Bolitics The New Condem Government

[EssexVilla]

I read the other day that Edexcel (exam board) made £70m pre-tax (I think) profits. I think this is appalling considering this is pretty much taxpayer money going straight into their pocket. Having done a bit of background reading on the subject close to 20 schools could be run with that. Surely the government should be privatising this sector and saving money this way considering that exams are compulsory. They could save cut on other areas on the economy though I accept that this is a fairly small amount in relation to the rest of the economy.

[peterms]

Students try to target libdems for voting action, and government targets protesters for "militarisation" strategy to counter civil disobedience and general lack of forelock-tugging

NUS starts campaign to oust leading Lib Dems

National Union of Students launch 'decapitation' strategy aimed at ousting Nick Clegg and other top Liberal Democrats in protest at the party's U-turn on tuition fees

The National Union of Students will launch a "decapitation" strategy aimed at ousting Nick Clegg and other top Liberal Democrats from parliament in protest at the party's U-turn on student fees.

The move aims to build on anger about coalition policies – which spilled over into violence on Wednesday – in Lib Dem-held constituencies with large student populations.

The key targets will be Clegg in Sheffield Hallam, Simon Wright in Norwich South, Stephen Williams in Bristol West and Don Foster in Bath.

Aaron Porter, president of the NUS, said the campaign would aim to force out Lib Dems who break their pre-election pledge to oppose any rise in tuition fees. The move has echoes of the Lib Dems' own "decapitation strategy" in 2005, when the party threw resources into efforts to oust leading Tories with narrow majorities, including Michael Howard and Theresa May.

Porter said the NUS will make use of a coalition idea for holding MPs to account that was championed by Clegg himself. The "right to recall" initiative, which has yet to became law, proposes that a byelection can be called if an MP is judged guilty of serious wrongdoing and 10% of constituents want him or her removed.

More likely is that the NUS could mobilise support against selected MPs ahead of the next election. Extra efforts will be made in the four target seats – with 1,000 students taking to the streets of Sheffield in an attempt to get 10% of Clegg's constituency to sign a petition.

The Lib Dem leader, who held Sheffield Hallam with a majority of 15,284 at the May election, has around 10,000 students in his constituency. Others could be more vulnerable, such as Wright, who beat Charles Clarke in Norwich South by just 310 votes. Porter said: "It will serve to undermine the wafer-thin mandate this government has on university cuts and debt."

Students will not target MPs who have promised to vote against the policy to raise fees to as much as £9,000, such as Tim Farron, who has just been voted Lib Dem president. Farron opposes the rise but insists the Lib Dems had made it a fairer package than it would have been under either Conservative or Labour.

Evan Harris, the former Lib Dem MP who topped the elections for the party's federal executive, attacked the campaign as a "partisan stunt". He pointed out that manifesto promises could only be fulfilled if a party won a majority and said the NUS never suggested voting against, "let alone recalling", Labour MPs who broke election pledges on top-up fees.

However, Caroline Dowd, Sheffield Hallam University's student union president, said her members were livid. "We could not get [Clegg] out of our union before the general election. He came and spoke about how MPs should not make promises and then break them, about how fees were wrong."

She said there were 1,000 students in Sheffield prepared to take to the streets to gather names for a petition and there would be a protest outside Clegg's constituency office on Thursday.

Clegg's problems mounted as the Guardian revealed secret documents showing that he and other senior Lib Dems were preparing two months before the election to drop their promise on fees in the event of a coalition..

John Denham, the shadow business, innovation and skills secretary, said Clegg had no "credibility" left on the issue. "This week he said he should have been more careful before promising he would vote against fee increases, but now we know he was planning to drop his policy long before he made this promise."

A Lib Dem spokesman said: "What we have achieved is a system that is fairer than the one that exists now which means the poorest 25% of graduates will pay less, and those who go on to earn more pay more."

The controversy comes as police arrested a 57th person in connection with last week's student march through London, which ended in violent scenes. As police face continued criticism for failing to control the march, the Observer has learned that defence firms are working closely with UK armed forces and contemplating a "militarisation" strategy to counter the threat of civil disorder.

The trade group representing the military and security industry says firms are in negotiation with senior officers over possible orders for armoured vehicles, body scanners and better surveillance equipment.

The move coincides with government-backed attempts to introduce the use of unmanned spy drones throughout UK airspace, facilitating an expansion of covert surveillance that could provide intelligence on future demonstrations.

Derek Marshall, of the trade body Aerospace, Defence and Security (ADS), said that such drones could eventually replace police helicopters.

He added that military manufacturers had discussed police procurement policies with the government, as forces look to counter an identified threat of civil disobedience from political extremists.

Meanwhile police sources say they have detected an increase in the criminal intentions of political extremists and are monitoring "extreme leftwing activity" in light of last week's student protest.

The office of the National Co-ordinator for Domestic Extremism (NCDE) said it was feeding information to Scotland Yard's National Public Order Intelligence Unit, which holds a database of protest groups. NCDE, which in turn works closely with the Confidential Intelligence Unit that monitors political groups throughout the UK, said it had already recorded a rise in politically motivated disorder.

An NCDE insider said: "Over the past year there has been an increase in the criminal activity committed by such individuals but this is committed by a very small minority".

An internal Metropolitan police report is expected to be completed this week into why senior officers failed to anticipate the violence during last Wednesday's student demonstration.

[leviramsey]

If you expect 2.5% inflation, you'd be batshit crazy to take less than that in interest, and if you're not going to stand for less than 3% from an entity that has zero default risk then you're going to demand more from entities that have nonzero default risks.

Though whatever interest level you require, if you lend to people who stand little chance of repaying with the slightest change in circumstances, I suppose the level of interest becomes a bit academic. So much current discussion seems to be about government debt, government deficits, but surely the real cause of the financial crisis was the unsustainable level of private debt?

In general the real cause of the crisis was a general mispricing of default and inflation risk across the spectrum.

There's a good expression in Scotland, the "daft laddie question", meaning a question asked by someone ether naive or pretending to be, that gets to the heart of an issue. The Queen asked one such (maybe it should be a "daft lady question") when she asked Gordon Brown why no-one had foreseen the crisis. I believe he was unable to answer.

Some did predict it, but they tend to be minority voices, not from the neo-classical mainstream, not the ones who have the ear of governments. They seem to me to be the ones most worth spending time on.

Keynesian economists (still a large portion of the mainstream, despite missing the stagflation of the 1970s which they said could never happen) generally missed it completely. Some Monetarists (the rest of the mainstream) got it, but most missed it completely (they basically either genuinely got suckered by Greenspan or were having too much fun to notice). Go outside the mainstream, to either the "far left" or "far right" reaches and you find a fair amount of economists who saw it coming: forget neo-classical, the Austrians (who most of the economic profession has ignored for decades as cranks), the most classical of the current schools, saw it.

Austrian Business Cycle Theory

The Austrian business cycle theory ("ABCT") attempts to explain business cycles through a set of ideas held by the heterodox Austrian School of economics. The theory views business cycles (or, as some Austrians prefer, "credit cycles") as the inevitable consequence of excessive growth in bank credit, exacerbated by inherently damaging and ineffective central bank policies, which cause interest rates to remain too low for too long, resulting in excessive credit creation, speculative economic bubbles and lowered savings.

Proponents believe that a sustained period of low interest rates and excessive credit creation results in a volatile and unstable imbalance between saving and investment. According to the theory, the business cycle unfolds in the following way: Low interest rates tend to stimulate borrowing from the banking system. This expansion of credit causes an expansion of the supply of money, through the money creation process in a fractional reserve banking system. It is asserted that this leads to an unsustainable credit-sourced boom during which the artificially stimulated borrowing seeks out diminishing investment opportunities. Though disputed, proponents hold that a credit-sourced boom results in widespread malinvestments. In the theory, a correction or "credit crunch" – commonly called a "recession" or "bust" – occurs when exponential credit creation cannot be sustained. Then the money supply suddenly and sharply contracts when markets finally "clear", causing resources to be reallocated back towards more efficient uses.

According to the theory, the boom-bust cycle of malinvestment is generated by excessive and unsustainable credit expansion to businesses and individual borrowers by the banks. This credit creation makes it appear as if the supply of "saved funds" ready for investment has increased, for the effect is the same: the supply of funds for investment purposes increases, and the interest rate is lowered. Borrowers, in short, are misled by the bank inflation into believing that the supply of saved funds (the pool of "deferred" funds ready to be invested) is greater than it really is. When the pool of "saved funds" increases, entrepreneurs invest in "longer process of production," i.e., the capital structure is lengthened, especially in the "higher orders", most remote from the consumer. Borrowers take their newly acquired funds and bid up the prices of capital and other producers' goods, which, in the theory, stimulates a shift of investment from consumer goods to capital goods industries. Austrians further contend that such a shift is unsustainable and must reverse itself in due course. Despite mainstream findings of evidence to the contrary, proponents of the theory conclude that the longer the unsustainable shift in capital goods industries continues, the more violent and disruptive the necessary re-adjustment process.

The preference by entrepreneurs for longer term investments can be shown graphically by using any discounted cash flow model. Essentially lower interest rates increase the relative value of cash flows that come in the future. When modelling an investment opportunity, if interest rates are artificially low, entrepreneurs are led to believe the income they will receive in the future is sufficient to cover their near term investment costs. In simple terms, investments that would not make sense with a 10% cost of funds become feasible with a prevailing interest rate of 5% (and may become compelling for many entrepreneurs with a prevailing interest rate of 2%).

If you look at what triggered the US housing bust, it wasn't subprime: it was artificially low interest rates from the Fed combined with loans that were structured to minimize the short-term repayment cost (the option-ARMs, interest-only, and vanilla-ARMs) and also to minimize the initial downpayments: in short housing units that were unaffordable suddenly became affordable.

Because the debasement of the means of exchange is universal, many entrepreneurs can make the same mistake at the same time (i.e. many believe investment funds are really available for long term projects when in fact the pool of available funds has come from credit creation - not real savings out of the existing money supply). As they are all competing for the same pool of capital and market share, some entrepreneurs begin to borrow simply to avoid being "overrun" by other entrepreneurs who may take advantage of the lower interest rates to invest in more up-to-date capital infrastructure. A tendency towards over-investment and speculative borrowing in this "artificial" low interest rate environment is therefore almost inevitable.

Austrian economists theorize that capital goods industries will find that their investments have been in error; that what they thought profitable really fails for lack of demand by their entrepreneurial customers. Higher orders of production will have turned out to be wasteful, and the malinvestment must be liquidated. In other words, the particular types of investments made during the monetary boom were inappropriate and "wrong" from the perspective of the long-term financial sustainability of the market because the price signals stimulating the investment were distorted by fractional reserve banking's recursive lending "ballooning" the pricing structure in various capital markets.

This concept is captured by the term "heterogeneity of capital", where Austrian economists emphasize that the mere macroeconomic "total" of investment does not adequately capture whether this investment is genuinely sustainable or productive, due to the inability of the raw numbers to reveal the particular investment activities being undertaken and the inherent inability of the numbers to reveal whether these particular investment activities were appropriate and economically sustainable given people's real preferences.

Though disputed, Austrian scholars assert that the boom then, is actually a period of wasteful malinvestment, a "false boom" where the particular kinds of investments undertaken during the period of fiat money expansion are revealed to lead nowhere but to insolvency and unsustainability. It is the time when errors are made, when speculative borrowing has driven up prices for assets and capital to unsustainable levels, due to low interest rates "artificially" increasing the money supply and triggering an unsustainable injection of fiat money "funds" available for investment into the system, thereby tampering with the complex pricing mechanism of the free market. "Real" savings would have required higher interest rates to encourage depositors to save their money in term deposits to invest in longer term projects under a stable money supply. According to von Mises's work, the artificial stimulus caused by bank-created credit causes a generalized speculative investment bubble, not justified by the long-term structure of the market.

Ludwig von Mises further suggests that a "crisis" (or "credit crunch") arrives when the consumers come to reestablish their desired allocation of saving and consumption at prevailing interest rates. The "recession" or "depression" is actually the process by which the economy adjusts to the wastes and errors of the monetary boom, and reestablishes efficient service of sustainable consumer desires.

Since it takes very little time for the new credit-sourced money to filter down from the initial borrowers to the recipients of the borrowed funds (the various factors of production), why don't all booms come quickly to an end? Austrians assert that continually expanding bank credit can keep the borrowers one step ahead of consumer retribution (with the help of successively lower interest rates from the central bank). In the theory, this postpones the "day of reckoning" and defers the collapse of unsustainably inflated asset prices. It can also be temporarily put off by price deflation or exogenous events such as the "cheap" or free acquisition of marketable resources by market participants and the banks funding the borrowing (such as the acquisition of land from local governments, or in extreme cases, the acquisition of foreign land through the waging of war).

I'm searching through the history books to see if the USA and UK (the primary actors in the current situation) were "cheaply" bringing marketable resources into the system. It would not surprise me if the USA and UK waged a war to get control of oil in the past decade or so....

Austrian scholars theorize that the monetary boom ends when bank credit expansion finally stops - when no further investments can be found which provide adequate returns for speculative borrowers at prevailing interest rates. It is asserted that the longer the "false" monetary boom goes on, the bigger and more speculative the borrowing, the more wasteful the errors committed and the longer and more severe will be the necessary bankruptcies, foreclosures and depression readjustment, though Milton Friedman concluded that the Austrian claim contradicts the evidence examined in his studies.

Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek warned of a major economic crisis before the Great Depression. Hayek made his prediction of a coming business crisis in February 1929. He warned that a financial crisis was an unavoidable consequence of reckless monetary expansion.

There's a surprising amount of agreement with the further-right-wing Austrian school from some of the post-Keynesian more left-wing schools (e.g. Minsky, Fisher's debt deflation (though Fisher's other work is not in the post-Keynesian tradition)

[theunderstudy]

Bloody hell Levi, if there was ever one person you would want at a pub quiz, its you!

And Essex, I agree about Edexcel. Shocking.

[leviramsey]

Bloody hell Levi, if there was ever one person you would want at a pub quiz, its you!

Unless there's a Nobel laureate in physics on another team...

(I've a respectable record in Trivial Pursuit in "me against all comers" games, but I've yet to post a win when the opposition has a Nobel laureate).

[bickster]

Edexcel - bin all the quite frankly stupid tell us about your job, you can't fail imbecilic VRQ / NVQ qualifications right now, save us all some money, not just in exam fees but the funding the government gives to the providers to get the qualifications out there. No one would do them if they weren't funded.

Yes I've actually got a level II NVQ and was training to be an assessor. It's a load of **** nonesense

[theunderstudy]

I've got a Level 1 NVQ in Business Administration, and NVQ Level 2 in Mechanical Engineering. I'm in the porcess of doing Level 3 for my apprenticeship.... not much fun, and as you say, a heap of bullshit.

[peterms]

In general the real cause of the crisis was a general mispricing of default and inflation risk across the spectrum.

Certainly mispricing, but surely the total amount of private debt as a proportion of GDP was the big underlying problem, with the effects of the mispricing acting as the trigger to crystallise the risk?

Keynesian economists (still a large portion of the mainstream, despite missing the stagflation of the 1970s which they said could never happen) generally missed it completely. Some Monetarists (the rest of the mainstream) got it, but most missed it completely (they basically either genuinely got suckered by Greenspan or were having too much fun to notice). Go outside the mainstream, to either the "far left" or "far right" reaches and you find a fair amount of economists who saw it coming: forget neo-classical, the Austrians (who most of the economic profession has ignored for decades as cranks), the most classical of the current schools, saw it.

Well, the Austrians share an approach with some of those who saw it coming, but the criticism is that they have tended to shy away from producing proposals which could be falsified, tending to speak in more general terms. The "stopped clock" and "permabears" criticisms reflect that view.

There's a review of forecasts by Bezemer, quoted approvingly by Steve Keen (as one of the ones who got it right), suggesting that it was also important to put some timeframe on the prediction for it to be taken seriously; a test which most of the Austrian school are said to fail.

Bezemer did an extensive survey of research by economists or financial market commentators, looking for papers that met four criteria:

“Only analysts were included who:

1. provide some account on how they arrived at their conclusions.

2. went beyond predicting a real estate crisis, also making the link to real-sector recessionary implications, including an analytical account of those links.

3. the actual prediction must have been made by the analyst and available in the public domain, rather than being asserted by others.

4. the prediction had to have some timing attached to it.”

On that basis, Bezemer found eleven researchers who qualified:

Researcher Role Forecast Date

Dean Baker, US Co-director, Center for Economic and Policy Research 2006

Wynne Godley, US Distinguished Scholar, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College 2007

Fred Harrison, UK Economic Commentator 2005

Michael Hudson, US Professor, University of Missouri 2006

Eric Janszen, US Investor & iTulip commentator 2007

Stephen Keen, Australia Associate Professor, University of Western Sydney 2006

Jakob Brøchner Madsen & Jens Kjaer Sørensen, Denmark Professor and Graduate Student, Copenhagen University 2006

Kurt Richebächer, US Private consultant and investment newsletter writer 2006

Nouriel Roubini, US Professor, New York University 2006

Peter Schiff, US Stock Broker, investment adviser and commentator 2007

Robert Shiller, US Professor, Yale University 2006

If you look at what triggered the US housing bust, it wasn't subprime: it was artificially low interest rates from the Fed combined with loans that were structured to minimize the short-term repayment cost (the option-ARMs, interest-only, and vanilla-ARMs) and also to minimize the initial downpayments: in short housing units that were unaffordable suddenly became affordable.

Didn't the ARMs have a structure which made them suddenly unaffordable? Weren't they just a deferred-interest vehicle, with the interest being rolled up and added on later (ie still adding to the unsustainable debt problem, but kidding people into thinking they might be able to afford it)?

There's a surprising amount of agreement with the further-right-wing Austrian school from some of the post-Keynesian more left-wing schools (e.g. Minsky, Fisher's debt deflation (though Fisher's other work is not in the post-Keynesian tradition)

Fisher and Minsky sound interesting.

I agree that the left schools of non-Keynesian thought share some common features of analysis with the Austrians. Where they differ is in the policy prescriptions which result, with the Austrians being so closely linked to laissez-faire and lack of government intervention. In the UK, the Austrian school will have to wait a long time before people forget the close association of Thatcherism with Hayek's ideas.

[leviramsey]

Didn't the ARMs have a structure which made them suddenly unaffordable? Weren't they just a deferred-interest vehicle, with the interest being rolled up and added on later (ie still adding to the unsustainable debt problem, but kidding people into thinking they might be able to afford it)?

That's a negative amortization loan (one where the minimum payment to avoid default is less than the interest). All an ARM is is effectively a series of short-term (the term being the duration between rate resets) loans that roll-over into each other. The effect is to (at least partially) eliminate the lender's interest rate risk* which (at least partially) results in a lower interest rate for the borrower in compensation for the borrower taking on that risk. That said, many of the ARMs featured unrealistically low starter rates to entice borrowing: I would generally suggest that if a banker (or anyone, really) is offering you what looks like a really good deal, it's probably best to do some homework.

Interest-only and neg-am loans (attributes that can be attached to a fixed rate, though that's fairly rare) should never have been introduced into the single-family home market: they're useful in some professional cases (e.g. building skyscrapers, but banks generally don't get involved with that: life insurers dominate that market).

*: interest rate risk is basically the phenomenon where existing debt issued at lower rates than new debt of similar quality and maturity is available for decreases in market value (conversely if the new debt is at a lower rate than the old debt, the old debt increases in market value). Simplifying into perpetual (i.e. featuring interest payments forever without repayment of principal) bonds, so that time to maturity is equal, a 4% bond with a face amount of $100k will pay $4k a year in interest. If similar bonds now pay 5% and you want to sell the bond to someone else, a reasonable price would be $80k (as 5% of $80k is $4k, the income stream from the bond)... in effect the lender at 4% takes a haircut of $20k.

[Gringo]

In general the real cause of the crisis was a general mispricing of default and inflation risk across the spectrum.

Certainly mispricing, but surely the total amount of private debt as a proportion of GDP was the big underlying problem, with the effects of the mispricing acting as the trigger to crystallise the risk?

The mispricing creates the debt mountain. You can't buy something at the wrong price until it has been offered at the wrong price.

[snowychap]

Happiness, happiness, the greatest gift we can possess;

Do you thank the lord that we've been blessed with a Tory gov'ment when we're in this mess?

Happiness index to gauge Britain's national mood

The UK government is poised to start measuring people's psychological and environmental wellbeing, bidding to be among the first countries to officially monitor happiness.

Despite "nervousness" in Downing Street at the prospect of testing the national mood amid deep cuts and last week's riot in Westminster, the Office of National Statistics will shortly be asked to produce measures to implement David Cameron's long-stated ambition of gauging "general wellbeing".

Countries such as France and Canada are looking at similar initiatives as governments around the world come under pressure to put less store on conventional economic measures of prosperity such as gross domestic product.

British officials say there is still hesitation in some parts of Whitehall over going ahead with the programme during such difficult economic times, but Cameron is said to want to place the eventual results at the heart of future government policy-making.

On 25 November, the government will ask the independent national statistician Jil Matheson to devise questions to add to the existing household survey by as early as next spring.

It will be up to Matheson to choose the questions but the government's aim is for respondents to be regularly polled on their subjective wellbeing, which includes a gauge of happiness, and also a more objective sense of how well they are achieving their "life goals".

The new data will be placed alongside existing measures to create a bundle of indications about our quality of life.

A government source said the results could be published quarterly in the same way as the British crime survey, but the exact intervals are yet to be agreed.

...more on link

[peterms]

In general the real cause of the crisis was a general mispricing of default and inflation risk across the spectrum.

Certainly mispricing, but surely the total amount of private debt as a proportion of GDP was the big underlying problem, with the effects of the mispricing acting as the trigger to crystallise the risk?

The mispricing creates the debt mountain. You can't buy something at the wrong price until it has been offered at the wrong price.

Yes, second sentence is unarguable. (Possibly excepting Man City - we'll buy him, whatever it costs).

On the first though, another way of looking at it is that the western economy as a whole is undergoing a shift from being mainly an industrial economy, where people buy things, to being mainly about debt-driven consumption, allowing a level of spending and profit which outstrips the actual productive capacity of the economy, being increasingly based on speculation. The most obvious example is consumption financed by increasing house prices.

From that perspective, pricing is the symptom, not the cause. Or possibly it's just two sides of the same coin - continued expansion of debt-funded consumption is impossible, but we're not keen to revert to a level of consumption based on production of real things and the consumption potential arising from that. So the financial economy starts to eclipse the real economy, and speculation and mis-pricing carries on until it collapses. But if the financial "products" were correctly priced, they wouldn't be sold, and the bubble couldn't carry on growing.

[drat01]

"If Lib Dems knowingly lied in their manifesto shouldn't their MP's elections be declared void?" asks Stuart Weir on Open Democracy web site

[Awol]

"If Lib Dems knowingly lied in their manifesto shouldn't their MP's elections be declared void?" asks Stuart Weir on Open Democracy web site

Impossible I think, there is no precendent for it and both Labour and the Tories have previously said things in manifestos that they knew full well they'd go back on. It's different from the Woolas case because he told specifc lies about his opponent rather than his party's agenda.

That said if the NUS get their way Clegg might justifiably be in the brown stuff regardless, it was a deeply cynical move on his part.

[drat01]

The true effects of these cuts are now ooozing out. Depsite the lies that Cameron and Clegg told about no impact to front line services again today we see that Police forces are having to cut back on Police "on the beat".

Link

Greater Manchester Police will lose a quarter of its staff, including front line officers, as it faces a £134m budget cut in the next four years.

Greater Manchester Police Authority said that nearly 3,000 posts will have to be cut from its 12,000 staff.

The jobs earmarked to go are 1,557 civilian posts and 1,387 front line officers. A recruitment freeze is also planned for 2011/12.

The authority will discuss the proposals at its meeting next Monday.

They will be presented in a joint report from the Chief Constable Peter Fahy and the authority's treasurer.

Forced retirement

"Protecting front line policing is at the heart of the plans we have been developing," Mr Fahy said.

"As the majority of our money is spent on staff it is inevitable that there will be an impact on our people."

The authority plans to cut 2,944 jobs over four years, with staff being offered voluntary redundancy.

By law police officers cannot be made redundant so they expect the savings in front line officers to come from natural wastage, a recruitment freeze and forced retirement for officers with more than 30 years service.

I wonder how this will be defended?

[snowychap]

That said if the NUS get their way Clegg might justifiably be in the brown stuff regardless, it was a deeply cynical move on his part.

Perhaps, though I do expect that there'll be as many 'safeguards' as possible in any recall legislation to protect Lib Dems (sorry all MPs) from what will probably be called 'vexatious' actions.

[Risso]

That said if the NUS get their way Clegg might justifiably be in the brown stuff regardless, it was a deeply cynical move on his part.

Perhaps, though I do expect that there'll be as many 'safeguards' as possible in any recall legislation to protect Lib Dems (sorry all MPs) from what will probably be called 'vexatious' actions.

I think the bigger problem with the NUS plans is that if Parliament lasts the full 5 years, all of the current crop of students will be gone, and it's the kids who are 14 now who will be at university.

[snowychap]

I think the bigger problem with the NUS plans is that if Parliament lasts the full 5 years, all of the current crop of students will be gone, and it's the kids who are 14 now who will be at university.

And they'll be liable for higher fees and may feel priced out of some university courses.

That might well make them more keen to make the Lib Dems pay. They will also be the ones who will not be supported with EMA, won't they? I'm not sure that'll help the cause of the politicians, either.

The NUS plans, though, are focussing on recall, I believe, as they've set up a website for their campaign - here.

If it were to be that they'd have to wait until the next general election then it shouldn't be that difficult to maintain a campaign for the next four years (as there may well be the possibility of the odd by-election to sustain it, too).

[Risso]

And then there's the fact that a lot of students will probably still be registered at their home address, rather than in the constituency where their university is. Still, as a plan I suppose it beats smashing up buildings.

[snowychap]

And then there's the fact that a lot of students will probably still be registered at their home address, rather than in the constituency where their university is. Still, as a plan I suppose it beats smashing up buildings.

If the votes of university students were not that important (that they might be able to prosecute a campaign against the Lib Dem liars) then it would seem slightly bizarre that this party put so much time and energy in to campaigning for their vote.

Smashing up a building seemed to attract a lot more publicity to the issue than was the case up until then.