Why should we suffer?

By "we", I refer to students.

The Association of University Teachers (AUT), a trade union to which many British university lecturers belong, recently decided to take industrial action over pay. The union is demanding a 23% pay increase; the highest offer made by the employers is about half that. The industrial action will consist of lecturers involved in setting and marking examinations (the majority) not doing so. This could delay results and might even delay graduations.

This is a serious threat. However, why does the AUT feel it necessary to make the life of students misery at a time when we are all under enough stress as it is? If the union has a quarrel with its members' employers, why does it have to bring students into it? The National Union of Students (NUS) supports the action because it says that higher pay will mean higher quality education - but at what cost? I have sympathy for the lecturers' cause, but their industrial action is irresponsible at best. I can only hope that the UCEA (the Universities and Colleges Employers' Association) can sort this out before it turns into a national outrage and a disaster for a great many students, finalists in particular.

Update: I have just heard that the UCEA has said that some universities might have to lay off some staff in order to finance the pay rises - is this what the AUT want?

Follow-up: Nuclear Power

(See "To build or not to build..." for background.)

Tony Blair today announced that he believes that there should be a new generation of nuclear power plants in the UK. As I said in my recent post, nuclear isn't the perfect solution but it's the best we've got as far as solving the energy crisis goes.

Good luck to him (and/or his successor) getting it through Parliament though - it won't be an easy ride.

Human Rights of Convicted Criminals

Nine Afghans were recently granted leave to remain (and work) in Britain after, in 2000, they hijacked a Boeing 727 on an internal flight in Afghanistan and forced it to land at Stansted Airport, near London. Mr. Justice Sullivan ruled that although in normal circumstances they would be deported back to their country of origin, this was incompatible with the Human Rights Act (an implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights) as sending the nine back to Afghanistan might endanger their lives.

What seems to have been missed in this case is that not only was Mr. Justice Sullivan's ruling completely compatible with British law, it complies perfectly with the European Convention. Many, including the Prime Minister, have called for amendments to the Human Rights Act, but I find it difficult to see what could be changed without forcing Britain to withdraw from the Convention.

The Government have found themselves between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand there is the majority of public opinion, which wants foreign criminals promptly deported; on the other hand there is the principle of human rights. It is rare for the majority of public opinion in a Western liberal democracy, such as Britain, to be opposed to the Human Rights Act, as it stands, but that's where it currently is - even if few would admit it.

Now the Home Office has to decide what it can do to stay within the rules of the Convention while preventing a similar ruling being given in the future. Needless to say, this is a near-impossible task. The obvious solution would be to put people in prison, but then what should be done once their sentence finishes? The train of thought then leads us to life imprisonment, but that would be impractical, expensive, and unnecessarily harsh. Perhaps we could deport such criminals to third countries, but which countries would stand up and say, "Yes, we want some criminals!"? Or, we could say that criminals lose their human rights as soon as they commit a crime of a certain seriousness, but that goes against the most basic principle of human rights (that they apply to everyone in all circumstances) and then we have an argument over what "level" of crime would warrant the removal of the perpetrator's rights.

This is one issue where I genuinely have no opinion other than to say that something has to be done. What that "something" is, I'll leave to the powers-that-be.

Funding the Palestinians

I was delighted with yesterday's announcement that the "Quartet" group (The UN, USA, UK and Russia) had set up a trust fund into which money would be paid in order to support the Palestinian people. The international community has been arguing amongst itself about the merits or otherwise of funding the Palestinian Hamas-led government, given Hamas' hardline stance, but there is one general consensus: the rest of the world cannot punish the Palestinian people for their choice of leaders. It has seemed obvious to me for some time that a trust fund such as that now set up - which gives money direct to individual people or to public projects via NGOs - is the only sensible way to stop the Palestinian territories from going bankrupt.

If this move helps the Palestinians to understand that the world is not against them as a whole, just against their terrorist groups (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, et al) then it will do a world of good in the Middle East conflict as a whole.

To build or not to build...

Debate in many countries, Britain included, has recently turned to the future of electricity supply, and the argument that, however much we invest in renewable energy technologies, they will never contribute significantly to our electricity grids. In Britain in particular, there simply isn't the space for wind farms or the rivers for hydroelectric dams. Tidal power is a promising technology but it appears that it will also be unable to fill the energy gap. So... the debate is now all about nuclear power and, specifically, the value of building new nuclear plants.

For me, nuclear power is the only solution to the energy gap. It may have many problems of its own - nuclear waste, high initial costs, risk of meltdown - but these can be reduced through investment in research, something that has been lacking in recent decades. When these very serious problems are compared to those of fossil fuels - there won't be any left soon, to put it bluntly - and renewable sources - not enough generation capacity - it becomes apparent, in my eyes, that nuclear really is the least of three evils. By all means we must continue to build wind farms, where practical - off-shore if possible, and to develop new renewable energy technologies but, in the mean time, we must act now by commissioning new nuclear plants before our dependency on fossil fuels drives us headlong into World War Three.

The British Government is due to publish its "Energy Review" shortly. Many believe that it is a stunt designed to show that nuclear is the best option, and many anti-nuclear activists bemoan this as if it's bad science: it isn't. It will be no government whitewash (or indeed hogwash) to suggest that the commissioning of new nuclear plants is the best option in the medium term, it just makes sense:

1. We will reduce our reliance on fossil fuels dramatically within a few years.
2. We will be able to take our time developing new renewable technologies rather than rushing them through to solve short-term energy supply problems.

Having said that I strongly support nuclear power, I am equally strongly against nuclear weapons. Whatever Iran's intentions, it is certainly rich of Britain and America, et al, to demand answers from the Iranians when they are not only in possession of large numbers of nuclear weapons (to me, that is not the main problem) but they are destroying them - as required by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - so slowly it beggars belief. Perhaps once the nuclear arms race is over, we can concentrate on the mass benefits of nuclear fission rather than its application as an agent of mass destruction.

Resignation

Under what circumstances should a politician resign? If he/she is running a department should any minor misdemeanor by departmental staff be a resignation issue? Certainly not. If he/she murders someone in cold blood? Certainly, although the judicial system should take care of that. So, what about all the possibilities in between? At what point does a politician become responsible for the actions of his/her underlings and what level of responsibility demands the rolling of heads?

All these questions have come to the fore, yet again, in British politics recently with the actions of Charles Clarke (former Home Secretary) and John Prescott (Deputy Prime Minister). For those readers not into the intricacies of the Westminster "village", the former presided over a period when hundreds of foreign criminals we not considered for deportation upon release when they should have been, and the latter had an oh-so-traditional affair with a secretary in his department.

While the actions of Mr. Prescott might be immoral, it's debatable whether or not they demand the use of the governmental axe. Those of Mr. Clarke, however, are inexcusable. It would seem sensible to me that making such a serious sequence of errors over such a long period of time and failing to inform the Prime Minister, even when asked about it directly, and then ignoring several reports identifying the problem should demand an instant resignation - but not in the world of New Labour! Mr. Clarke refused to fall on his sword and had to be sacked by Tony Blair in his recent reshuffle.

So, it seems that my earlier assumption was right: anything but murder is fine...