Tag: Shadow Minister

Grants Not Debt – 2016

Grants Not Debt Protest Blocks Bridge: The previous week a parliamentary committee had scrapped the means-tested maintenance grants for for students and on Tuesday 19th January 2016 the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) organised a rally and protest to support that day’s Labour party debate against the action and the government’s flagrant denial of democratic process.

Grants Not Debt

Student maintenance grants to cover living costs were brought in in 1962, nicely in time for me to go to university the following year. Before that students from poorer homes had been reliant on awards by their counties, some more generous than others. UK students then paid no fees for their courses, and though New Labour abolished the grants in 1999 they brought them back in 2006 when they brought in higher course fees.

Grants Not Debt
David Bowie’s lyrics from ‘Changes’: ‘And these children that you spat on As they try to change their worlds Are immune to your consultations, They’re quite aware of what they’re going through’

In his 2015 budget, Tory Chancellor George Osborne had announced the intention to abolish grants and replace them with increased maintenance loans.

Grants Not Debt Clive Lewis
Clive Lewis MP

But the change was only actually brought in by a committee vote under the Education (Student Support) (Amendment) Regulations 2015. The Third Delegated Legislation Committee approved the changes for students beginning their courses in the 2016/17 academic year on Thursday 14 January 2016 by ten votes to eight.

Grants Not Debt

The amount of money students would be eligible to receive would not be changed (it would actually increase by inflation) but it would very nearly double the amount of debt for students from the poorest homes who had qualified for the full grant who would now end a three year course owing around £35,000 extra. Of course these amounts have greatly increased since 2016.

Grants Not Debt

Students living in London – as many of those at this protest were – would in 2025/6 be eligible for a maintenance loan of £13,762 in their first year – and a total well over £40,000 for their 3 year course. With the cost of tuition fees this would bring their total student loan up to around £70,000.

The rally began in Parliament Square and there were a number of speeches including from Labour Shadow Minister in Department of Energy and Climate Change Clive Lewis MP and Shelly Asquith the NUS Vice President (Welfare).

At the end of her speech the students decided it was time to take some action and began to march past the Houses of Parliament onto Westminster Bridge. Some had brought a banner ‘NO GRANTS = NO BRIDGE’.

On the bridge many of them sat down while others remained standing with their banners and traffic was blocked. A police officer tried to persuade Shelly Asquith to get the protesters to move but she ignored him and the protest continued.

Eventually the police managed to clear the north-bound carriage way but the protest continued to block traffic going south.

After an hour or so the protest appeared to be dying down, with some students leaving and although the protest was still continuing I decided to go too.

Many more pictures on My London Diary.

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Suicide Crisis

I hadn’t realised until I went to this event the terrible scale of the suicide crisis this country is now facing. It isn’t something that is entirely evenly distributed and I have to think for a long time to recall someone I know personally who has actually killed themselves. But while talking to a friend a few months ago she told me that over 20 people she had know had taken their own lives, all disabled people in desperate circumstances because of cuts in benefits, either because of unfair assessements or following benefit sanctions.

I had a shock a few weeks ago, waiting for a train at a busy London station, standing on the platform when something had clearly gone wrong, with railway staff running down the neighbouring platform to stop an incoming train. I glanced back down the track and quickly turned away as some distance away there was clearly a body and a great deal of blood on the line. My train was just coming in and I got on and left without knowing what had happened, but several times a year the trains on my own line are halted because someone has jumped in front of a train at another station.

The last person I knew who did so was a photographer, Bob Carlos Clarke, who in 2006 walked out of the Priory Hospital in Barnes and threw himself in front of a train at a nearby level crossing. A year or two earlier I’d had some long telephone conversations with him about his book ‘Shooting Sex: The Definitive Guide to Undressing Beautiful Strangers’ and he had sent me a CD-Rom with some of his pictures, though I don’t think I ever got round to writing more than a short note about it – it wasn’t my sort of photography.

I’d come across suicide – or rather attempted suicide – at a much closer distance in my teenage years when I’d actually interupted someone who was trying to electrocute themselves, pulling away one of the mains wires they had wrapped around a finger and had burnt into their flesh. It was an event that seared itself into my mind too.

What shocks me now are the statistics on teenage suicides, with UK official figures showing more than 200 school age children now kill themselves each year. The campaigners were laying out 200 pairs of shoes to represent these 200 fatalities, 200 lives ended. One of the main factors that lead to this is the failure of mental health services, which simply lack the resources to deal eefectively with the problem, particularly with the problems of young people. Speakers told some horrific stories of teenagers waiting for months to get the specialist care they desperately need or at being let down by what care is provided.

A number of MPs and others had pledged support and some were shown on posters with their promises in writing, GPs and psychatrists came to speak, along with both the Shadow Minister for Mental Health & Social Care Barbara Keeley and Shadow Secretary of State for Health Jon Ashworth came and pledged a Labour government to action. But unfortunately we haven’t got a Labour government.

More at: Stop the suicide crisis.

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