Is university really such a good thing? I spent three years learning to be a Trot



I went to university and spent the whole time being a Trotsky­ist troublemaker at the taxpayers' expense

What are universities for anyway? I went to one and spent the whole time being a Trotsky­ist troublemaker at the taxpayers’ expense, completely neglecting my course. I have learned a thousand times more during my 30-year remed­ial course in the University of Fleet Street, still under way.



I am still ashamed of the way I lived off the taxes of millions of people who would have loved three years free from the demands of work, to think and to learn, but never had the chance.

We seem to accept without question that it is a good thing that the young should go through this dubious experience. Worse, employers seem to have fallen completely for the idea that a university degree is essential – when it is often a handicap.



For many people, college is a corrupting, demoralising experience. They imagine they are independent when they are in fact parasites, living off their parents or off others and these days often doomed to return home with a sense of grievance and no job. They also become used to being in debt – a state that previous generations rightly regarded with horror and fear.



And they pass through the nasty, sordid rite of passage known as ‘Freshers’ Week’, in which they are encouraged to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol and to lose what’s left of their sexual inhibitions after the creepy sex educators have got at them at school.



If they have learned self-disciplined habits of work and life, they are under pressure to forget all about them, suddenly left alone in a world almost completely stripped of authority.

And if they are being taught an arts subject, they will find that their courses are crammed with anti-Christian, anti-Western, anti-traditional material. Proper literature

is despised and ‘deconstructed’.



Our enviable national history is likewise questioned, though nothing good is put in its place. Even if they are study­ing something serious, their whole lives will be dominated by assumptions of political correctness, down to notices in the bars warning against ‘homophobia’ and other thought crimes.

I think this debauching of the minds and bodies of the young is more or less deliberate.



The horrible liberal Woodrow Wilson, who eventually became President of the United States, was originally an academic who once blurted out the truth as seen by many such people. He said in a rare moment of candour: ‘Our aim is to turn out young men as unlike their fathers as possible.’



Well, look at the modern world as governed by graduates who despise their fathers’ views, and what do you see?

Idealist wars that slaughter millions, the vast corruption of the welfare state, the war on the married family – and in this country the almost total disappearance of proper manufacturing industry.



Rather than putting an entire generation in debt, the time has come to close most of our universities and shrink the rest so they do what they are supposed to do – educating an elite in the best that has ever been written, thought and said, and undertaking real hard scientific research.



Or do these places exist only to hide the terrible youth unemploy­ment that is a result of having a country run by graduates?





Embarrassing dancing can’t get a message across, Ann



An awful price to pay: Ann Widdecombe with partner Anton Du Beke

Will we ever be able to forget those pictures of Ann Widdecombe trying to dance? Heaven knows, some people can’t and shouldn’t dance. I am one of them.



The last time I tried was when I was required to do so with the beautiful female staff of the North Korean consulate in Shenyang, China. It was part of the price of getting a visa to go to Kim Jong Il’s paradise, and worth paying for me (though not for the poor ladies).

But Miss Widdecombe – a fundamentally thoughtful person and the author of intelligent novels – was also paying a price. It is one which anyone must consider who is trying to get serious ideas across to a population that isn’t very interested in them.



If you even want to be heard in the modern world, let alone listened to, then you must seek to become some sort of celebrity. This is the new aristocracy and the new priesthood, and if you don’t belong to it you are nobody.



There have been dark nights when I have wondered if I should try to get myself on to one of these programmes, swallowing grubs or enduring the company of morons on live TV, or making some sort of exhibition of myself, in the hope that people might in that case read my books and listen to what I have to say.



I decided not to try because I concluded that even if I did these things, it would be the terrible dancing, or the dinner of weevils, or the absurd costume that would be remembered. People still wouldn’t pay any attention.



How lucky David Cameron is, to have been appointed a celebrity by his media friends, and so not required to galumph round a stage in funny clothes to get his miserable message across.

China’s jackboot marches on



The Chinese police state doesn’t really care that Liu Xiaobo has won the Nobel prize. The Peking junta are irritated, but it won’t have spoiled their day. And ten, 20, 30 years from now China will still be a tyranny, censored by what a group of Chinese writers recently called ‘The Invisible Black Hand’, a system by which an anonymous telephone call can stop a book or an article being published anywhere.



By contrast, Nobel awards to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Lech Walesa all helped to bring down the Kremlin’s evil empire, causing genuine grief and ­dismay to its leaders.



We are all going to have to learn to share the planet with a new superpower which, having been cut off from the Christian enlightenment, is not ashamed to crush its critics – a boot stamping on a human face for ever.





Why, we’ll ask, did we give our nation away...



If an occupying power did to us what the European Union does – carted off huge piles of national wealth, robbed us of our right to make our own foreign policy or laws, abolished our passports, compelled us to import its goods at preferential rates, cut us off from the English-speaking world while forcing us to allow in ­millions of continental workers (inclu­ding doctors who cannot speak English), dem­anded the right to arrest our people and carry them off to unfair trials on the Continent, ordered our MPs and courts about, closed rural post offices, fined market traders for selling vege­tables in pounds and ounces – we’d be in revolt.



But because our own political leaders allow this to happen, anyone who opposes the EU membership that lies behind all this is dismissed as an extremist or meaninglessly sneered at as a ‘Little Englander’. One day, people will

wonder why.



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Why do we have an Equality and Human Rights Commission? Who asked for it? Who needs it? Who would miss it if it were abducted by aliens?













