You've got to fight! For your right!

This week the government seem inclined to introduce two policies that I think are particularly offensive. The first relates to those starting out on their post-school career and the second relates to those already in employment. Clearly these two parts of society are in it together. Employers on the other hand, less so.

So the first piece that filled me with horror was the idea voiced By David Willetts MP that students who could afford it could pay for extra university places in lieu of obtaining a place on merit. Now it seems that this has now been pushed aside as it drew noises of horror once the Guardian story broke.

Now this idea is outrageous for a number of issues. Firstly, many rich applicants to universities already benefit from having paid to attend a private school. Research shows that undergraduates from state schools are more likely to succeed at university, even if they had achieved lower grades at school or college, and this is certainly what I experienced myself at university.

Yet state school educated pupils accounted for 88.8% of university entrants across the country in 2010. For Oxford this falls to 54.3%, with Cambridge performing only slightly better, with 59.4% of the intake coming from state education. Now I don't have the figure to hand as to the percentage of pupils who study at state schools, but it sure as hell is significantly higher than 88.8%, never mind Oxford's measly intake.

Society benefits as a whole from an educated workforce, and we should be working towards enabling everyone to achieve their potential. This doesn't need to be a degree, but we should all have access to the same opportunities, based on merit and not ability to pay.

Now David Willetts angered me a while back in regard to his view that feminism was to blame for a lack of jobs for men, which is a frankly disgusting remark that highlights succinctly why feminism still plays an important role in society. Again, this relates specifically to the need for us all to be able to achieve what we want to be, without any limits based on any arbitrary factor.

The second thing that really got me metaphorically screaming at the government was a Liberal Democrat led policy to further limit employment rights to make it harder for employees to counter discrimination at work, which is already hard enough to prove anyway. That, my friends, may be economically liberal, but it sure as hell isn't socially democratic, and it is the following of these policies that show that the dominating force in the parliamentary Liberal Democrats is that of the Orange Bookers, and the Social Democratic left of the party seems to be nowhere to be seen.