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Picket line lecture debate: “It’s a waste of time”

By River Reporter Dec 8, 2011

By Thomas Ward

First off, let me say that I do not condone the Public Sector cuts, and that I wholeheartedly support peoples right to protest – when it might make even an iota of difference.

Unfortunately, November 30th never was going to make any difference. I know this because I was told by the leaders of all three major political parties, including Labour.

It’s an often frustrating but inescapable fact of government and politics that sometimes the people we elect make decisions on behalf of us that are not necessarily in our own best interests at the time. They do this to keep a country of around 62,000,000 people just about on its feet.

Any economist will tell you it’s not about how much money you have, it’s about the value of that money. We are just pulling ourselves out of the worst depression since the 1930s and it took World War Two to get us past that one.

The protests are not providing practical alternatives. If people were getting together and producing a plan that not only stabilizes the economy but also left the pensions plan untouched then I would be 100% behind it.

But turn up at Occupy LSX, the public sector strike or the student demos and all you get is an echoed rant about how we had to bail out the banks, with nobody suggesting a single alternative as to what the Government could have done instead.

So here’s a news flash. There was nothing they have done instead. What did you really expect, that we would let every bank in the U.K crumble under its own greed, laugh and say “we told you so” and then go back to buying our local groceries – with rocks?

Then what happens when the NHS has to purchase foreign medicine in order to combat a new strain of bird flu? No money for that. Oh look, Grandma’s dead.

Students (the MP’s of tomorrow, some would say) and lecturers should not be on the streets moaning about how bad we’ve got it now. This is the perfect time to get in the classrooms, on the social networks and into the lecture halls and start working out how we’re going to make Britain stronger in the wake of this slow, but steady, economic upturn. Maybe we could start implementing ideas such as, I don’t know, an increase in public sector pensions in 2016? Stop trying to change yesterday, start trying to change tomorrrow.

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