As has been apparent for the last two and a half years, ever since the wretched Tory-led coalition government was formed, no area of British life — or more correctly, English life — is safe from the Tory butchers intent on destroying the state for malevolent ideological reasons.

Health, welfare, education — all have come under ferocious attack, as I have been reporting extensively for the last two years. An early target was education, as poorer school pupils had their financial support — the Education Maintenance Allowance — scrapped, and David Willetts, the minister for universities and science, presided over the near-tripling of university fees from £3,290 a year to a maximum of £9,000 a year, and the removal of all government support for arts, humanities and the social sciences.

A new organisation seeks to defend universities from Tory butchers

This week, a new body, the Council for the Defence of British Universities, is being launched. Its 66 founding members include David Attenborough, Alan Bennett, Melvyn Bragg, A.S. Byatt, Richard Dawkins, Michael Frayn and Andrew Motion, and, on its website, the CDBU states, “Britain’s universities are amongst the world’s best. But misguided policies are rapidly undermining them.” Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone with a heart would be hard-pressed to say that living in Tory Britain — with the particularly savage dolts currently in Downing Street and in the Cabinet — is anything less than an ordeal. Through their treatment of the disabled alone, ministers have taken a route that is thoroughly depressing on a permanent basis, as the government — and its overpaid puppets in the French multinational Atos Healthcare — systematically pursue a policy of making disabled people undergo tests designed to prove that they are fit for work — when they are not — to cut their state support.

The stress and the impoverishment of those who should be helped rather than put through this callous ordeal — and which is repeated if claimants manage to prove that they are unfit for work, or if they successfully appeal (as a majority do) — enrages me on a daily basis, but they are not the only casualties of the Tories’ shrinking state — one which, shockingly, public sector expenditure will plummet to a smaller percentage of GDP than the US by 2017. Read the rest of this entry »