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Edge TV is now online with an archive so the Pat Mills interview may be available to view online if anyone has the inclination to look for it.

I have to correct myself here as the interest rates payable on the loan by the better off are higher than those who are worse off.

Off again:

The catch here is that the govt have created a cash-cow with this no fees upfront system and what is worse than that is the fact that the interest rates are linked to the RPI [retail price index] and the interest rates can go up as well as down and at todays rates you would be paying 7.6 percent interest [4.6 percent [RPI] + 3 percent] on a 30,000 loan on an income over 41,000.

They cant even offer/guarantee a fixed rate of interest.

What happens if you default on the loan payments ?

Why charge interest when they could simply charge the ex-student on 41,000 PA an extra £1000 per year [£19.23 pw] in tax to pay back a govt loan of 30,000 without interest @7.6 percent [£2,280 pa - £43.84 pw - £68,400 over the life of the loan which is 30 years] on top of the loan therefore paying back the actual costs they incurred to the taxpayer ?

The taxpayer is refunded so what is the problem ?

Student Loan:

total amount repayable :

Loan = 30,000 + Interest repayable at todays RPI [4.6 percent plus 3 percent = 7.6 percent pa over 30 yrs = 68,400 = 98,400.

£3,280 pa over 30 years.    



Since when did the Govt become a moneylender ?

Because the govt has created the Student Loan Company with unattractive/punitive rates of interest and there is no other way for a student to be able to borrow 30000 so its the SLC or nothing.Companies exist to make money and its immoral for a govt to set up a company to make money out of those who cant afford to tuition fees and top up fees rather than making adjustments to the taxation system.

Where does the revenue generated by the SLC go to ?

This company will almost certainly be registered as a private company in Dunn and Bradstreet so does it pay taxes on its earnings ?

I should think not.

Peter, why is it immoral to charge interest on tuition fees?  We all need a roof over our head and to achieve that most of us have to take out a mortgage.  

I would point out, it's not compulsory to go to university.  Most of the people I know who have achieved a good standard of living are self-employed builders, plumbers, electricians, etc., etc.  The most required attributes in the modern jobs market are a willingness to work hard, self-reliance, and flexibility, not a BA in Fine Art!!

There must be jobs out there, 'cos if I'm reading one of Ush's posts correctly, he's got three of them!!

"Is it immoral, therefore, for the banks to charge us interest on our loans?"

Yes it is as banks generate credit out of nothing and charge interest on the loan.Its all about generating as much income as possible in return so the whole system is exploitative and immoral.

I havent got much time for Strawman arguments as before i know it another half an hour has gone by.I am working as there are jobs out there and i am self employed.

[only]

Being as cynical as I am, I had to agree with my reactionary friend on another message board that the £9,000 a year fees are fair on poor students, only with the proviso that they never earn as much as £21,000 a year so long as they live, thus never having to repay a penny of their borrowing. We were, both of us, quite pleased with this elegant solution, which is course a bit of a gamble. How fair the higher fees are will depend entirely upon how certain you feel that you will never enter employment in a professional occupation subsequent to graduation. So long as your aspirations are more modest than to want to be a school teacher or a nurse, it looks like a fairly safe bet to me.

Interest on the loans is unfair because those who can afford to pay the tuition fees upfront will not have to take out the loan so therefore student loans are unfair in principle.

Even though a student who pays interest on the loan doesnt get anything more from the university than the student who pays upfront it costs them a LOT more in the long term.

This hardly seems fair to me.Everyone has an equal opportunity to go to University but the system favors the better off.

Debt slavery sounds fair to me and whats more if you are not from a better off background if you want to go to university you have NO choice but to take the offer of the loan which to me is exploitative.there is no need to "insinuate" anything either as this is all fact so its fair to say that the loan is off putting to some especially in this economic climate and you could say that while its not actually a barrier it is a deterrent.

This is hardly fair.

The comment i am referring to was Bollocks.

Next time make sure the Fluffy Monkey Woman doesnt have a hot water bottle inside her.

My wife said she was cold in bed last night 'Southerner ', it was only minus 1 at work for me (still T-shirt weather).
So tonight I decided to fill a hot waterbottle for her (it's inside a fluffy monkey, women.....), I am too nice really. Anyway, after I had filled it up I placed it between my thighs, as I filled the water filter back up. All of a sudden extreme heat registered on my left inner thigh, the fucker had only gone and leaked. Still, better to have a red thigh than a wet bed, unless you like that sort of thing!

It was an explosion of red hot Fluffy Monkey Woman love juice.



The confessions of CF.

After today's escapade at the student fees protest, and as someone who has recently left university, allow me to say that I find it difficult to sympathise with rioting students, irrespective of the issue at hand.

-Why are French students rioting about the retirement age? Most of them are barely twenty! They haven't done a day's work in their indolent lives! And the French retire earlier than most places in Europe as it is, so their petulant bleating (and smashing up of streets) completely fails to move me.

-It's all very well to talk about the halcyon Avalon of free university grants, but back in the 1970s 14% of British school leavers went on to university. Now it has more than trebled to 43%. Something's got to give somewhere. 

-For ****'s sake, for the umpteenth ****ing time, fees are not a barrier to entry[/u]. Under the student loan system you only have to pay once the degree is completed, and then only once you've reached a certain income level, so your background is irrelevant - and before you leap down my throat condemning me as the typical insensitive Tory, you should know that Vince Cable said the exact same thing.

We currently have what is misleadingly called a system of 'tuition fees'. Many people believe, wrongly that when students arrive at university they or their parents are required to get out their chequebooks, or wallets, and pay more than £3000 for a year's tuition.

The idea that students are repelled from higher education by fees owes much to this erroneous belief.

In reality of course most students meet these costs by taking a student loan, payable direct from income after graduation when earning a reasonable salary.

Cable goes on to criticise the current system in that someone like me (an archaeologist) has to pay a similar amount to a stockbroker with a higher salary, but there is no financial barrier stopping a salt-of-the-earth blue-collar honest-crust flat-cap working-class person from applying for law or medicine or any other upwardly mobile degree should he so desire. To insinuate otherwise is fearmongering agitprop from people deliberately trying to provoke a false crisis. In short, lies.

The clue is in the word "Loan"

Students are signing up to a loan which of course has interest added to it @ 3 points higher than the RPI.Also the Govt knows that most wont be able to pay off the full amount very quickly if at all so they work out a deduction scheme where pay is deducted @ 9 percent while still adding interest on top of the loan.The worse off in work after graduating will pay more interest on the loan than the better off.

Thats the bit you missed out

Its immoral to charge the student interest on top of the tuition fees.

Rufus Sewell



He's also be my first choice for Jesse in a Preacher movie with Tim Roth as Cassidey

Perfect.

Looks wise i've alway thought of this guy...Adrian-Grenier

NO.

I have got a nice job to do inside before Xmas and what is even better is i can get a taxi to work and back and get the expense of a taxi refunded from the Norwegian window company who is paying for my work as i am correcting the mistake they made with their own windows.Unfortunately its only 1 weeks work when more would have been nice.

That was meant to say " is different in Ireland "

I learnt to read out loud to others at school without having previously read the material i was reading.

Well, they obviously didn't teach it at the school Iain Duncan Smith went to.

What is even funnier than that is Teleprompters.



The next thing you know is they will need someone else to read it for them.

I'd be up for collabing with anyone if they're up for it - my brain is full of static competitions and dull ideas - !

Additionally I'd be up for meeting for an ale. ALE IS NICE.

My mind is full of dull competitions and static.

Such is life.

looks like I'm going to Ireland. Not just for the ale - not JUST for the squaxx company - BUT ALSO FOR THE WONDERFUL BARN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Barn

That is a wonderful barn!!

That doesnt look like any barn i have ever seen but perhaps the terminology for buildings in Ireland.

I would love to visit and explore Leap Castle:


http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Yf88wvg3cj0J:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_Castle+leap+castle&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=firefox-a

Why even BOTHER with X mas shopping crowds... let's do something completly different...

They won't bother us, especially after I ring in my bomb warning  

Havent we already had this conversation ??

[sigh...]

There seems to be a demand for CradleGrave to be collected and if it doesnt have a high page count then a collected edition would be cheap.

Just now watching Iain Duncan Smith reading aloud an evidently very difficult speech he hasn't read through in advance (or seen before?) thus tripping up over the parsing.

The Labour spokesman's response is much more clearly annunciated and his delivery is more measured, probably because he has rehearsed it and probably because he wrote it himself.

I learnt to read out loud to others at school without having previously read the material i was reading.

Rehearsing speeches.  

Thought I'd show this modified Judge Uniform from the Stallone flick
Notice the missing (and bulgy) Codpiece!
And the added zipper.

If we saw something like the modified uniform I wouldn't have a problem with it.

With or without the silly codpiece i always thought it looked cheap and plasticy/Tacky.The material it was made from looked wrong as well as it looked like nylon or Dralon.