The following table was published by the EU back in November -
Erasmus is the sort of scheme that most benefits kids from ABC1 homes, university top-streamers, those with comfortable parental incomes, kids who can easily master a second European language, with parents with the time and inclination to drop their offspring and their huge rucks at airports, collect them again as required and fill their accounts with spending money. Gap year kids. The privileged offspring of our privileged metropolitan elites.
You might consider this to be both criminal waste and squander and a not very fair use uf UK tax resources. Certainly we should encourage and assist our young people to travel and learn in Europe. We should also ensure we give UK taxpayers value, and we should ensure that young people from all backgrounds, including apprentices and those at tech and vocational schools as well as universities, can fairly and equitably access any grants.
So I'd encourage the government to steel itself to resist the sharp elbows of the middle classes, the petulant whining at the red end of the Coogan Scale and to introduce proposals for participation on fair terms.
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19 comments:
Fair terms?
Paying your own f*****g way seems fairest.
Is that Turkey above us?
Wonder how much grovelling subservience they had to show to get to that position?
Surely the clever money was in Sussex?
Sorry Raedwald, I must keep up, I didn't realise that that business moniker has already been appropriated by a potato grower.
"Anything good is bad", say European Union-haters.
Het your skates on, you still have time.
I don't know if the EU youth has an age limit but they are very sophisticated (being european) in the application of rules.
JPM - you know the rules - no cut and pasting of other folk's agitprop. Your own opinions are as always very welcome.
OK, what is the evidence that these young people come from the sorts of homes that you claim?
It might be true about some from the UK, where for the educated sector having another language is a feather in your cap, whereas for many others it is viewed as a mark of not-being-one-of-us, of having pretensions.
But it is not on the Mainland. There, say, in the Netherlands, to have no command of another language - or several - would mark you our as a bottom-ender, and rightly so, in my opinion.
- and it's clear that both France and Germany are the nations that benefit most.
Surprise! And German engineering benefits most from the strong euro, French farmers from the CAP. I detect a theme.
I think the evidence is where the whining is coming from. Radders has already pointed this out.
Yes, there's a very silly article in the Grauniad by some Bright Young Thing of a journo, about how she spent her time on an Erasmus year.
But a state school educated type, from industrial Nowhereland in the Midlands such as me could equally have benefited from it, had it been around when I was of that age.
I suppose that it suits the Tories, to turn the country into as culturally, philosophically, and linguistically isolated an offshore oddity as possible, rather as the US is from the rest of the world.
The US culturally, philosophically and linguistically isolated from the rest of the world?
Of course dear!
Three quarters of Americans do not know where Iran is.
Strawman.
The US is immensely culturally important. How culturally important is China?
....just as it suits the Socialists to make everyone equally dumb, compliant and reliant on state aid.
The other way of looking at it is that we paid just under £110,000 per UK student for their Erasmus trips. Assuming that we would like to continue funding this kind of activity, we could probably organise it a little more efficiently in future.
Excellent post Raedwald (and the Copyright notice had me in stitches). can't believe TURKEY is there let alone above us!
patently's point (12:29) is the key one here. Even if we lowered it a bit to help some of the poorer nations (don't we do that anyway?) it is still basically us giving German, French Spanish and Turkish youngsters a freebie that could be more better and efficiently used nearer to home.
From an isolationist point of view Patently's angle makes complete sense, but the European Union is not a project for isolationist nations.
I think that the UK's participation will be scrapped on that argument, but rather than by a more self-efficient programme, it will most likley be replaced by nothing.
I also agree with JPM and thought I'd said so in the post - I want to see more midlands state school kids doing Erasmus, and I want to see more state school teachers, apprentice-masters and vocational education institutes pushing their students into the scheme. I've also no objection to our paying in to the scheme enough cash to fund say 20,000 UK places a year, and to pay an additional VOLUNTARY sum from our overseas aid budget into the scheme to fund places from specified EU nations - the poorer ones - with the proviso that these are badged as 'Funded by the United Kingdom' or 'UK Erasmus Bursaries'.
Travel in Europe and time spent living in Europe are good things. Well, I would say that, wouldn't I?
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