“The target should be that by 2015 at least 30 percent of all supervisory board members should be women, and 40 percent by 2020 …” (source)

An odd target in a way, since English speaking countries, at least, tend not to have supervisory boards. It is also worth noting that supervisory boards have little to do with the day to day running of a business. They are an ideal target if you want to hand out favours without demanding competence.

This is the most important difference: the best and the brightest can easily skip repayment altogether by working abroad. If you owe the government a fixed amount of money any interest you have in clearing your debt does not vary with your place of residence. Your tax burden however does, hence there will be an added incentive for graduates to emigrate.

Another half baked proposal is that of promoting two year degrees. This is feasible in principle (the University of Buckingham has been doing it for years). The change comes at a cost, however: one option would be for new teaching staff to be hired by universities to spread the workload and new office space to be built to accommodate them. The other would be to cut down on research and reduce British Universities to the status of higher education colleges.

If cost savings are the objective, research will have to go. This may well be what the government wants, but at least they should spell this out to make it clear to domestic and (full fee paying) international students what exactly British universities do and do not offer.

A third, and probably better, option would be for Universities to go completely private. In this way, students would pay full fees, government could give them loans if it saw fit to do so or refrain from doing so if it didn’t. The cost for government would be that it could no longer use the university system as a social engineering tool. On the other hand, academic standards would probably be better protected.

CBI director Katja Hall is quoted as saying: “Forcing companies to publish average salary figures for men and women could mislead people into thinking that women are paid less than men in the same role, which is rightly illegal, when differences will actually reflect the proportions of men and women in higher-paid jobs” (source)

Also of interest: Should we mind the Gap? from the iea for download here: pdf.

Repeal all terrorism acts from 2001 onwards in their entirety

The telegraph reports that “Mr Van Rompuy and the European Commission have tabled plans that will require all of Europe’s governments to discuss their budget plans with other EU finance ministers and officials before they [are] presented to national parliaments.” (source)

Mr Van Rompuy, by the way, was prime minister of Belgium from 2008-2009. We remember that Belgium’s public debt fell (!) to levels of around 84% of GDP when Van Rompuy was budget minister before rising again to over 90% while he was heading the government. He sure has experience of managing high levels of public debt. This leaves the wider question of whether Belgium’s political establishment is in a position to lecture Britain -or Spain for that matter- on fiscal prudence.

“The Scots have two highly developed important cities and several great universities and medical schools; their intellectual and entrepreneurial tradition is second to none. They don’t need us.

Nor do we need them. Above all, we would be much better off without the notorious Barnett formula; it is obviously unfair that the Scots should receive more public money per head than the English, especially when their taxes and benefits are so different. Let them get on without us.” (source)

1. Atheist Harry Taylor has been given a suspended jail sentence and ASBO for distributing anti-religious material. (HT: Pub Philosopher)

2. Christian preacher Dale McAlpine was charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” by a hobby bobby who overheard him publicly stating that homosexuality is considered sinful in Christianity.

What these cases illustrate in the first case is that suppression of free speech is now everyday reality in modern Britain. Not only do we live in a country where you have to worry what the police might think about your political or religious views but the interpretation of the prohibitions used is at once narrowly defined and arbitrary.

To see how the room for permitted speech is narrowing, consider the fact that Mr. Taylor’s ASBO bans him from “carrying religiously offensive material in a public place“. He would thus break the law if he carried a title like “God is Not Great” from the bookshop to his home. On the other hand, it has been said in Mr. Alpine’s defense that: “Case law has ruled that the orthodox Christian belief that homosexual conduct is sinful is a belief worthy of respect in a democratic society.” If you extrapolate from those two precedents you will indeed end up with a set of rules where opinions are either illegal or else you are legally required to respect them. There is no room for mere indifference or individual judgement.

The arbitrary nature of these repressive measures becomes obvious once we consider their legal basis. Neither the Public Order Act [1] used against Mr. Alpin, nor the ASBO used against Mr. Taylor were introduced or justified as instruments of political or religious censorship. Yet this is what they have become.

[1] The 1986 Public Order Act is admittedly not of Labour’s making, although it arguably acquired its present reach in the meta-context established by New Labour.

She said: “In Strathclyde Police we have senior officers refusing competency-related threshold payments and special payment applications as officers have not met the performance indicator targets set for anti-social behaviour fixed penalty notices, stop searches and other fixed penalty notices.” (source)

Apparently, things aren’t better in England either. One can only hope that the supposedly planned ‘bonfire of labour laws‘ will address this issue after a change in government.