British Parliament Approves Sharp Increase in Tuition at English Universities
By Aisha Labi
Britain’s coalition government survived the first significant test of its durability on Thursday, when a contentious bill to allow universities in England to increase undergraduate tuition to as much as £9,000 a year—or more than $14,000— from the current rate of £3,290 passed by a vote of 323 to 302.
The increase, which will take effect for the academic year beginning in the autumn of 2012, will transform many English universities into the most expensive public institutions in the world. The average tuition and fees at public four-year institutions in the United States for the last academic year, by contrast, was $7,020. For England, the move marks a radical transformation for a system that did not even charge tuition until 1998.
some pertinent commentary from Richard Seymour
“Democracy is supposed to mean popular sovereignty, not the unimpeded rule of a no-mandate government. It is supposed to mean that the will of the majority governs, not the interests of the rich. It is supposed to mean at minimum that people get the policies they vote for, not those they are overwhelmingly hostile to. In liberal democratic theory, the people are sovereign inasmuch as their aspirations and prerogatives are effectively mediated through a pluralist party-political state. They may not get all that they want all of the time, but the decision-making process will be guided by the public mood, which rival parties must compete to capture and express. Yet this system has only ever been effective to the limited extent that it has been when it has been supplemented by militant extra-parliamentary pressure, by the threat of dispruption to stable governance and profit-accumulation. “
The rest is here
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/12/i-am-mob.html
Some nice festive music to go with that, part of the soundtrack of the demos