In my never-ending quest to stay objective and call contemporary politics as I see it, combined with the modern culture of social-networking, a while back I became a fan of the ‘Conservatives’, ‘the Labour Party’ and the ‘Liberal Democrats’ fan pages, to get up to date news in my Facebook news feed from each of the parties. Granted the news is always biased, but I like to know what the parties think about issues that crop up, whether they think that policies that they announce are going well, and in the process you get nuggets of actual fact about what the parties are up to.

Today, the Conservatives’ fan page announced that you could submit questions to David Cameron’s new and hip ‘webcast’ on education, and rate other suggested questions. So as a student activist, whose primary concern and focus is our education, I thought that I should do my part. I proposed a question regarding what Cameron and the Conservatives intend to do about the HE cuts which are happening across the country – Leeds University recently announced a £35m cut – and how he will ensure every students right to Higher Education.

After submitting my question, I decided to rate the other questions – some of which were pretty much just a question asking why he is such an elitist bell-end – and inevitably came across a question that I thought was just irrelevant. You have three choices when rating a question, a tick – whereby a window tells you that are saying “Yes” to the question – a cross, where the window tells you that you are saying “No” – and finally a choice to skip the question. As I hovered the mouse over the skip button, the windowed switched to “meh…” (as shown in the image) and I realised that this tactic is typical Cameron: all style and no substance.

First of all, the Tories are utilising facebook, a modern and hip website, to induce interactivity in a new and hip ‘webcast’ which will discuss education, when facebook has a phenomenal student population online. Will my question even be considered? No. Will any of the questions even be considered? No. The Conservative party are just playing at being the cool and hip party, but really they will ask the questions that they have prepped for and answer in riddles that will not amount to any real policy.

Nick Griffin BNP MEP appeared on BBC Question Time last week

Welsh Secretary Peter Hain has recently been quoted, saying he believes Nick Griffin feels that the BBC have given him an early Christmas present, and that he should not be allowed on Question Time. The question came to my mind: who the hell is he to say who should and should not be on the BBC?

The BBC is supposedly a sovereign media organisation, therefore the government should not only not have a say in who goes on the show, but it’s arguable that he should be allowed to ‘kick off’ in public about it. After all, what’s the point in a sovereign media organisation which reports the news having to do what high-up officials say? If that rule was followed, we would never get honest news. In the same way as the Huddersfield Student has to, the BBC will have to report the truth and offer different sides of an issue, irrelevant of who it upsets and offends, because that is its duty.

However, when watching it I became increasingly annoyed by the format of the ‘debate’. Don’t get me wrong, I dislike the BNP more than most, but the format did in actuality give the BNP an early Christmas present. They isolated Nick Griffin and bullied him for an hour, which is simply going to increase his defence and reinforce the BNP follower’s determination to the cause.

Firstly, a chair of any sort has to be unbiased and fair. David Dimbleby simply ripped into Nick Griffin almost constantly, barely giving the man time to really skirt around the question, something afforded to the other panelist by Dimbleby.

Furthermore, the content was based almost exclusively on the BNP. The show is meant to be about issues – not a scathing attack on a guy who looks like he’s a product of inbreeding and was constantly shaking with what I can only imagine is fear from the academic lynch mob in front of him (I guess now he knows how it feels).

The show should have talked about the issues of government, not just immigration policy. We all know how racist the BNP’s policy is – why not ask him about healthcare provisions and watch him go “errrrrrr”? Short of their immigration policy, the BNP have diddley-squat.

The BBC were well within in their rights to have Nick Griffin on the show, but I believe that the format benefited the BNP and was detrimental to viewers. Toward the end it was pointedly obvious that very few issues were really touched upon. I have always been a promoter of the open-platform policy, purely because when you give these people the floor to speak, they really show their true colours, and people see the crazy spilling out of them. The BBC failed in that objective because they couldn’t maintain a very basic professionalism (though I can’t really blame them for doing so).

Is student debt real or is it just a graduate tax?

Keeping in line with the October edition of the newspaper, I thought that I would share my thoughts about student loans with you.

Whilst surfing the web about the system which I will soon have to take part in, I came across some wonderful facts- the most important of which are these.

Firstly, there are an estimated 3.3 million outstanding student loans, each one averaging around the £17,500 mark (that’s £57,750,000,000 of debt); and we only pay 9% on anything that we earn over 15k after we graduate – this sounds like a lot but in a 16k job, you would only pay £90 for the year- that’s pretty slim to be fair.

When looking at the maths, it occurred to me, most people will not even remotely cover their loans in the time we are to pay it back. Think it through logically. Say you earn £500,000 in your job after graduating over the 25years that you have to pay back your debt (which would average at 20k a year), you would pay £11,250 towards your loans, resulting in a £6,250 loss for the government.

Furthermore, I happen to know that, in a £26k a year job, the interest per year is higher than you pay back, because a relative is in that situation. So in reality, most of us are just never going to pay everything back. Ever.

Not only that, but in the economic climate that we are seeing right now, numerous graduates aren’t even breaking the 16k barrier, leaving the government in even more debt than it is already in, and yet the percentage we pay has not increased to accommodate that.

Why is that? Well I think it’s pretty simple: we are paying a graduate tax. Since the days the media started reporting what the government got up to, they have been attempting to conceal taxes. When the words ‘tax’ and ‘increase’ go together, votes are almost instantaneously lost.

So what I am trying to tell you all is this: don’t worry about any massive increase in student debt, because at the end of the day, when we break it down to the basic level, after graduating, we pay a concealed tax to the government for the use of the higher education system – which, I believe, is why student debt is not considered real debt when you get credit checked. So, be happy, we’re not really in debt after all.

Politics Editor, Andy 'Frodo' Blunt questions: what is the function of Huddersfield Student?

I was given this blog to rant on things that crop up of a political nature, so here it goes: censorship is something that every paper will eventually have to face and, whilst looking through the archives of the Huddersfield Student, I found a front page article which made me think.

It was from 2003. The President of the time had stepped in at the last minute to stop a front page article that showed the Students’ Union in a bad light. The newspaper editor of the time then saw fit to change the front page article to photos of the subeditors with gaffer tape over their mouths and a message to all students about what the President had done.

With recent events within the Students’ Union surrounding who controls the paper in mind, I would like to put the question to anyone who wishes to have their say: is the Huddersfield Student autonomous and here to report about the students and the Students’ Union (as after all, how could that article have been printed were it not?) or is the Huddersfield Student a paper of the Students’ Union?

Personally, I think from previous editions of the paper, the former is more likely, but at the end of the day, the Students’ Union is mandated to maintain relevance to the changing demographic of the student body.

So what do we want? A paper which reports campus news or one that advertises it?

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

The media misrepresent and misconstrue facts to fit with their own agendas

I applied to be the politics sub-editor because modern media frustrates me. I am sick and tired of purposefully misconstrued facts to push further the agenda of the media conglomerates. The media no longer consistently bases its arguments in facts, but in opinions disguised with facts – certain facts having somewhat dubious backgrounds.

For instance, in early August the BBC released news about how excessive drinking habits can lead to oral cancer, and yet their main feature article of this was based around a woman who smoked and drank… The BBC with their mission objective aiming to “inform, educate and entertain” combined with their company values of, I quote, “Trust is the foundation of the BBC: we are independent, impartial and honest”… Well I don’t know about you, but a sufferer of oral cancer with an excessive drinking habit who happens to smoke – to me it seems more likely that the latter is to blame… just throwing that out there…

So basically what I’m saying is, think about what you’re reading – you are at university, you should be questioning where the facts are coming from and what the agenda is behind them.