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Newsnight on student fees on BBC2 last night was a missed opportunity. Neither of the Oxbridge academics challenging David Willets made the crucial point that the fees increase replaces the teaching grant for arts & humanities which was removed in the government’s spending review announced earlier, and that the whole scheme is intended to complete […]
I should like to pay tribute to Oliver Stutchbury, who has died aged 84, and was instrumental back in the early 70s for helping me get started as a film-maker. I first met Oliver when I was a student at Sussex University and he was a part-time philosophy tutor—my first. In fact it was he […]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20236904[/vimeo] At Saturday’s Progressive London conference, I caught up with comedian Josie Long and Mehdi Hasan, the NS’s political editor, and listened to Unite’s Len McKluskey and False Economy‘s Clifford Singer, plus ukuncutactivists take on Barclays Bank and South London celebrates a Carnival Against the Cuts. Additional filming by Kaveh Abassian and Philippa Daniel. Philippa’s own video of the […]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/20008781[/vimeo] The repercussions of the cuts in Higher Education are being felt in Bristol, where lecturers at the University of the West of England (UWE) have been forced to take strike action over threats to staffing. Here I report on the strike and find out what students who supported it think about the situation.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19737016[/vimeo] Mary Warnock, Blake Morrison and south London residents take action against library closures. Across the country, 5 February saw read-ins at dozens of libraries threatened with closure. Michael Chanan filmed four of them in south London, along the way encountering Mary Warnock, Lucy Mangan, Blake Morrison, a lot of angry and articulate local residents, […]
The arguments advanced by government ministers like David Willetts for the draconian reform of university funding are confused and specious. They would certainly fail any exam in logic. Rather than reason, they depend on various forms of mediatised rhetoric, like Orwell’s newspeak, or doublespeak, or what the writer Steve Poole has called unspeak—although sometimes they […]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19471489[/vimeo] In On Campus, Terry Eagleton speaks at a meeting at the London School of Economics about the contradiction between education for society and education for the economy. South of the river, the Vice Chancellor of Roehampton University, Paul O’Prey, considers the implications of government measures with colleagues. With Terry Eagleton, Paul O’Prey, Joe Kelleher, […]
“Last autumn, in response to the coalition’s spending cuts, Britain saw the emergence of the first mass protest movement in a generation. One result has been an outpouring of online video, giving a very different picture to the one presented by the mainstream media, but making it hard sometimes to see the wood for the […]
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19161582[/vimeo] Reprinted from the New Statesman: Last autumn, in response to the coalition’s spending cuts, Britain saw the emergence of the first mass protest movement in a generation. One result has been an outpouring of online video, giving a very different picture to the one presented by the mainstream media, but making it hard sometimes […]
For the last few weeks I’ve been out and about filming moments in the developing protest movement against the unconscionable coalition government and its programme of swingeing cuts in every department of social provision. The result has been a number of short videos posted here on Putney Debater. I’ve now been invited by the New […]