Farage, who had recently resigned his position in the party to concentrate on failing to achieve a Westminster seat later this year, was scheduled to make a statement criticising the wearing of burkas in public places. In the event, he slowly removed a World War I era Enfield pistol from his pocket and blew his brains all over Salma Yaqoob, chief media sound-bite provider of the Respect Party. Visibly fazed by the incident, she valiantly countered his argument: “Live and let live….freedom…rights…socialism…er…Iraq…erm…did I mention freedom?”

Presenter John Sopel was less surprised, stating later that “we all knew he was going to say something a bit thick, but it takes an incredibly brave man to argue that he would feel a bit iffy if somebody sat next to him on the Tube in a balaclava. In the grand scheme of things, maybe he chose the path of least resistance”.

The prominent EU pariah had been known principally for looking more like an archetypal Tory than a Surrey MP and for his proposed solution to what he dubbed the ‘European Problem’. Launching his party leadership bid in 2006, he stated: “I think we should take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

“We don’t know if some kind of biological agent will even affect them – any virus would probably be more afraid of Baroness Ashton than she is of it.”

It is unclear as to what the future is for the eurosceptic party as Farage’s leadership successor, Baron Pearson of Rannoch, was revealed to be a figment of the former leader’s imagination. Robert Lipton-Smythe, a UKIP member from Guildford, asked “Where the fuck is Rannoch anyway?”

Taking time out from his ministerial responsibilities for children, adults, schools, families, homes, workplaces and leisure time, Ed Balls contacted the BBC and cackled maniacally down the phone for approximately seven minutes.

The proposal to charge a £15 ‘victims levy’ to those who are given on-the-spot fines or fixed penalty notices is cheap. Not cheap in the ‘affordable’ sense, but in the sense of moral bankruptcy.

There’s no way of avoiding the simple fact that this is a tax. The government is extending the application of this levy because an increase in the fine itself would look bad in the newspapers. It would be yet another indication of a government running desperately short of funds, while we already know that they are desperately short of ideas, except when it comes to finding new ways of taking money from our wallets and inserting it into theirs.

At the same time, trying to criticise this move draws fire from groups which support crime victims. By opposing this tax, are we not being insensitive to the victims of fixed penalty crimes such as speeding? Hell, the current administration might even be able to make a public relations success out of it. Imagine that – the government taxes us, and we love them for it. Victim support groups are happy (until inevitable budget cuts at a later date, as the extended levy picks up the slack), and we’ve successfully made a few million to help soak up the losses made during the financial crisis. Let’s have a cold one.

I don’t buy it. The government may be on firm ground when saying that speeding is not a victimless crime – claiming it is a ‘minor offence’ will certainly incur the wrath of the victim support – but what about letting your dog foul in the street or dropping litter? What victim support fund is in existence for these crimes, and how do I claim my share?

It’s a troubling fact that the existence of this stealth tax almost goes without saying, that we know instinctively that the interests of victims have barely factored into the government’s equations when seeing the potential fiscal benefits of this venture. If those behind this actually cared about victims of crime, they would find a way to fund this move out of existing charges. But who would expect this government to turn down a chance to make a quick and easy few notes while we foot the bill?

I’ve always hated the word ‘Progressive’. Not so much because of what it means – I recognise that the current political zeitgeist is one which favours redistributive taxation and I am nothing if not somebody willing to be carried along by the wind of political fervour. No, I hate the term because of its disingenuity, because it is a policy which piggy-backs on a politically palatable word. When a politician claims to be progressive they are said to be in favour of ‘progress’, instead of wealth redistribution. If you’re not progressive, then society as a whole will not progress, so goes the logic.

So when Aaron Porter addressed our Student Union Council about the NUS’ proposals for a progressive system of tuition fees, it set alarm bells furiously ringing. The NUS Vice President (Higher Education) called it a ‘Blueprint for an alternative higher education funding system’. I call it a blueprint for disaster.

The proposed scheme is for students to be charged based on, according to the NUS, the “benefit they obtain from higher education”. Up-front fees would be abolished under the NUS’ system, and fees would no longer be fixed. Basically, the better the job you get upon leaving university, the more fees you will pay. Instead of paying off a loan, you will be making sustained, increasing payments over a fixed term of twenty years. At 22 (or later, if you graduate later), graduates will begin to make contributions into a newly set-up trust fund until they reach the age of 42, with their contribution linked to their earnings. As you progress in your career and earn more, your contribution to tuition fees will increase, and vice versa.

This ‘progressive’ notion is a plan which forms the cornerstone of their ideas for university funding. Porter argued that “I don’t believe, under the current system, that it is fair that a high flying lawyer pays exactly the same for their university degree as somebody who decides to become a nurse”. Instinctively we might agree. Intuitively we could think that a progressive system of tuition fees might make sense, before we contemplate the implications of just what the NUS is proposing, and what our Student Union Council unanimously voted to support.

Porter used an example of high emotional resonance. We instinctively sympathise with the nurse, and we ask why the lawyer shouldn’t have to pay more – we judge the tuition fee argument by our feelings for the jobs in question, specifically that people should be penalised for becoming hard-nosed businessmen or hawkish-lawyers, and that we should reward people for humanitarian pursuits. The problem with these instincts is that they ignore the point in question, which is that if you succeed at university, the NUS wants you to pay more for the same product received by your less successful peers.

 A slightly less morally loaded example can best illustrate this point. I study politics, and I may like to go into journalism. I have done work experience, my portfolio is solid and I have written in various publications. I’ve written at Impact Magazine for over a year, and I’m currently in a position of responsibility there. Now I would think it fair to expect to get a better job in the field of journalism than somebody who had studied politics and not done the same amount of extra-curricular work. However, if I did get a better paying job than them, by the standards of the NUS proposal I would have ‘benefitted’ more from my degree and would thus need to pay more for it. I would be penalised for having worked harder.

When students attend university to study a certain course, they are all paying for the same product – an education from the university in their chosen field. We’re all grown-ups now; if we choose not to make the most of our opportunity here then that doesn’t mean we should pay less because we have ‘benefitted’ less. If somebody is very talented, works very hard to get a first class degree and gets a better job than somebody with a third, they shouldn’t be penalised for taking more from their degree. They have earned their pay, and the NUS has no moral right to propose that it be cut.

If the NUS are allowed to have their way, high achievers will merely find themselves subsidising everybody else’s education. The proposed system is absurd, and it isn’t in keeping with one of the fundamental ideas behind university life – that high academic achievement is rewarded. Penalising success is a dangerous play, especially when it comes to education. The NUS is trying to play at social engineering with a very tenuous mandate, and I only hope they enjoy a similar level of failure to last time they tried to influence tuition fee policy.

This piece will have little coherency, or indeed a point besides my searing anger at the bureaucratic mess that is ‘Student Finance England’. I just decided to compile a list of my pet hates in the form of a list of tips about a system that seems to infuriate all but the lucky few.

1. Make your product simple to access. That means don’t make your questions read like total gibberish and don’t have so many trick questions. If we have filled out the form, it’s pretty clear that we want a student loan, so why ask us at the end to check a box saying that we want to apply for a loan?

2. Either we apply online or we apply on paper. Make up your fucking minds.

3. It’s a week before we go back to university. Don’t, for the love of god, let your website crumble under the inevitably increased webtraffic. It happens every year – your constant protestations that you are ‘surprised’ by it contain as much truth as the results of a Russian general election.

4. Don’t make us apply for the same product twice. We’ve applied for a 3 or 5 year course. You know it. We know it. So why do we have to submit all our details every single year? We already spent many lost days trying to get you to accept our documents last year, why go through that punishing saga again? You can’t make every single student renew their loan every year and then complain of congestion when your phones get clogged up. Speaking of phones…

5. Get a decent helpline. If you aren’t going to make your product simple to access (and let’s face it, Student Finance UK is to simplicity what Iraq is to socio-political stability), then at the very least make sure we have a working number that we can phone you on when it all goes tits up.

6. Stone-Age cavemen had hold machines, even if it consisted of a gruff man telling you to wait for a minute while his mate got back from slaughtering a sabre-toothed lion. There is no excuse not to put people on hold, maybe even give them an indication of how long the wait will be. That means that we don’t have to sit at our desks pressing redial every 5 seconds only to hear the same voice over again telling us to call back later. Speaking of which…

7. Replace your recorded message with somebody other than a Scot. It’s bad enough having to worry about my own student loan without knowing that our rotten abscess of a political system gives anybody born north of the border a free ticket to university. This is Student Finance England, not Monarch of the fucking Glen.

And finally…

8. When I dial your number (08453005090), the last thing I want to hear, ad infinitum, is: “This number is no longer available, please hang up and redial 0845 300 50 90”.

Kenyan medical services have gone on the alert following the development of its first swine flu case, as it was disclosed that a University of Nottingham student had been diagnosed with the disease while on a field trip to the African state.

On developing joint pains and a headache, the 20 year old man presented himself to the authorities after it emerged that his girlfriend in Britain had tested positive for the virus. He, along with 33 other Nottingham students, is now quarantined in a hotel in Kisumu. The group had departed prior to the announcement of positive cases at the university.

Kenyan public health minister Beth Mugo has stated that the case is mild and does not require hospitalisation, and reported that the department of health possessed a stock of 50,000 doses of Tamiflu, ready to counteract an outbreak.

The East-African country has long been seen as one of Africa’s major transport hubs, and counts tourism as one of its principal industries. However, in a country already suffering heavily from diseases such as cholera, typhoid, malaria and HIV/AIDs, it remains to be seen what impact swine flu – a relatively mild form of the influenza virus – will have on the state.

124 cases have been confirmed at the last count in the East Midlands, with nearly 60,000 infected worldwide. While treating the H1N1 strain as a pandemic, the World Health Organisation still states that “Most people recover from infection without the need for hospitalisation or medical care.”

If you read the news over at www.impactnottingham.com, you may well already know that swine flu has spread from Nottingham to Kenya in a single bound.

Here in the west our instinct is to predict chaos, and at face value we may be correct. Kenya receives huge amounts of money through tourism, and is indeed a massive player in trade in Africa. Swine flu should be catastrophic, shouldn’t it?

The one report which really jumped out at me during the writing of that brief article, however, is one done prior to the confirmation of the first case. The report was carried out by ABC news back in April, and concluded on a quote from a taxi driver: “It’s like any other disease. Either you get cured, or you die.”

It was interesting to me because it’s a facet of human nature which has definitely made itself known to me in the last couple of years, and also relates to my previous blog post on terrorism and the effect it has on our society.

In the West we concern ourselves with what we see as huge issues. We panic over swine flu, and it takes a reality check to really snap us back. As the chairman of the Kenya Tourist Board pointed out, one thing we need to keep in mind “is that Swine Flu is actually a very mild form of flu. In fact it’s less dangerous than the normal influenza.” This is not to say that swine flu isn’t worthy of concern – I doubt the World Health Organisation is calling this a pandemic because it’s of no concern at all. I’m just noting that our priorities are a little bit topsy-turvy.

Is it not callous of us to see swine flu as such a dangerous beast, when countries like Kenya labour under the spectre of far worse maladies and have done for most of the past? Swine flu has killed almost 300 people. HIV/AIDs kills 70 people per day in Kenya alone, lowering their average life expectancy by about a decade. The obvious difference is that we feel far more immediately by the former – we buy into the hysteria, and wonder why the people of Kenya aren’t so keen to be terrified. As the aforementioned ABC report pointed out, why worry about it when there are already quite a few diseases that can kill you already in your neighbourhood?

I found a similar point when it came to terrorism. We are terrified of it. We spend billions fighting wars to mitigate it. We give our politicians the backing to take our liberties away to try and prevent it. Places like Tamil in Sri Lanka, and other areas of Asia suffer terrorism too, even if we tend not to focus on it. In the aftermath of the tsunami, however, one Asian commentator argued that “It’s not that they don’t understand the problem of terrorism, they have all dealt with it for decades…the big picture is that large numbers of people here still live on less than $2 a day…this is the war they are waging”.

We spend billions, trillions even, trying to counteract global warming. We put up solar powered signs, we construct gargantuan wind farms, we press states to stop developing and stop using technology that could emit CO2. One wonders how states such as Bangladesh respond to these eco-Luddite gestures, when even a paltry attempt at adaptaion (constructing flood defences etc) would save vast tracts of land and property. While we pursue our idealistic notions of saving the world, we ignore the people who we claim to be protecting.

Euripides noted that “Chance fights on the side of the prudent.” Where is the prudence in the way we react to these threats? What happens when our luck runs out?

Are you afraid?

Maybe you should be. The world, after all, is a dangerous place. We are constantly bombarded with news of a new impending catastrophe, and one could be forgiven for thinking that the world is more dangerous than it has ever been.

One can’t help but think that the media follows the mantra that “If it bleeds, it leads.” Even taking a look at the particular rag I work for, Impact, our current lead story is that of a man being tased and repeatedly punched by the police in the city centre.

In 2005, during the avian flu scare, a leading UN health figure stated that this strain could occur at any time and cause anything between 5m-150m deaths, an estimation bordering on sheer guesswork. The BBC headline? “Bird flu ‘could kill 150m people’”. Only upon reading the article will you find a World Health Organisation spokesman rubbishing the figure, but the damage is already done. It’s a regrettably common theme, and it is practised not only by the media but by politicians.

Fear gets things done. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your fear of missing a deadline for a coursework assignment, or it’s the fear which artificially created a cassus belli in 2003 prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom. There is a school of thought which says that the reason we support our governments and pay our taxes is fundamentally down to our fear of the alternative: anarchy, or Hobbes’ ‘state of nature’, whichever is worse. More than anything else, fear gets people sitting up and taking notice.

The War on Terror, by its very name, shows the effect which fear can have on policymaking. The attacks of September 11 2001 are talked of in similar earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting tones as Spanish influenza. Moreso, perhaps.

Is it worth it? You’re still more likely to be killed by a particularly dangerous deer than by a terrorist. You are far, far more likely to be killed on the road, yet it is terror which excites the imagination. A fear of terrorism could be equated to a fear of being run over by a specific model and colour of car. Perhaps it’s ironic – we try to counter terror (ie: fear) by allowing our fear to dictate our policy for combating it. Some, like Frank Furedi, argue that it’s much simpler to refuse to be terrorised. He cites a “market in apocalyptic scenarios”, pointing out that our leaders have forgotten how to actually reassure voters of a secure future, instead opting to play on fear to secure their own positions and further their own policies.

We can apply this to numerous disaster scenarios which the media presents to us, and it mobilises the populace like nothing else. Just as we mobilised over the Madeleine McCann abduction, we have mobilised over two separate variations of flu in the past, as well as over climate change.  We worry about crime – I should know, Nottingham continues to labour under the ‘Shottingham’ moniker.

Child abduction rates have not changed. In Nottingham, we have had one shooting in the last four years. Avian Flu hasn’t gone away and still represents a threat, just as swine flu will after the media coverage falls away in a month or two.

In my cynical moments, I can’t help but think that people want to be told what to be afraid of. It allows for a kind of togetherness that perhaps we have been lacking since the destruction of the Berlin Wall and this ‘New World Order’. Mankind may be a social animal, but social exclusion (a ‘them and us’ attitude) may well be fundamental to the stability of our society.

It’s not an entirely absurd idea. In international relations it can be argued that the end of the Cold War saw a crisis of meaning  – without an enemy to define yourself against, how do you know who you are? Do we primarily define what we are by what we’re not? Instead of making rational risk assessments, we cling to irrational fears and let them decide what we do and don’t stand for, even if it leads to massive expenditure and violation of our civil liberties as we stumble through crisis after crisis.

If you read your Sun Tzu, you know that knowing both your enemy and yourself is the key to winning battles. He who knows neither his enemies nor himself, contrariwise, is imperilled whenever he takes to the field.

My biggest fear, in case you were wondering, is that we know neither.