, the name became so synonymous with cotton products that it replaced the word ‘linen’ in New Zealand, and is still used so today. Canals continued to play a part, but were facing increasing competition from the railways, to which investors were now turning. The technology of steam power that had once gone hand-in-hand with the emergence of canals, was now threatening their very existence.

Manchester Ship Canal

The spread of railways began in the 1840s, and soon led to their dominance in the transport of goods in the latter half of the century. Many canals were bought by the railway companies to penetrate competitors’ territories or to be filled in and used for routes. Canals that remained lost their economic viability and became platforms for communities of boatmen who, with very little work, resided on the waterways with their families. However, Manchester’s aquatic scene remained resilient to change and underwent a mini-revival towards the latter half of the century, in a development that would thrust the city into an even more prosperous 20^th century.

In 1887, work began on the building of a new canal in Manchester. This came about as a solution to the growing taxes currently incurred at Liverpool, in the transit of goods en route to Manchester. At 36-miles long, the canal bypassed the Albert docks and permitted huge transatlantic liners to continue their journeys inland, negating the cost of transferring goods to rail before reaching Manchester. It followed the original route of the Irwell and the Mersey, arriving into the West of Manchester at Trafford and opening out into what has become the now famous Salford Quays.

The canal served as Manchester’s portal to America. To cope with the enormous levels of trade, Manchester needed some docks of its own. Ultimately two were built: Pomona Docks to the east, and the larger Salford Docks to the west. Of the produce that was brought into the docks, most frequently carried by the ‘Manchester Liners’ was grain, frozen meat and live cattle. The influx of such goods was reflected in the rapidly developing urban landscape.

The access to imported goods prompted expansion of the industrial estate into Trafford Park. In the early 20^th century it attracted many American firms such as Ford Motor Company and later Kellogg’s, while providing a base for newly establishing British companies. Household names like the penicillin-producer ICI and the Spitfire engine-manufacturer Rolls-Royce settled in; but it is perhaps the story of Mancunian Arthur Brooke that lends itself best to the legacy of Trafford Park. It was to here that Brooke moved from his little tea shop on Market Street to mass-blend his product ‘Pre-Gest Tee’ with the ‘tips’ of tea leaves imported from India and China. It is claimed that 35 million cups of PG Tips tea are now consumed in Britain every day.

The jobs created by the growth of Trafford Park and Salford Docks helped to buffer the impact of the Great Depression on the people of Manchester. Yet the area would not have existed without the construction of the giant waterways and the sea-linked artery that fed them. One needs only to head by tram to Salford Quays ­to see the legacy of this period: in the stops announced along the way – such as ‘Pomona’ – in the huge blue rusting cranes that line the docks; or in the names of apartment blocks like  Labrador Quay, that echo the origins of the great vessels that once steamed up the Manchester Ship Canal.

Modern times

Despite the strong connection with an industrial Britain of the past, canals remain to this day vital yarns in the fabric of both urban and rural life. In the cities they serve as a peaceful and attractive backdrop to residential development, as well as arenas for sporting events such as boating and canoeing. In the countryside, they stretch out along green meadows and traverse wonderful feats of engineering such as aqueducts and complex lock sequences, passing old riverside pubs along the way to provide a pleasant stage for calm and leisurely boating holidays.

The increasing number of tourists floating along the canal routes of Britain may interact with another of the waterways’ users: cyclists. The ‘Sustrans’ charity, whose aim is to promote sustainable transport, was set up in the late seventies and teamed up with the owners of the canal network, British Waterways, a few years later to improve the condition of towpaths along the many routes nationwide. Thirty years on, the Sustrans network now covers over 10,000 miles, many of which are waymarked out along canals. The National Route 66, for example, follows on its proposed route from Kingston-upon-Hull to Manchester parts of the Leeds & Liverpool and the Rochdale canals. The pleasance of the canal side coupled with the absence of traffic, make such transport routes ideal for this green form of travel.

As the 21^st century unfolds and threat of climate change increases, it is not only in providing cycle routes that canals are contributing to a greener Britain. In 2007 the Manchester Ship Canal was thrust back into action, when Tesco announced it would used the route to carry 1.6 million litres of wine into Manchester each week, saving 700,000 haulage miles per year. Given the enormous impact that canals bestowed on Britain in the Industrial Revolution, it seems rather poetic that this great system should once again be seen as a cheap alternative to the roads. The only difference this time, is in the currency.

Arrested and in prison for their religion: Iran

Sara Azadi interviews Rev. Sam Yeghnazar about the imprisonment of Christians in Iran. Rev. Sam Yeghnazar is one of the oldest Christian Iranian Leaders and has been working with hundreds of Iranian church leaders for the last 50 years.

“Every Muslim has the right to hear the message of the gospel – they have the right to reject it. But they should have the right to accept it. Unless we do give people the right, then we are not for freedom.

SA: Do you know any of those that have been arrested personally?

SY: I don’t know them all but I know a number of them. You meet some of them in different conferences. Frankly speaking, whatever I say the authorities may read. A question like that can implicate them.

SA: Ok, I understand. But you say that you know them personally, what was your reaction to this news?

SY: Well we were expecting that things like this would happen. During the last thirty years of the Islamic Revolution, Christian leaders have been arrested – some of them have been killed and one of them was even  hanged in Mashhad prison. So the persecution of Christian leaders and Christian believers is not something new. Very specifically, in the last number of months the authorities one after another started making statements; public statements about the wide spreading of house churches in Iran and also wide distribution of the Bible and the New Testament. On the 19^th October the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, mentioned that house churches are on the increase and this is the plot of the enemies to undermine the Islamic people and Iran by cultural invasion. After that we knew that the government is going to take some steps to upscale the persecution in Iran.

SA: Could you please explain what a ‘house church’ is?

SY: Well, you see, Christianity in Iran is an officially recognized religion. But in practice they have only allowed the ethnic Armenians and ethnic Assyrians who are Christians to operate relatively more freely. The Armenian and Assyrian Orthodox and Catholic churches will not allow non-Assyrians and non-Armenians to come in, especially those from Iranian Muslim backgrounds. The Iranians who come to the Christian faith have no option but to meet in homes to perform their religious worship. They have no other choice. The actions of the authorities have pushed them underground. There are evangelical churches and in some of these evangelical churches you have majority Muslim background Christians, although usually the pastor of that would be of ethnic Armenian or Assyrian background.

These churches were registered before the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic regime has actually closed down a number of them and has tolerated a number of them, although they are not now officially registered: their registration is no longer valid. They are frequently under surveillance, they have to sign documents saying that they will not allow Muslims into the church and they have to submit the names of church members who are from Muslim background, and some of them are tolerated. But the number is very limited.

SA: There have been claims that those in prison are ‘deviant’ and are not mainline Christians. Is there any truth to these claims?

SY: The term that the authorities have used is ‘Evangelical Christians’, and this term, Evangelical Christians covers 638 million people in this world. Since the term deviant was used the World Evangelical Fellowship has made a statement saying that these people are legitimate part of the Evangelical church worldwide and many leading Christian clerics are making statements such as the Archbishop of Uganda, and others.

SA: Do you believe that if they did not evangelise they would be left alone? If so, why isn’t the church advising Christians to stay quiet about their faith?

SY: Why should they keep quiet? […] When people are suffering and they have no hope and they are depressed, if you give them a message of hope that’s not a crime. The illegal people are the government, they are working against their own constitution, against human rights. They don’t have the right to be part of the United Nations if they cannot control themselves.

[The Iranian government] are threatened by anyone that does not belong to the ruling party. If you are not in the right, you are terrified. Why is it that they are not working in public? They won’t survive. They have to be in their armoured vehicles and be protected by men who carry guns because their life is not safe. They have brought it upon themselves.

SA: Let’s talk about those that are in prison. Do you know what the conditions are like?

Iranian prison is not a pleasant place to be. [The prisoners] are intimidated, they are threatened that if they don’t cooperate there are going to be serious consequences. There is sleep deprivation, they are blindfolded for hours and chained. They are interrogated. Questions will be repeated so many times to make [prisoners] tired so they can make a mistake. [The interrogators] will say anything possible to really bring them down, psychologically affect them – so there is also psychological torture.

[Prisoners have reported that the authorities also use tricks] they would call and say: ‘Your house has been broken into by thieves and so come quickly to the police station because we have put a new lock on your door, so come fast so we can go to your house and see what items have been taken,’ as if they have caught the thieves. This way they can bring people to the police station and arrest them. Some people have gone and been arrested and been kept for over a month, and some people have just gone into hiding.

We have also heard the threat of sexual abuse. They say: ‘If you don’t recant your faith, sign documents and betray people or tell us who else is in the network then we bring someone very close to you, family member who is a woman and we will violate her in front of you’ – this type of thing. But you will appreciate that we only know about the cases that have been reported, and when people have been arrested we don’t know their case; [psychological] torture, rape and physical torture has regularly been reported. On average three people a day are being executed in Iran, for a variety of reasons.

There are also parents in prison and the children have been left. [The authorities] have not had any regard for them; they just came and took the parents in front of their young teenage children. Also we have people who have been taken to prison and their elderly parents have been threatened. They are in a miserable condition, because they don’t know what has happened to their children.

According to the Iranian constitution, no one is allowed to be inquisitioned or investigated about their faith. So what is happening is anti the Iranian constitution. Now, not only they are taken for what they believe, but also they have to pay an exorbitant amount of bail to come out. So if someone has a property, they have to risk that property. If they [the authorities] can blame the victim after being freed on bail for doing something wrong, then the property is in danger.

So the livelihood of people is put under question. If they come out of prison then for some time they will be in a very difficult situation, and the family would…when somebody is in panic, then it’s not a pleasant situation. I should also say that there are brave Christian leaders, the finest people that you could imagine, and they take this gladly, they consider it an honour to be persecuted and harshly treated for a belief that is so precious for them. They are the courageous ones and the persecutors are the cowards, who cannot face anyone having a belief other than their own. So they are the threatened ones, not the Christians.

SA:  What has been the reaction to this in the Christian community and what is your message to the Iranian government?

From Church history, over 2000 years, we see where persecution has increased; the net result has been even more spread of the Christian faith. We have messages of support coming from across the world.. Scores of countries are writing to affirm their solidarity with the Iranian Christians in prison, and they are mentioning that these are legitimate part of the body of the church worldwide. And they are very much encouraged by the character, commitment and the stand of these Christians.

There are more than twenty Christians now in prison, some of them three months in prison, four months in prison, some of them just over a month in prison. We ask the Iranian Government to respect the undertaking they have made internationally, the documents they have signed;  they have agreed to honour documents that the government before them had signed, including the human rights act. They have broken that. We ask them for the immediate release of Christian prisoners without bail, and also to allow them to worship God. If they don’t want Christians to meet in house churches they should allow the construction of churches. As they have that freedom in other countries. They build mosques, nobody interferes. Christians in Iran are not from the west. Christianity has been in Iran for a long time, when you read the Bible, you can see that there are four, five books in the Bible, four books particularly, that have been written in Iran. They are part of Iranian history.

Esther was the Queen of Iran, Daniel was the prime minister of Iran, and these are two prominent books. The most famous Kings of Iran, Cyrus, Darius they are mentioned there, their decrees are there and there is quite a high honour in the Bible for them as well. So it is very much an Iranian religion and it is such a horrible crime to treat the people of Iran who are turning to a religion that has been in Iran seven centuries before Islam has come in this terrible way. So we pray that God will give our countries just leaders that will respect basic human rights.

SA: What is your message to the Christians in Iran?

SY: My message to the Christians in Iran is that Jesus said to his disciples that they would face persecution and the way they treated Jesus they would treat his followers the same. So persecution is not a strange thing that’s happening. I remind them of the promise that Jesus gave: ‘Lo, I am with you always’ so right in the prison, right in the persecution, you know that his presence is with them. My message is ‘hold on, as hard as the persecution may seem, it’s going to pass and what they are investing through their persecution is going to bring great reward.’

SA: And finally, what is your message to mainline Muslims worldwide?

Muslims are asking for freedom, wherever they are. We can see what’s happening in Egypt, people want to have freedom to speak. The Iranian regime is not giving freedom to Muslims as well. Sunni Muslims are not treated properly, and the Islamic mystics are not treated well, they are being persecuted as well. So I would ask the peace loving Muslims also raise their voices and have the statements to say that Christians in Iran have the right to practice their religion. I would say that every Iranian has the right to hear the message of the gospel; in fact, every Muslim has the right to hear the message of the gospel. He has the right to read the New Testament, the Bible; he has the right to read Shakespeare, or any other writer. They have the right to reject it. But they should have the right to accept it. Unless we do give people the right, then we are not for freedom.

University of Manchester professor Hillel Steiner is a world-renowned thinker on matters of political theory. Features Editor Nick Renaud-Komiya met up with him to chew the fat on Libertarianism, politics and the state of higher

Do you have the right to the fruits of your talents? This seems like a simple question. Yet, people have gone to war over this question; those who say ‘yes’ have fought those who say ‘no’. Libertarianism? Socialism? Communism? All of these ‘-isms’ are essentially attempts to answer this question in one way or another. Are you and you alone the arbiter of your lot in life? Or do you have a duty to help others and they you?

Shortly before the Christmas break, the Manchester Debating Union hosted a public debate asking this very question – thankfully, there wasn’t any violence. One of the debaters was Professor Hillel Steiner. For someone who has often been described as one of the foremost contemporary political philosophers, Steiner, 68, cuts a very relaxed and modest figure.

In addition to his extensive writing on rights and theories of justice, Steiner’s claim to intellectual fame is his pioneering of the ideas of Left-Libertarianism. Having taught at the University of Manchester for over 40 years, he is now officially retired, although he continues to mentor PhD students in addition to teaching part-time at the University of Salford.  It’s not everyday that you get the chance to meet someone who essentially created a political ideology. The Mancunion went to meet the man himself.

Nick Renaud-Komiya: Libertarian is an often-misunderstood term. Would you give readers a summary of what Left-libertarianism is in a nutshell?

Hillel Steiner: What all libertarians have in common, right or left, is a dislike of an over-extended state, a state that is involved in too many spheres of social activity. Right-libertarianism might just stop at that. Likewise, Left-libertarianism agrees that it doesn’t want an over-extended state, leaving a lot to market forces and to voluntary exchange. But, it is concerned also about the distribution of property rights in society.

Right-libertarians just seem to take the existing distribution of property as legitimate, however it came about. Whether you conquered it from Native Americans or bought it with hard-earned money and so on. Whatever is yours legally Right-libertarians think is yours morally as well. Therefore, they say the state shouldn’t interfere because you’re just disposing of what’s yours morally.

In contrast, Left-libertarians say what is yours legally might not be yours morally, it all depends how you got it. They are very focused on the Lockean idea that, when it comes to appropriating natural resources such as land, it’s not a matter of moral indifference as to who gets how much. All the stuff that’s not a product of human labour has to be divided equally. That’s obviously a complicated demand to fulfill in view of an almost infinite succession of generations.

In a nutshell, Left-libertarians hold that people who own natural resources have to pay taxes on them, which should then be distributed equally to everyone. The tax, or what I get out of that tax revenue, is my compensation for not owning land or natural resources to which I should be as entitled to as their current legal owners are.

NRK: What is the Left-libertarian view on direct action and student protest? Is it justifiable within that realm of Libertarianism?

HS: Libertarianism has nothing really distinctive to say about this particular issue. I personally think, and I guess most Libertarians right or left would think, that if you have a just cause then you should be allowed to express it. Anything to advance that cause is legitimate as long as it doesn’t encroach on the legitimate rights of other people. By this I mean the legitimate rights of other people, not the legal rights of other people. Those two are different things.

Libertarians are only interested in legitimate rights. That is, if someone who should not be as wealthy as he actually is, sees some of his wealth trampled on in the course of a student demonstration, for example, then Left-libertarians will not lose sleep over that. But, you wouldn’t want student demonstration resulting in, say, broken windows in poor people’s neighbourhoods.

NRK: Talking about just cause, what are your views on the big issue of the moment, the increase in tuition fees and spending cuts on arts subjects?

HS: I’m not really clear that these cuts are unjustified. Statistics seem to show that people with university degrees have, on average (and of course with important exceptions), much higher lifetime earning prospects than people without degrees. That’s an argument for inviting more people to get degrees, and making it easier. But, it’s also an argument for charging those people a certain amount for the privilege of getting into a category within the labour market with greater earning power.

Whether the best way of charging students is through raised fees, a post-graduation tax or a system of raised fees plus loans that don’t need to be repaid until the beneficiary starts earning a particular income level, neither libertarianism nor, I think, any other political theory has any clear answer. But, the idea that people should pay for what ultimately is going to bring a lifetime advantage strikes me as fair enough.

NRK: A big argument against these fee rises is that university education benefits society as a whole, in a more abstract, broad way. So, everyone should contribute to university education. Is it a valid point?

HS: I’ve got a very long and complicated answer, but it is essentially true. We’ll leave aside the sciences and medicine because it’s very clear how they benefit society. The big question is how do the social sciences and especially the humanities benefit society? How does society benefit from graduates doing an archaeological dig in Egypt, for example? That’s harder to say. Perhaps you could say that a modern society that doesn’t support the humanities is going to find itself sooner or later importing a lot of its cultural entertainment, like television shows.

It’s also the case, though, that aspects of those disciplines are, in a sense, public goods, useful to everybody. We all want see museums. But, if other people are willing to pay for them, or pay for whatever is necessary to maintain them, like archaeologists, then why should I pay? Economists understand well that a collective good like a museum, can only be supplied by government, generally speaking. If private enterprise can do it, then as far as Libertarians are concerned, let them do it.

We don’t want the government supplying us with apples, for example, because private enterprise does that well enough. The same cannot be said of museums. Museums and other products of the humanities and social sciences are public goods and need to be funded by government via the tax system.

NRK: How do you think the British higher education system has fared since you first started living and studying here in the sixties?

HS: When I started in the sixties, I was immediately involved in teaching undergraduates as a PhD student. In our department at that time we had an average of seven students per one-hour tutorial group. Now, I’m not even sure they bother to call them tutorial groups. They’re more seminar groups and have 25 people. Certainly, by the time I finished teaching two years ago the average tutorial group was about twelve.

Only eight per cent of each generational cohort in this country went to university when I started teaching. Now it’s about 45 per cent. Of course, this number rose sharply with the doubling in the number of universities in 1990/91. Even if you had combined the attendance to both universities and polytechnics, when I started the number was a lot lower than 45 per cent.

The effect of the increase in student population is that it has changed to some extent the culture. When I started teaching, if students got a bad mark on an essay they were embarrassed and apologised to the tutor [laughs], promising to do better next time. Today, when students get bad marks there’s a chance they will come to see the tutor with their lawyer in tow. They certainly can be a lot more indignant. University education tends to be seen now more often like a vocational preparation, something to equip you with at least a credential, if not the skills, to get a better job.

NRK: Do you think that is a change for the worse?

HS: I can’t honestly say that. It’s certainly nicer to teach students who are intrinsically interested in the material rather than just instrumentally interested in what you’re teaching them. Because it’s very difficult to separate these two groups, they all have to be taught together and the teacher has got to find the right balance to accommodate both expectations. It’s certainly challenging. I think it’s good that there’s a larger proportion of each generation going to university today than in my days.

NRK: How does David Cameron’s much-trumpeted Big Society concept come across to you as a Libertarian? Do you see any merit in it?

HS: [Sighs] Oh, I have no idea. I’ve always been and as far as I can imagine will always be a member of the Labour Party. I think the Labour Party’s heart is in the right place, but sometimes its head is not. The party has a hostility to the market that I believe is just a superstition. David Cameron’s Tories are obviously much more pragmatic than Margaret Thatcher. Insofar as the idea of the Big Society has a connotation of lots of volunteer groups doing certain things in the neighbourhood and in their towns, as a Libertarian I like that. I really think that people on the left who are critical of this approach are being ungenerous. The idea that the state should do everything for us is really one about which we have to grow up.

Cameron’s right in that he’s hit on this idea of reducing the state. As a Libertarian and even as a Left Libertarian, I support this move. But I would like to see accompanying it a wealth distributing policy that is obviously lacking and will never occur under a Tory government. The kind of redistribution policy, and this might bear on the tuition fee question earlier, that Left Libertarians on the whole favour goes under a number of forms.

One form is unconditional basic income. Rather than receiving an income from the welfare state based on one’s particular condition – single mum, disabled, etc – citizens get a guaranteed unconditional income. There’s a big worldwide movement in favour of unconditional basic income and most Left-libertarians support it.

An even more radical idea is not this unconditional basic income, but what’s called an unconditional ‘basic stake’. Instead of everybody receiving a monthly cheque from the state out of tax revenue, when they reach the age of 18 or 21, people get a huge capital stake, which they can choose to invest as they see fit. They can invest it in higher education, opening a small business or something along those lines. But everybody gets the same stake.

NRK: You’ve been described as a pioneer, a conference was held in your honour last year and a book based on your philosophy and containing essays from your colleagues was published in 2009. How do you respond to such accolades? Is it surreal?

HS: [Laughs] It’s a little surreal, also a little misleading. The basic ideas of this theory of Left-libertarianism have been around for centuries. An American philosopher and I published a two-volume anthology on Left-libertarianism. The first volume dwells on the concept’s history. Key ideas can be traced to Grotius, Locke, the Levellers and others.

All I’ve done is pick up on those ideas, try and excavate philosophical roots for them and see how they connect up with our general thinking about morality, politics, economics and rights, in particular. I make the concept of rights central to the whole theory. I guess I have pioneered the casting of this view of justice into modern analytical philosophy terms.

NRK: If you were given the opportunity to meet a political philosopher from the past, which one would it be?

HS: [Pregnant pause] Gosh. Well, it’s kind of corny, but I guess it would have to be Aristotle or Plato. I think I’ve got what all the others are saying. Aristotle and Plato, I’d like to push them a little bit more on what they said.

Sarah McCulloch

On Wednesday the 20^th of October George Osborne announced £81bn in cuts to public spending. This includes a 40 per cent cut, that’s £2.9bn, in higher education funding. Although it is still unclear where exactly the axe will fall at our universities, previous experience tells us that we can be sure these cuts will lead to course closures, staff job losses and a poorer quality of education.

As a Students’ Union we will not stand for these cuts. During the summer, we agreed to make our priority taking a stand against cuts to higher education. Since term began, we have been raising awareness amongst students about the cuts by running stalls at the Welcome Week Fair and every day at lunch times in the student union building. We have also been doing lecture shout-outs and door knocking. On the morning of the Comprehensive Spending Review we held anti-cuts fairground games, encouraging students to play Hoop-liar, throwing hoops over the faces of Nick Clegg and Vince Cable.

Support

At the last General Meeting, the student body passed policy endorsing everything we have done so far and empowered us to work further on the campaign. On the 10^th of November we are hoping to take 600 students down to London to demonstrate against the cuts to our education and the lifting of the cap on tuition fees. This event is being held in conjunction with the National Union of Students and the University and Colleges’ Union. Coach tickets are £5 from the box office in the student union building on Oxford Road, so why not join us?

Speaking to people about the campaign against higher education cuts generally gets a positive response; most students instinctively oppose the commodification and reduction in quality of their education. Every so often someone comes along asking, “But what is the alternative?” It’s a very fair question. How can we deal with the deficit without cutting public services?

Robin Hood?

The most immediate and effective option is to enforce taxation. Every year £70bn is lost through tax evasion and £25bn in tax avoidance by wealthy businesses and individuals. Due to cuts in staff £27.7bn in tax is uncollected by Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs every year. In September 2010, George Osborne intervened in an ongoing dispute between the HMRC and Vodafone, canceling Vodafone’s outstanding tax bill of £6bn. You read that correctly, £6bn. Andy Halford, Vodafone’s financial director, has been “advising” George Osborne on company tax.

That’s just enforcing the tax rules that we have already. Introducing a tax on financial speculation could also raise a great deal of money without unduly penalising financial speculators. Known as the ‘Robin Hood Tax’, a 0.05 per cent levy on risky investments could return almost £252bn globally a year.  Given that risky investments can make a return of up to 13%, this is hardly squeezing the rich.

Other alternatives include scrapping Trident, our nuclear deterrent. Yes, this is almost always mentioned by anti-government campaigners, but as we really aren’t going to be using a nuclear weapon any time soon, now or in the future, it’s not much of a deterrent. Scrapping Trident completely would save us £2bn a year (free education for everyone in the country costs only £3bn, remember).  We could also end the drug war, on which we spend £13bn a year prosecuting addicts and recreational users and imprisoning non-violent drug dealers.

Added together, these alternatives exceed the £89bn in cuts that George Osborne has announced that will “bring Britain back from the brink of bankruptcy”. These cuts are political choice, not inevitability. It’s important to remember that we are paying for a crisis we did not cause. The banking sector collapsing caused the crisis not the public sector. The coalition government talks about fairness, but why is it fair for the United States embassy to be exempted from £382 million in parking fines but we have to pay up to £7,000 a year for an inferior education?

The future

As a consequence of the reduction in public spending, the Comprehensive Spending Review looks set to create even further job losses. George Osborne himself estimates that there could be up to 490,000 public sector job losses.  What he hasn’t factored in is that because many businesses are dependant or heavily reliant on public sector contracts, dismantling the state will devastate the private sector as well, meaning nearly 700,000 private sector jobs could go.

This will create even more unemployment and an even heavier bill for taxpayers as hundreds of thousands of people land on Jobseekers’ Allowance. Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary has unsympathetically stated that people need to “get on the bus” and look for work. Duncan Smith and Osborne calculate that by reducing ‘welfare dependency’, the benefits scroungers they see everywhere will be forced to find work. However, for the tens of thousands of people who are disabled, sick, or just desperate to find work and unable to get it, the coming changes to the benefits systems simply mean more anxiety and uncertainty over how they will survive.

With businesses tightening their belts and the public sector being reduced by 19% over  the next four years, there simply aren’t half a million jobs out there to be had. Being in  education, students are currently insulated from this, but not once we graduate. Graduates are finding it hard enough to get a job after leaving university: with an extra half a million people with work experience also competing in the jobs market, the idea of putting yourself in £20,000 worth of debt with no guarantee of a job at the end of three years seems much less attractive.

The last Conservative-Liberal coalition government was in 1931. The government embarked on an austerity programme to deal with the deficit and promptly plunged the country into an economic crisis so deep that only the massive military expenditure and loans of World War II brought us out again – and the Prime Minister at the time, Ramsay MacDonald, lost his seat at the next election. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warned: “The best guess is that Britain in 2011 will look like Britain in 1931, or the United States in 1937, or Japan in 1997. That is, premature fiscal austerity will lead to a renewed economic slump. As always, those who refuse to learn from the past are  doomed to repeat it.”

There is another alternative to this scary future. Instead of cutting public spending, we could increase it. We have plenty of work to be done that would create new jobs and encourage our ailing economy. We could invest in renewable energy and high-speed rail links. We could build new housing for the 1.8m families on council house waiting lists. We could repair all those dodgy roads that make it a nightmare to travel on the bus.

There’s so much public infrastructure that we could invest in which would provide a public service while employing people. Employment means people have money to spend, people with money to spend want services and goods, which are supplied by businesses who pay tax – and suddenly we have a balanced economy again.

Unfortunately, George Osborne has made a different choice and taken a risk with our economy and our future that history has shown does not pay off. Soon we are all going to feel it, as our GPs become even busier, as our buses and trains become more expensive, and as our universities shut down courses, lay off staff, and introduce charges for once-free services.

Ever since the government set the target of fifty per cent of school-leavers attending university in the nineties, the higher education system has been struggling to adapt. The surge in student numbers has hugely overstretched university resources, and also raised the cost of higher education massively. Despite the hopes of the government, the graduate premium produced by a small proportion of young people going through university and into the professions was not simply conferred upon the swollen ranks of the new graduates. Instead, we have seen the devaluation of degrees and chronic graduate over-qualification and unemployment. With fierce competition in the current job market, more jobs now require a degree for a successful application – sucking more school leavers into higher education and fuelling the downward spiral.

The view I share with successive governments is that variable tuition fees are the answer to these problems. Tuition fees allow a student to decide for themselves whether or not a degree is worth the investment of time and money required, and serves to discourage people taking degrees that they don’t envision making a sufficient return – be that material or personal. In addition to covering the costs of higher education, by reducing the number of students they allow universities to concentrate their resources more effectively. By placing a tangible cost on your degree, they incentivise hard work to get your money’s worth. By curbing the flow of graduates flooding the employment market, they will help to stem degree devaluation and the graduate surplus, with its trickle down effects of raising barriers to employment for non-graduates who would otherwise be perfectly capable of doing the job.

My problem with the alternatives is that they encourage a high number of wasteful degrees, serve to penalise those who get good jobs out of their hard work and are innately unfair. Having higher education be free as it was before 1998 would be ruinously expensive and would require further tax rises on the working population, whilst a ‘graduate tax’ makes a poor return degree a risk-free option by having economically productive students pick up the tab for the rest as well as their own education. In either case, the burden of a lot of low-value degrees is placed upon the shoulders of the hard working.

There are as many definitions of fairness as there are human beings, but I do not believe that a degree is an entitlement. Nobody else owes you the right to spend three years as a student. If you value a degree enough to foot the bill for it you will, and if you don’t that is your decision and responsibility. Government grants and student loans mean that anyone who wants to go to university can do so without worrying about the upfront costs. But if you don’t think that your degree will boost your income enough to be worth paying for, you should reconsider it.

As for the commodification of higher education, it is really an inevitable consequence of trying to hugely raise student numbers. University has shifted from simply being a natural stage in the life cycle of the professional classes to a competitive investment in your employment prospects. There simply isn’t room in the ivory towers for fifty per cent of school leavers, and there never was.

After being exposed for the best part of a decade to media coverage of British soldiers fighting in foreign fields, it is getting easier for us to become desensitized, only to box it all up and store away in our minds. If these ongoing conflicts can be ‘zoned’ out, what of those of the recent past? Bosnia? Kosovo? Will our awareness of those simply peter out as well? Encounters with people like Nigel [see last page] brings these issues back into sharp focus.

This syndrome in some ways mirrors the phenomenon of so-called ‘Compassion Fatigue’ or ‘Oh Dear-ism’ that is experienced in public life in response to natural and humanitarian disasters. Scenes of disasters like the Pakistan floods, the earthquake in Haiti and now the Cholera outbreak there don’t elicit the kind of public reaction that they once would have done. We have seen it too many times before. There has been no Live Aid for Pakistan, nor has there been a flotilla of boats, filled with people sending aid to Haiti. This is not to say that we do not care at all, quite the contrary. Around campus today many good, selfless people work tirelessly, fund raising for these same charitable causes. However these people are a minority.

With the proliferation of television news media especially, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to say that many of us now have a similar reaction to hearing about Britain’s war dead. We mark grim milestones with little ceremony; 100, 200 and now as of last month 300 British combat-related deaths in Afghanistan since invasion in 2001. [Source: BBC News]

Of course it would be insanely presumptuous of me to think that what I write here reflects the views of all those who read this paper, especially when it comes to as contentious and important an issue as the way in which we view war. I can be confident in saying that a vast proportion of students here are aware of the fact that British soldiers are fighting overseas and are aware of the reasons this is the case, even if they disagree with them.

However can some of us help but feel this ‘fatigue’ given that we are constantly surrounded with reminders that our country is still at war, albeit on the other side of the world?

Arriving for our meeting, Nigel Le Fanu is dressed impeccably, complete in dark navy suit and old school tie. Sipping his coffee, he speaks slowly, but by no means minces his words.  A wicked sense of humour belies the distress he regularly feels due to the way he is treated by others, particularly his fellow students; he has been the subject of derision by other students due to his disability, the result of a gunshot wound to the head whilst serving in Afghanistan.

This is obviously upsetting, but Le Fanu remains resilient: “They’re just ignorant. They stare and they laugh at me. I try to keep my feelings to myself and bite my tongue until I get home – but tell them I forgive them.” Whether it is getting sneered at whilst cycling past Owens Park, or students pointing and laughing around campus, this debasing behaviour is an unflattering depiction of our ‘enlightened’ times.

Currently in his first year of post-doctoral Astrophysics research into event horizons, black holes and neutrinos, Le Fanu is a unique character with a fascinating story. Speaking about his life and time in the armed forces, his words are beguiling, touching and at times harrowing, but they are certainly never tinged with self-pity.

Before coming to study at the University of Manchester, Le Fanu was in the armed forces for 24 years, as a Royal Marine. Joining in 1980, he made the rank of Major just a year later. The Marines’ have a fierce reputation. Le Fanu explains their nickname “Booties”, or “Bootnecks”, a moniker referring to the neck collars they traditionally made out of boot leather, in order to prevent sailors slitting their throats whilst they guarded officers aboard British ships.

On paper, the list of places in which Le Fanu served reads like a comprehensive history of British military intervention over the last thirty years. His illustrious CV includes time served in The Falkland Islands, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan, yet he remains modest: “I can take the blood, bullets and bombs, but I don’t need any medals”.

On witnessing extremely active student groups debating and protesting the Israel-Palestine conflict around campus, Le Fanu reflects: “The conflict in Palestine has been going on since the year dot. I attended a talk on Palestine recently, and it struck me that more people should know about matters closer to home, like ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the insurgency in Northern Ireland.”

Le Fanu described in graphic detail the horror that confronted him whilst serving in Bosnia: “Because of the nature of my capacity in the armed forces, I’ve seen horrible things. I saw pregnant women shot dead in the Siege of Sarajevo”.

Le Fanu took the decision to adopt a Bosnian orphan, with help from the British Consulate. Both of her parents had been Bosnian Muslims, murdered during the period of ethnic cleansing that marked the break up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. She is now in her twenties and also lives in Manchester.

Being initially based in northern Iraq in 2001, deciding to move from one battleground to another, Le Fanu elected to be placed in Afghanistan, which is where he was wounded three years later.

“Six years ago I was tasked with taking command of ninety Royal Marines while posted in Afghanistan. We were stationed near the Kajaki Dam in Helmand Province. This was on my fifth tour of duty in the country. Each tour lasted six months. The Taliban had compounds approximately eight miles away from where we were stationed.

“We were given orders to take out the compound. This is what is known as a Tactical Advanced Battle. How long does it take you to walk eight miles? It took us two hours to reach the compound with all our weapons and ammo. We started to engage the enemy at 05:27. We were still taking incoming fire at 15:12, so I called in an air strike. A United States B1 bomber dropped 6,000 pounds of ordnance on the compound. Much to my consternation and perhaps even admiration they were still firing at us.

“An IED [Improvised Explosive Device] blew the arm and leg off a Marine in my command. He was only 22 years old. He was killed, then and there. But in a perverse way, [Le Fanu pauses] he was the lucky one. He died instantly.”

An all too common story, yet hearing these words from a fellow student, shocked me more than any news report could.

Le Fanu then makes a point of showing me the exact spot on the left side of his head, where he was shot during his sixth and final tour.

A widespread criticism of the government’s handling of the current war in Afghanistan is that those on the frontline are simply not being given the sufficient equipment needed: “We simply didn’t have the equipment we needed to do the job. There aren’t enough Snatchers (Purpose-built jeeps), and for 10,000 troops there are only eight Chinook helicopters, two of which are used for medical emergencies.”

I am shocked and appalled to discover that a typical Royal Marine earns the equivalent of £2.18 a day while on tour: “If you’re thinking about joining the armed forces,” Le Fanu intones, “approach me in the Union bar, I’m willing to give you advice.”

I feel humbled by the stories that Nigel Le Fanu chose to share with his fellow students, and find it difficult to stop thinking of his final words to me: “Those of us who were injured bear the legacy of the Blair/Brown ‘ideal’ in so much as they want something for nothing. This sentiment is shared by most people who work in the public sector.”

Advice was immediately issued to female students on how to protect themselves from similar attacks, from tips such as carrying personal alarms to never walking alone after dark.  I carry a personal alarm; doing so makes me feel safer and far from infringing on my liberties it actually increases them by enabling me to sometimes do things or go places with or in which I otherwise wouldn’t be comfortable.  The alarm is a tiny key ring and was free from the Women’s Office in the SU; the obtaining and use of it requiring virtually no effort on my part.

If someone were to ask me whether I thought attack alarms were beneficial, I would say yes.  However, if someone were to ask me whether I thought all women should carry them, I would say only if they want to, and if they don’t want to then that must be respected.  The key issue here is choice.  A woman must make her own choices with regards to this matter and furthermore she must not be judged for those choices.  Feeling safe is entirely subjective and can be dependent on a number of factors – past experience and environment being two that spring to mind – but is often random, and always personal.  I have female friends who have grown up in large cities who would never leave the house without an attack alarm, ones who have grown up in the countryside who would, and vice versa.

It is imperative that self-defense classes be widely offered in spaces used by women, such as community centres, workplaces and educative environments.  Having taken these classes in my second year I can say that I found them to be a largely positive and empowering experience that like the personal alarm increased rather than infringed on my liberties.  But again, attendance must be down to a matter of personal choice.

Removing this choice, by stating that these are steps women ‘should’ take, facilitates a situation where if women haven’t taken them then they become, in the eyes of society, partly responsible if something does happen to them.  This is dangerous and damaging in so many ways; it contributes to self-blame amongst victims and the shockingly low conviction rate for rape in the UK (estimated at around 6.5% compared to 74% for murder).

A woman never has a responsibility to ‘protect’ herself from rape.

A man always has a responsibility not to rape in the first place.

We don’t teach people who live in areas with high instances of gun crime to dodge bullets.  Why are emails not being sent out, posters put up, reminding men that no means no?

The matter of walking alone after dark (or not) is of particular importance.  I consider carrying an attack alarm and taking self-defense classes to be positive actions that enhance my life; they’re things I do rather than don’t do.

Not walking alone after dark however is a negative action, something I’m not doing.  It is an infringement of my liberties.  The fact is that personally I would not feel comfortable walking home alone in the early hours of the morning (I’m usually on my bike, but if not I would get a taxi).  But my housemates do not necessarily feel the same, and may enjoy walking more than I do.  And although I might not walk all the way back to my house on a quiet street in Victoria Park at 3am, I would walk a short distance from a bus stop or a long distance down Oxford Road after dark, and I will not be made to feel guilty for doing so.  Taxis are exceedingly expensive and unaffordable for some women – should they be denied a social life?

People often forget that in the vast majority of rape cases, the perpetrator is someone the victim knows, and will not attack her in a public place anyway.

I’m not actively advising women to walk the streets alone at night, or not carry an attack alarm, I’m merely stating that they should do whatever makes them feel comfortable, and if that is the aforementioned then they should not be made to feel like they are committing some sort of crime.

There is only ever one criminal in rape – the perpetrator.  I carry an attack alarm in the same way I use a burglar alarm.  But living in constant fear and planning your life around crime is no way to live.  Sadly it is inevitable that fear will seep into women’s lives from time to time, but when institutions start feeding this fear, what hope is there of keeping it in perspective and thus enabling women to enjoy their lives?