The Conservative government tells us that it cares what happens to the British people and that is why they are making us suffer the cuts. Sadly that is not so. They want to live in a society in which they and their friends and family can exploit the rest of us without constraint to maintain their wealth and power. Nothing they do makes any sense if they care about the British people and everything they do makes sense if they want to maintain the ability of the powerful to accumulate wealth at the expense of the rest of the population. So the Conservatives are the party of those whose core values are about pursuing self-interest.

So what are Labour's values? Unfortunately, it is not easy to tell any more. They used to be about social justice and preventing the rich and powerful from exploiting the rest of us. In the class struggle, they were supposed to be on the opposite side to the Conservatives. Unfortunately they weren't. New Labour pretended that the class struggle was history. But the Conservatives knew it wasn't, and if one side is fighting and the other isn't - the result is going to be one sided. 

So Labour needs re-establish its core values and then fight for these with every fibre of its existence. 

There was a young royal named Will

Whom everyone loved until

Of his wedding they learned

Despite what he earned

It was they who were footing the bill!

Nudge is a book and a doctrine. It has become central to the British Government's thinking on behaviour change. The fundamental tenet is that governments should not attempt to change behaviours through coercion, restrictions or regulation but through subtly altering the 'choice architecture' so that people find themselves doing what is best for them or society. 

This sounds attractive in many ways but, while it is fine as a rhetorical device, it untenable as as a method of devising policy for two reasons:

1) It begins the process of designing a policy, not on the rational basis of what the evidence indicates is likely to be effective, affordable, practicable and publicly acceptable but by choosing from a more limited set of options; coercive and restrictive options (e.g. tax increases on tobacco) are very often the most effective solution and widely accepted by the public because they see them as helpful in overcoming temptations

2)  It neglects the fact that all our behaviours are subject to powerful manipulation by companies through marketing and product design. The tobacco, gambling, fatty food and alcohol industries spend many millions of pounds and dollars exploiting our psychology to sell their products. If governments eschew interventions that protect us against this manipulation, 'choices' are not free - they are just being dictated by profit rather than our own welfare.

With the decline of our industrial base and relentless  media brainwashing, many workers, particularly in institutions such as universities, have lost a sense of the vital importance of unions in protecting workers' rights. 

UCL academic staff, like many other organisations,  have recently voted to strike to protect jobs against a proposed system of applying cuts that many of us think will damage the university and the country.  

I think we owe our current conditions of service to the sacrifices made by our forebears and we owe it to future generations to band together to protect our universities. It is very easy to join the UCU, our main trade union. Just go to www.ucu.org.uk