Graduate gap year scheme won't help

Imagine my excitement when I turn on the news this morning to find the headline: "Graduates to get gap-year money". Hooray! I thought, I don't have to stay at home filling in a million forms to get Jobseekers Allowance and sift through the job websites to find something to do, I can spend a year in far off places doing valuable work for charities while beefing up the CV while I'm at it.
Then I read further into the article:

"graduates must raise £1000, buy their own flights and cover the cost of vaccinations to be eligible"

Ah.

Being a graduate coming from a low-income family this puts me off the entire scheme. After three years of borrowing money to put myself through my degree(albeit supplemented by the maintanance grant) I'm sure not even Lord Mandelson expects me to have a grand plus airfare and money for vaccinations to go on one of these expeditions, so this leads me to believe that this scheme is only going to perpetuate the assumption that all people who go on gap years are spoilt rich kids going on a jolly for a year that they can put on their CV- the only difference here being the people going on these gap years are a bit less rich so the government can subsidise them.

If the government really want to stop graduates from getting into, as NUS President Wes Streeting so eloquently put it, "the soul destroying experience of sitting at home, watching Jeremy Kyle, on the dole"(by the way, this graduate is watching Star Trek repeats on the dole, lightyears more intelligent and definitely not soul destroying!) it's got to find ways of supporting graduates that don't exclude vast swathes of them who aren't middle class and came into university as the government made a considerable effort to increase university place take up. The internship scheme is a start, but maybe instead of funding gap years for people who could probably afford them anyway if they really tried, help out both graduates and the UK's voluntary sector by giving support to get this valuable work experience in organisations in this country that are no doubt as affected by the recession as anywhere else. Maybe the government could even put me up in London to do one of those parliamentary internships I've heard so much about, but that's probably not going to happen at this rate.

So, back to the drawing board then, Mandy. I'll be doing my job searching and avoiding Jeremy Kyle.

Change, twittering and Glastonbury politics: The 2009 Compass Conference

Partly due to speakers(as they often do) having a tendency to talk for longer than the published agenda says they have, and also there being 8 flights of stairs between the conference hall debates and the attached seminars, I go home from this conference rather exhausted. This was only the second one of these I've been to, but the only thing that appeared similar in my experience of it was my incredibly dozy self rushing to the coach or train station to go home by the end of it. If there's any alternative byline for the Compass conference it is "an annual marathon of left wing political discussion".

But whereas last year's conference felt like it was more of a discussion of things that we could do in British politics if we had the chance, the mood this year couldn't be more different. Expenses scandals, plots against Gordon Brown, global economic turmoil and appalling election turnout allowing the BNP to take two European Parliamentary seats have given politicians and activists rather a kick up the arse telling them to go out and do something about it. Speakers and those in the days' seminars talked about their frustration and dismay at the current prevailing style of British politics, in particular what has been going on in the Labour party, and the reforms and policy changes that are needed to change that. Particularly notable was the speech from Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party, who said rather than attempting to include many kinds of political persuasions under a "big tent" we should instead co-operate with each other in a "campsite of smaller tents", or, as I said on Twitter on Saturday, form a kind of Glastonbury Politics. This need for a discussion about policy between many parties was well illustrated by one member of the audience during the question time portion of the day who said he was a Green Party voting Lib Dem member who helps Labour MPs on issues of equality!

Speaking of Twitter, one of the seminars I attended concerned the use of online engagement in politics, and I was fascinated by the representatives from Blue State Digital (the people who helped do the Obama campaign) and Hope Not Hate, the latter of which ran a superb campaign against the BNP, using support from email, Facebook and Twitter to to bring people out campaigning against the BNP, which in some areas drew such a huge response they actually ran out of leaflets to give out. In countering Hazel Blears's famously ill-advised comment about internet campaigning, the message from the session was Youtube if you want to, but a) do it properly and b) don't use it for the sake of using it, use it to complement other aspects of the way you conduct politics.

Overall, the conference hammered it home to politicians and the Government in particular: Stop screwing around and start listening to people and give the reforms everyone wants. To bumble on the way you have done for the last few weeks would be frankly idiotic and against the values you attempt to uphold.

There will be tinkering...

...But after that, I will be actually making some use of this blog. Anyone stumbling across this will note this.