Cuts Ahoy At Cap'n Mandy's Universities!

Cuts will cost British universities their international reputations British universities can look forward to hard times under the stewardship of Mandelson:

Universities are facing a new funding crisis with looming public spending cuts and intense competition from overseas, according to the man employed by the government to allocate money to higher education in England.

Sir Alan Langlands, head of the university funding council and a former chief executive of the NHS, warned that the UK risks losing its international reputation for higher education as other countries pump cash into universities to try to train people out of the recession.

It comes after research by the lecturer's union this week suggested that universities are already making widespread job cuts in anticipation of a decrease in public funding. In the last year 1,318 academics have been laid off and a further 5,097 are threatened, it found. Cardiff University has lost 50 jobs, City 65 and Salford 150 through voluntary and compulsory redundancies.

Again, it's good to see the British government coming up with positive solutions, particularly when it relates to the possibility of raising cash:

Mandelson, the business secretary who is also responsible for universities, has launched a new plan for universities which suggests that funding would be increasingly skewed in favour of science and technology subjects. That has already been happening in some areas over the past year meaning that many arts and humanities areas have suffered. There has been a series of high profile closures of language departments in universities.

Mandelson, mind you, studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, so maybe getting rid of all this airy-fairy humanities stuff would be a good idea after all.

Mandarins Plan For Doomsday

Whitehall lines up ‘doomsday’ cutbacks:

Secret “doomsday” plans for 20% cuts in public spending are being prepared by senior civil servants, who fear politicians are failing to confront the scale of the budget black hole.

Whitehall mandarins have begun creating detailed dossiers containing reductions in expenditure that are far deeper than the more modest savings being proposed by Labour and Conservative politicians.

NHS Cost Cutting

On a local note: the Lincolnshire Health trusts are planning to close the microbiology lab in Lincoln and expand the one at Scunthorpe, leaving the county with only two labs (the other being in Boston).

This is no doubt a simple cost-cutting measure. Apparently the health trusts have said it will be an 'improvement'. The same kind of 'improvement' you get from closing down libraries, post offices and fire stations.

It's ridiculous that a major hospital in the capital city of the county, in the centre of the county, should have its lab taken away from it. Lincolnshire roads are notoriously dangerous. You can get from Lincoln to Scunthorpe in under an hour if you put your foot down and don't mind risking death by collision with tractors or lorries; and the same for Boston, in 45 - 50 minutes (provided you actually avoid going into Boston during peak hours).

Apart from which, it can take bloody weeks to get a result from a test in Lincoln as it is. Not much point adding a couple of months to that.