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Month: February 2012

Smurf up your sex life

Young love. It’s sweet, it’s innocent, spilling over with unexpected delights and new experiences.  The same can also be said for the sex you have when you’re young as well.

Unfortunately, these more dynamic moments are often overshadowed by sporadic thrusts, sloppy mouth-work, amateur poking, weak grips and awkward mutterings of “how was it for you?”

If your response to that question usually seems to be more “hmmm” than “mmm”, why not give one of these novel suggestions a whirl the next time you’ve netted the object of your affections in the bedroom:

Practically every female you see on campus will own some form of headband, be it a sweeping bohemian scarf or a wire-filled floral hipster tie. Why not appropriate these largely ornamental items of headgear and wrap it round your other half’s wrists and take advantage of their limited mobility.

That well intentioned reading you meant to do for class tomorrow sitting unloved and unnoticed on your bedside table? Utitlise the sheer force of knowledge in a different way: give your bedroom partner’s rear end a cheeky rap or two with that hard-backed bad-boy. John Rylands need never know.

Ever feel like you’ve wasted your money on all those BOP outfits? Why not indulge in those fantasies he never knew he had; Smurfs can be sexy, elves can be erotic. Sure, it’ll take a lot of persuading, but persist and you can both reap the benefits of love inspired by Luvyababes.

No space in your budget for chocolate body paint? Improvise! Why doesn’t marmalade enter the bedroom more often?

Some of us prefer savoury to sweet, so why not turn your partners body into a homage to your favourite Domino’s topping: squirt on the ketchup, smear on the BBQ sauce, hell, why not sprinkle on some mozzarella, dot on some pepperoni and make a real meal out of it.

Cashing in on Cadbury

A new phenomenon has swept across the student nation. One that is neither ethical nor approved of in many social circles.

So far a technical term hasn’t been coined for this activity but it can be simply summed up as: making fake complaints to get free stuff. Maybe it’s the friends I keep but it seems to me that customer “feedback” is on the up.

The motivation behind the creation of a false complaint letter or e mail is not necessarily financial. Granted everyone, students especially, can benefit from a £3 Sainsbury’s voucher but the prospect of a couple of quid off your weekly shop really isn’t the only incentive.

For some it is simply a case of having too much time on your hands – I’m looking at you humanities students. What better way to kill some time around your five hour a week than putting your creative writing skills to the test in return for a couple of free chocolate bars? The funnier the better.

Here’s some inspiration if you’re new to this questionable game: telling Tesco that your BLT sandwich was missing the all important T, claiming that your Yorkie Raisin & Biscuit was disappointingly lacking in the biscuit department or that the Cilit Bang you purchased last week just isn’t getting your pennies as shiny as Barry promised.

The ultimate fake complaint came last Christmas when a friend of mine, on a boring and hungover Sunday afternoon, wrote to Cadbury declaring that on a frosty December 1st morning she had opened the first door to her Dairy Milk advent calendar to unexpectedly be greeted by a white chocolate reindeer rather than the milk chocolate she had anticipated.

Cadbury was having none of it so naturally asked for proof. Two hacked up advent calendars and a switcheroo later Cadbury had their evidence.

The end product was pathetic to say the least and involved lots of tape but even so a £4 consolatory coupon arrived in the post a few days later.

Rather than argue against artificial accusations it’s easier for these big companies to pay you off with a voucher and a computerized apology. Everyone’s a winner!

So be warned, supermarkets and chocolate manufacturers alike, for there are many out there with a dwindling student loan and far too much time to kill.

Ask Keir: Tonsillitis

Ask Keir is a new column aiming to answer all your health questions. If you want to know about that funny looking lump that won’t go away, why that student doctor keeps poking you or anything at all to do with health get in touch at: [email protected]

All questions will of course be kept confidential and anonymous.

 

Question of the Week

Hi, I went to my GP a few days ago because I was sure I had tonsillitis (I had it last Easter) and my GP said I did but he didn’t give me any antibiotics. I meant to ask him why but I didn’t want to seem rude. Can you tell me why he didn’t give me them?

Yes hopefully I can! Right so here’s the basics. Tonsils are a pair of glands that sit near the back of your throat and they contain these special cells that help us fight infection.

When you get an infection it can localise in your glands and when it does this, your glands swell up as it tries to make as many cells as it can to fight the infection. That is how you get your sore throat and find it hard to swallow food and fluids.

Tonsillitis when broken down consists of tonsils  (those glands at the back of your throat) and -itis (inflammation – which is your bodies response to an infection)

An ‘infection’ has numerous causes. Two of the most common causes are bacteria and viruses. Bacteria can be treated with antibiotics and viruses are usually left to be fought off by our own immune systems.

Now most of the time tonsillitis is caused by a viral infection therefore there would be no need to give antibiotics as it would have no affect.

However surely if even only 1 out of 10 cases of tonsillitis were caused by bacteria and giving antibiotics didn’t have a negative effect on your body why wouldn’t you just give the antibiotics in case?

The answer to that lays in the fact that bacteria are constantly evolving to avoid being ‘killed’ off by our antibiotics. I won’t go into detail but by using antibiotics unnecessarily bacteria can build up a resistance meaning you now get these much talked about ‘super bugs’ such as MRSA that are resistant to all but the strongest antibiotics.

The fear is, is that one day we’ll have bacterial infections that we wont be able to treat with antibiotics and that could make them fatal. So that’s why doctors won’t hand them out unless they know for certain that they’ll be of use.

Phew! There’s your whistle stop tour of ‘the tonsillitis and antibiotic dilemma!’ Hope it helps!

The lives behind the numbers

They say that a picture is worth 1,000 words, but when it comes to grasping the reality of life in Palestine, sometimes 1,000 words is better than a picture.

Articles about Palestine and Palestinians under Israeli occupation usually use numbers and statistics or shocking pictures to capture the situation. However, simply reading headlines such as “1,400 killed in air strikes and ground war in Gaza” or “40 percent of Palestinian males detained since the start of the Israeli occupation” allows people to forget the humanity behind the headline. Therefore, this will be a different kind of article that concentrates on the details of the human experience of Palestinians.

When I close my eyes and think of my childhood memories I remember a rainy cold night. As usual I opened the window to see the rain but that night there were two Israeli Merkava tanks outside my house. They saw some movement through my window and moved their laser sights on me.  I automatically dropped to the floor and started crawling, woke up my younger brother and escaped to another room crawling along the floor. My parents woke up as well and we all stayed in the house for more than 20 consecutive days due to military curfew. This was in the 2002 Israeli invasion of the West Bank and the beginning of the most brutal period of the Second Intifada.

During the curfew my dad kept us busy so we would not think of how bad it was. He used to read us stories, tell us jokes, listen to radio with us and make us read Al-Arabi Magazine. We had to spend so much time inside during the curfew that I read every edition of the magazine from 1980 to 2000. It is commonly reported that the city of Nablus was under military curfew for 150 days in 2002, and although that fact is shocking, it says nothing of the hours of boredom and frustration we endured.

I was a child during the curfews and invasions of the Second Intifada and while most people remember their school years as a happy time in their life, for me it was a continuous marathon of running to and from school. I was running to escape the Israeli army as they were always present in the city. We always had to be prepared to encounter the army and I usually kept an onion in my bag because onions help lessen the effect of tear gas. My childhood was full of small details like this that would never make it to front page headlines. However, the worst event occurred on April 16 2002 when an Israeli soldier shot my 10-year-old cousin in his home.  At first his family was forced to bury him in their front yard because the army had imposed a curfew. When the curfew was called off for one day, we took my cousin’s body away and buried him in a cemetery. No statistic could accurately capture the story of my cousin’s death or my childhood memories of the Israeli invasion.

But, to be honest, I was lucky to have a family that helped me through these times. I don’t think others were as lucky as me. Children witnessed the killing of their families by the Israeli army. Some people lost their homes, land, money and even everyday belongings because the army bulldozed their houses with everything in them.  I reached a point where I dreamt of leaving Palestine and going to live anywhere else, but then I realized that this what those who are trying to take our lands would want and so instead these hardships had the opposite effect: now I don’t want to leave and even if I left for some time, I know I will come back to Palestine.

Sharing these details is difficult because first of all I am not using my native language, and more importantly, we Palestinians are not open to talking about our worst memories and expressing our feelings in public. This is the reason you usually don’t see this side of the story and that is why I felt it is so important to share my experience: to make people understand that the 4100 Palestinian lives lost in the Second Intifada is not just a number, that each has a story and many other lives behind it. For each death there is a child who lost a father, a wife who lost a husband, a sister who lost a brother, or simply a kid like me who lost his childhood.

Everyone’s a photographer

Call me old fashioned, pretentious, whatever else, but something really gets my goat about the proliferation of Facebook ‘photographers’. I don’t understand the need for so many pictures while clubbing or drinking. Every night out validated by posing, posting and commenting on the same cookie cutter images with different faces?

This isn’t purely a clubber’s phenomenon, the same rings true with iPhones at gigs. What makes people have to enjoy their experience of a performance through their low resolution cameras, as if to ‘save it’, like a child does with the good bits on their dinner plate? I hope I’m not the only one who is sick of the sea of clasped hands trying to capture their fleeting memories instead of enjoying the show – and don’t even get me started on the Instamatic or Holga emulation apps.

I want to look at where the distinction lies between ‘a photographer’ and ‘someone with a camera’. A serious concern is what these picture-taking attitudes and our images say about us when we look beyond the original purpose of the pictures; to what they say out of context. The camera is a tool, a canvas, a workshop, a toy and an unwilling or uninvited guest all at once.

What we choose to take photographs of defines, to an extent, who is behind the camera. What interests me is where the line lies between the Snap – an extension of memory that all too often fails us – and the Photograph. Is a Photograph simply an image that comes from a camera, or something more?

It is not fair to say that the answer lies just in the volume of work, nor in the quality of the images produced. So perhaps subject matter is what creates this distinction. Well, maybe this is closer but the defining factor can’t just be what is being captured in the photo. The context and motive must play a role in defining the photographer

A friend once asked me if I thought a ‘good photo’ should be able to speak for itself without context. He believed it should, but I have to disagree. This places too much power in the exposure, composition and immediate effect of a photo, hat perhaps any effective subject could conjure when well captured.

There is not a binary distinction between Photographers and picture takers. However, I think it is important for my own sanity to try as best I can to separate these two. There is an old Arabic saying – “if you want to see what someone is really like, look at their friends” – or something like that. I think the same can be said of what we take photos of. The skill of a photographer lies not in simply taking ‘good’ photos, but in selecting and editing those photos, and in choosing which ones to display. A photograph does not make a photographer; direction, objectives, images and ‘feel’ – these perhaps are some steps in the right direction but are not all-inclusive. It’s difficult to define a photographer. It’s certainly a subjective issue, but perhaps there are elements we can all agree on.

What I’m trying to say is this: photographs are great, taking them is unlimited fun and everyone should enjoy it. But please, we don’t need documented evidence of all your boring exploits. Enjoy gigs without living through the lens, and practice your craft, develop your ideas and do your research before you go around branding yourself a photographer.

Disagree? Tweet us @Mancuniondebate, or email [email protected]

Book Blogs

You can thank David Karp for attempting to (albeit, indirectly) inject a little literary culture into the social networking frenzy that has dominated our internet history and depressingly, our consciousnesses, with his creation, ‘tumblr’. For those of you unfamiliar with this, it initially seems like another procrastination tool that we surrender our mental wellbeing to, in favour of hours of staring at a computer screen, waving goodbye to our degrees – that is of course, after checking your Facebook notifications and Twitter feed. However this particular social networking site has an ever-so-slightly more sophisticated twist, offering users a chance to express themselves through ‘micro-blogs’, which many have incidentally chosen to fill with expressions of their love for the written word. All that is required is to type ‘tumblr’ and ‘literature’ into a search engine and you will be presented with pages of results filled with literature-lovers the world-over. Like its rival Twitter, users are given the choice of becoming a pseudo-stalker by choosing to ‘follow’ any of these pages, thereby being informed on a continuous basis of the newest additions to these pages. Many follow the theme of posting their favourite quotes or extracts from classic books or authors, or even adding their own personal works of prose and poetry. A little more civilised than the genius of the average ‘frape’? Probably. However like Facebook, the tumblr literature scene has been infiltrated by the notorious ‘memes’ which have ignited so much debate recently, (though I’m the last person to tell you whether or not they are being used, ‘correctly’), with one irritating example complaining of the clearly blatant ignorance of the general public for not knowing that ‘wherefore art thou Romeo?’ does not in fact mean, ‘where are you Romeo?’ (If this is news to you, look it up. It was news to me too). Obviously, tumblr is a more creative outlet for the youth of today than its fellow networking sites, considering 50% of all tumblr users are under 25. However, whilst it seems a more mature version of the typical networking site we are used to, if it is literary enlightenment you are after, it is probably best to adopt the old fashioned method, and simply read some books.

Review: Northwest Corner – John Burnham Schwartz. 4 stars.

Twelve years after a tragic accident that lead to prison time and estrangement from his family, Dwight Arno receives a visit from his son Sam. Deeply unhappy and misanthropic (due in no small part to his father’s crime and disappearance) Sam has grievously injured a man in a bar fight and his future hangs in the balance. What follows is a pretty unflinching examination of a family taken to the very limit of their emotional endurance.
Northwest Corner is an excellent novel and tells its story maturely and skilfully; the rich prose delving deep into the inner worlds of its protagonists without becoming too self-indulgent. The dialogue is clipped and realistic, contrasting nicely with the characters’ tortured mental states and lending the novel a great tension that a more harmonious approach to dialogue and narration would dilute. However, as is always the danger with this style of writing, Northwest Corner’s prose can at times descend into long lists of extraneous similes and occasionally overwrought cliché (a mark of light on Sam’s cheek is described in the narration as ‘the unconscious brand of his goodness’) which clashes with the novel’s quiet grittiness.
While Dwight is certainly the protagonist, Northwest Corner is an ensemble piece, each chapter told from the point of view of one of the principle characters. It is here that Dwight’s ex-wife Ruth emerges as the novel’s most compellingly tragic character. Undergoing chemo therapy following a lumpectomy, Ruth’s horror at her rapidly deteriorating body is forcibly superseded by her son’s crime and her ex-con ex-husband’s re-emergence into their lives. Schwartz does an excellent job of giving Ruth a vitality that she, as a recovering cancer victim and the collateral damage of her husband and son’s mistakes, should by rights not possess.
Dwight (whose chapters are the only ones told in first person) is a sympathetic and well-written protagonist but his fallibility and machismo prevent him from having the kind of heroic presence within the story that Ruth does. While this is clearly a deliberate and effective narrative decision, the novel fumbles in its attempt to take a similar tack with Sam characterisation. Sam is clearly supposed to share his father’s machismo and reticence but in attempting to show this fallibility in an undiluted form Schwartz has created a somewhat shallow caricature of a young man.
However, with the novel’s emphasis clearly being on adulthood, parenthood and coming to terms with regret, the strong characterisation of Dwight and Ruth, the compelling prose and the dark subject matter overshadows and overpowers its failings.

Online academy aims to “make education available to all”

Following last week’s report that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is launching a free course, which is studied and assessed completely online, another new online educational development, the Khan Academy, is also rapidly increasing in popularity.

The Khan Academy is a US-based free online tuition service, which allows students of any age to develop their knowledge on a wide range of subjects, test themselves and chart their own progress.

The free-to-use website contains thousands of step-by-step videos which help to explain different topics, from maths and science to the humanities. 85 million videos have been downloaded so far and there are currently 3.5 million people using the website each month.

Shantanu Sinha, Khan Academy president and chief operating officer, says that the project is part of a “major transformation” in education.

He says: “It’s being transformed by accessibility.” An internet connection is now the only thing required for students to study, regardless of where they live.

“Access to information will be like access to clean running water. A great education will be seen as a basic human necessity.”

Sinha sees portable tablets as the key in this new accessibility of education. “The intimacy, the portability, the low cost” make them very student friendly.

The website, which has received financial backing from both Bill Gates and Google, is not aiming to replace schools, universities or teachers, but does raise questions about the future functions of schools or universities, especially with the increasingly higher tuition fees.

While select educational institutions already make lectures available online through iTunes U, the Khan Academy download figures make it seem irrelevant.

Almost a million lectures and sets of course materials are being downloaded everyday from 1,000 universities around the world, including Harvard, Oxford, Stanford, NASA and the Open University.

As Liam Burns, president of the National Union of Students wrote in relation to MIT’s new course, Khan Academy “throws open learning on a scale never imagined before.”

While this is a large development in the face of increased university fees, it also reveals the tensions conventional education has with the abundance of online material available.

William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford says that traditional universities have struggled to find a balance between their teaching and the way that young people now gather information.

He says: “Universities have not figured out how to integrate online information into courses.”

Professor Dutton expects the future to hold a shift for all universities towards “blended” learning, using both face-to-face teaching and online learning.

Shantanu Sinha’s central aim with the Khan Academy is ensuring that as many people have the chance to access the core teaching materials that they need, in the most useful form, regardless of income or geography.

“Everyone deserves an education,” says Sinha.

 

 

 

Kidnapper jailed in torture case

A fourth man has been jailed for the abduction and torture of a Salford man.

Isaac Nathan Hodges, 23, pleaded guilty to kidnap, blackmail and false imprisonment. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Three men have previously been convicted in relation to the same case.

The victim’s ordeal occurred in November 2009, when he was abducted from outside his home.

He was leaving his flat at the Fusion Apartments in Salford when he noticed that he was being followed by four men in a dark car.

As he was waiting for the gates to open, one of the men punched through the passenger window of his car.

Terrified, he sped away, but was eventually cornered, dragged from his own vehicle, and forced into the back of the kidnappers car.

A bag was then put on his head to prevent him seeing where he was while the kidnappers drove him to an address in Ashton-under-Lyne.

Two more men were waiting inside, and on arrival he was thrown on the floor and tied up with cable. He was told that they were to demand a ransom from his family.

The victim was scolded with boiling water and stabbed in the leg, as well as being punched and stamped on throughout the six-hour ordeal.

He was forced to call his brother asking for the ransom, which was then collected by the kidnappers at a meeting-point in Ardwick.

The victim only escaped to safety when he was left alone briefly. He managed to untie the cable around his hands and run to a house next door.

He remained in hospital for three days following his escape.

Detective Constable Dan Worthington said: “The impact of this incident on the victim cannot be overstated, so it is only right that these offenders have today been given lengthy sentences.

“Since the police received the report, we have had to work very hard on this investigation, with particular assistance from the Crown Prosecution Service and Forensic Science Service and I hope today’s result will help the victim’s recovery.”

 

Private university defies application slump whilst parent company has faced US investigation.

The private institution BPP University College has seen applications for undergraduate places soar by 139 percent this year, while most publicly funded universities in England have seen a substantial drop in applications.

The University welcomed the rise in applications, stating that it: “indicates that students still feel that there is quality, affordable education available to them in the UK.”

BPP recently announced it was offering degree programmes for between £5,000 and £6,000 a year for 2012-2013. With the government’s fee rise taking affect from 2012, this means that BPP will undercut the price of every degree programme from an English state funded university.

The coalition government has looked to encourage more private universities into the higher education sector. But there have been serious concerns raised about whether for-profit companies really have quality education as their first priority.

The Apollo Education Group, the US based company which owns BPP University College has been the subject of undercover investigations by the US Government Accountability Office over aggressive recruitment tactics and misleading information on graduate prospects.

The 2010 report alleged that Apollo’s “college representatives exaggerated undercover applicants’ potential salary after graduation and failed to provide clear information about the college’s program duration, costs, or graduation rate.”

“Admissions staff used other deceptive practices, such as pressuring applicants to sign a contract for enrollment before allowing them to speak to a financial advisor about program cost and financing options,” the report continues.

An even more damning report from the US Department of Education found that employees at Apollo’s University of Phoenix felt the institution lost all student focus and became solely profit driven after it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Students at the University of Phoenix were reported to have been misled over the extent of government funding available to them to support their studies. The 2004 investigation also found evidence that the University “kept students in class even though they were unable to perform”.

The Department of Education’s figures show a graduation rate of 16 percent at the University of Phoenix, well below the national average of 55 percent.

Serious claims against Apollo’s business practices have been widespread. As far back as 2004, they were the largest focus of a series of investigations and reports by state and federal agencies.

Last year Apollo was fined $300 million for withholding from shareholders a damning report authored by the US Education Department that said the company was illegally paying recruiters on the basis of enrollment numbers.

Carl Lygo, CEO of BPP College has dismissed claims that introducing private providers into the education mix is a danger to the quality of UK universities.

“The US has some of the world’s best private universities: Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT”, he says.

But there is a significant distinction in the US between private universities such as Ivy League institutions and the for-profit outfits that have been at the centre of educational and business malpractice allegations.

An American higher education advocacy group, the AACRAO, has been highly critical of the vast majority of these for-profit institutions. They are accused of “offering completely worthless programs” that “don’t meet the traditional standards of quality”.

“Millions of students have stepped forward to better themselves and ended up with crushing debt and no enhanced wage-making capability,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the AACRAO.

BPP have insisted that their operation is entirely separate to the Apollo Group US and that strict government regulations ensure the quality of the education they offer.

Speaking to The Mancunion, a spokesman for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills stressed that there was “quite a different regulatory system in the UK than in America at the moment but also we have the QA, the Quality Assurance Agency.” The QAA’s purpose is to “safeguard standards and improve the quality of UK higher education”, according to its website.

For its part, the academic community remains skeptical about the quality of education offered by private institutions like BPP. An open letter in the Daily Telegraph last month bearing the signatures of 500 UK academics warned that students would be offered “derisory graduation rates, crushing levels of debts and degrees of dubious value.”

First year student launches T-shirt range

A first year student from the University of Manchester has launched a business designing and selling T-shirts.

Jamie Thompson, a first year Economics student set up website www.bassicclothing.co.uk with designer and friend Asif Sheikh from his native Newcastle, and have began selling t-shirts of their own design.

With a penchant for cartoon-style designs, Sheikh and Thompson found inspiration from their childhood.

“The designs are influenced by things from our childhood like Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse and Disney,” said Thompson, “we are trying to take something everyone is familiar with and putting a twist on it – turning it into something they would want to wear out.”

The website was launched on February 14, and they want to expand the business venture, looking for potential stores in both Manchester and Leeds.

Although making money from Bassic Clothing while still at university may not be realistic, said Thompson, he is optimistic and hopes to establish something for when he leaves university.

“Ideally, I would like to be able to make a living from clothes,” he said. “I’ve had people come up and comment on our t-shirts in the street and it just gives you such a good feeling.

“It’s a really good feeling seeing people wearing your t-shirts.”

 

Arrests made over seven armed robberies in student areas

Three arrests have been made over the armed robberies of seven different people in the early hours of Saturday 8 February across South Manchester.

The spate of robberies taking place in Fallowfield, Withington and Chorlton launched a major police investigation and police patrols of the areas were increased. No one was hurt but all the victims have been left badly shaken.

The first attack happened in Platt Fields Park at 1.40am where three men threatened an 18-year-old woman and a 19-year-old man at gunpoint, stole their property and walked off towards Wilmslow Road.

At 2am a 20-year-old man was assaulted during an attempted robbery on Ladybarn Lane in Fallowfield, suffering head injuries.

15 minutes later a woman was threatened with a gun and pushed to the floor on Derby Road, also in Fallowfield. The three men ran off empty handed.

Just before three o’clock a man was threatened and robbed at gun point on Moorfield Road, Withington and at 4.10am police were called to Barlow Moor Road, Chorlton after another man was threatened and robbed by a man with a gun.

A report of another man threatened by three men with a gun on Manchester Road, Chorlton is also being investigated.

Superintendent Wasim Chaudhry said, “These are a serious set of offences that we are treating as top priority and I will use whatever resources are required to indentify the offenders and bring them to justice.

On Saturday evening two 18-year-old men and a 23 year-old-man were arrested. Two imitation firearms were also later recovered.

Supt Chaudhry reassured local residents: “There will be a visible police presence in the areas and if anyone has any concerns they should speak to one of the officers.”

Hannah Patterson, the Welfare officer of University of Manchester’s Student’s Union gave students the following advice saying students should be “aware of your surroundings, making sure if you can that if you’re walking home you aren’t on your own or you’re taking taxis. Not flaunting expensive items, not walking around on your phone.”

She also wanted to reassure students that the police have been active, having 60 police officers deployed in Fallowfield each day last week, and overall, there has been a 12 percent decrease in crime against students this year.

Greater Manchester Police, the three students’ unions and the council are working in a partnership called ‘the student safe return strategy’ to reduce the amount of crime against students in Manchester. Manchester student homes, the security officers at both universities, the communications officers at both universities and the council are also involved in working against crime in student areas.

 

Student prostitution: an increasing concern

Student prostitution is estimated to have increased as a result of the rising costs of attending university. The English Collective of Prostitutes claim that calls from students seeking help doubled in 2011 while concerns over student prostitution in Wales has initiated a £500,000 investigation by Swansea University into the matter.

Supposedly, a combination of factors has lead to increased sex-work activity among students.  Higher education is becoming more costly at a time when youth unemployment continues to rise.  Though student prostitution is not a new development, it has seen a spike in activity following the announcement of higher university fees.

It may seem absurd to fellow students with more conventional jobs that someone should choose sex work to raise the funds for their education, but those that do it will argue that the financial incentives are too difficult to resist.  The infamous Brook Magnanti, author of The intimate adventures of a London call girl, worked as a prostitute for an escort agency and made £300 an hour doing so.   To put that into perspective, Brook made in one hour what the average bartender would make in 50.

Some students desperate for the cash have taken an unorthodox method of prostitution by offering their virginity to the highest bidder.  A struggling student in New Zealand fetched up to £20,000 by advertising her virginity for sale. In Belgium, a 21-year-old student sold her virginity in an online auction for a staggering £45,000.

Despite how immoral such behaviour sounds, evidence suggests prostitutes can stand to make a lot of money, which begs the question – why is prostitution a low skill but high paying profession?

In a published paper entitled A theory of prostitution, economists Edlund and Korn conclude that “prostitution must pay better than other jobs to compensate for the opportunity cost of forgone-marriage market earnings”.  In other words, prostitution pays well because prostitutes must compensate for compromising their access to a shared income pool that comes with marriage.  This theory could explain why the age bracket where escort wages peaks (between the ages 26 and 30) coincide with the most intensive marriage ages.

Whether financial reward alone is enough to justify prostitution is another matter entirely, but the increase in student prostitution is the by-product of an economy in bad shape coupled with a worrying lack of education and advice on the matter.

Nick Clegg is right – we need a new look House of Lords

Having been a cornerstone of Liberal Democrat policy for some time now, it seems very likely that Nick Clegg will succeed with his plans to dramatically modify the composition of the House of Lords, ushering in a new – and seemingly more democratic – era for British politics. However, recent events suggest that the apparently urgent need for reform to our upper chamber is less clear cut than previously thought.

In the past few months, the unelected members of the Lords have been doing at least as good a job of expressing the will of the British people as ours MPs have. Spurred on by a substantial Twitter campaign, it was the House of Lords which voted against seven different parts of the government’s bill to reform the welfare system, before subsequently voting down the Coalition’s controversial NHS reorganisation bill in its entirety. Add to these defeats the somewhat unlikely passage of the Legal Aid bill, and it is clear that the Lords is acting as a quasi-independent check House of Commons as opposed to merely providing the formality of a rubber stamp.

Yet not all of their collective decisions have been consistent with public opinion. Components of the welfare bill have been defeated numerous times in the Lords, despite their relative popularity with the public at large; a poll for The Sun showed that over 70 per cent of the public support the government’s plans in this area. Instead, it is the cuts to legal aid and the reorganisation of the NHS which have seen the Lords on the right side of popular opinion. A recent YouGov poll showed that a mere 18 per cent of voters support the proposed changes, with almost every major medical organisation – including the influential Royal College of Surgeons – standing firmly in opposition.

Unfortunately, the upper chamber’s admirable opposition to a government determined to railroad its programme through Parliament is virtually meaningless. The government was able to the defeated parts of the welfare bill back to the Lords within a week, preventing any further scrutiny by attaching a finance label to the bill. If the government is truly determined to push through its NHS reforms, it will do so easily. The House of Lords must be reformed – not only because its members have no public mandate, and therefore negligible legitimacy, but more pertinently because they can only provide minimal resistance to the government for that very reason. Only reform will enable the Lords to exercise a clearly defined set of powers, providing them with genuinely democratic legitimacy to fully exercise said powers.

‘Militant secularisation’ has not gone far enough

Baroness Warsi’s recently-expressed fear that religion is under threat from a campaign of ‘militant secularisation’ is wildly overstated. From the hundreds of thousands of children across the country educated in faith schools, to the disproportionate number of bishops in the House of Lords; religion, the Church of England in particular, continues to play a huge role in British public life.

Even if Warsi were right, the departure from religion in public life should be seen as good news for everyone, religious or otherwise. Considering the proliferation of a multitude of religious faiths in the UK, to give them all an equal share of the public platform would be utterly impossible. By virtue of tradition, Christianity currently dominates the media and parliament. But despite David Cameron’s protestations that “Britain is a Christian country”, and “we should not be afraid to say so”, this over-representation is outdated and unfair. The only practical way for the state to avoid favouring one religion over another is to ignore them all.

Instead of trying to redress the balance, tipped so heavily in favour of the Anglican Church, the Prime Minister has made no secret of his desire for a “return to Christian values”. Cameron attributes the fact that secular countries like France are often accused of more religious intolerance than the UK to “the tolerance that Christianity demands of our society”. Baroness Warsi’s comments serve to reignite the debate over the role of religion in public life, and to what extent the decline in religious belief has played a part in the alleged moral collapse of our society which has seen us descend into ‘Broken Britain’. Yet it seems unlikely that giving religion any more space in the public sphere than it already has will solve any of these problems – and a government that focuses on what divides us, rather than what we have in common, is going to find it difficult to combat intolerance.

A more secular society does not mean a more intolerant one. Separating the state from matters of religion can only give religion (and religious people) more freedom, and will only impact negatively on the privileged position that the Church of England occupies in UK politics; for all other religious groups, this is surely good news. The very fact that it was the removal of Christian prayers from an official council agenda, rather than a call for the banning of faith schools, the burka or religious symbolism in public life suggests to me that, on the contrary, these so-called militant secularists are not being militant enough.

My Political Hero: Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter really ought to have been considered the perfect US President. Morally firm like a church pastor, yet as neutral as Switzerland and polite as a Canadian, his sheer affability was an asset to both domestic and international politics in a world suffering at the hands of despotic maniacs and crippled by currencies collapsing to the value of a used Kleenex. Wearing extra jumpers to save on heating in the White House, installing solar panels and recognising the futility of threatening the Soviet Union, Carter was mind-bogglingly considerate. For four years in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, this was America’s compassionate, gentle and ever-supportive parent.

Wise, unassuming and undervalued, President Carter possessed an extraordinary ability to simultaneously empathise with the religious and non-religious, peacemakers and the military, public servants and entrepreneurs, rich and poor, intellectuals and politicians – because, quite simply, he had been all of them. Relinquishing a successful Navy career in order to support his family’s ailing peanut farm, Carter turned his fortunes around by kick-starting the business, before being sworn in as Democratic Governor of Georgia in 1971. Six years later, he was President of the United States, and the most powerful man in the world. Though determined to share his experience and knowledge with the masses in order to attack a complex myriad of problems, the world was not always ready or willing to sit up and listen.

His incredible Presidential achievements are many and varied. Firstly, the Camp David Accords saw Carter preside over the signing of an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in 1979. That’s right, peace in the Middle East – your eyes do not deceive you! Secondly, and most controversially, he returned the Panama Canal to General Torrijos in 1977; the United States, Carter clearly felt, had more than its fair share of canals in its own territory. However, his greatest triumph was surely the dignity and humility he displayed in his fight for extended human rights and overarching good will. Unlike his successor, President Reagan, he recognised that yelling, “tear down this wall!” would hardly make Mr Gorbachev better disposed to doing so. Unlike some of his predecessors, he understood that ground troops and tanks are not generally welcomed by natives with open arms and crumpets.

Instead, he took a practical approach to diplomacy, engaging in face-to-face talks and identifying that the United States was far from perfect. Carter ceased to overlook human rights abuses in friendly territories, campaigned tirelessly against the abhorrent death penalty and highlighted the previously sidelined issue of gay rights. Republicans often sneered at his supposed weakness; on the contrary, Carter was a pillar of great strength in the face of a belligerent world.

His inspiring work continues to this day, having won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize and campaigned tirelessly for low-income Georgian families. He has spent the best part of the last decade persuading Senators and Congressmen of the hypocrisy of Guantanamo Bay, attempting to assuage the religious right and promoting clean energy in the face of idiocy. A record like Carter’s should be celebrated, published worldwide, bottled and sold and textbooks festooned with his teachings.

Alas, his insight appears to have been ahead of his time. Living up to his parental role, he gave one simple warning in his televised message of 1977. He outlined the degeneration of society into raving materialistic lunacy, “worshipping self-indulgence and consumption”. This wasn’t Marxism or collectivised peanut farming – this was absolute common sense. Of course, no one listened, but Carter knew that one day the message would sink in. “Owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning,” he said. As I sit surrounded by my laptop, TV, iPhone and (albeit Primark) clothing, I can’t help but think – no, know – that he was right.

“We need to be painting big bright colours rather than writing in shades of grey”

Considering the events surrounding his turbulent 18 month spell as one of the most powerful figures in the Labour Party, culminating in a departure from his job which wouldn’t have looked out of place in an episode of The Thick of It, Peter Watt has remained remarkably loyal to the organisation which chewed him up and spat him back out in November 2007.

As General Secretary, Watt was the fall guy for the ‘Donorgate’ scandal, a controversy surrounding the issue of third-party donations and one which threatened to envelop the Prime Minister unless responsibility was shifted elsewhere. Initially, Watt understood that it was necessary to relinquish his job in an effort to bury the story once and for all. “This had happened on my watch and I wanted to do whatever it took to put it right, so if it took me resigning to be the lightning rod, then I was prepared to do that”. It was to be, as the old cliché goes, for the good of the party.

However, he was utterly unprepared for what was to happen the day after his resignation. “I was in the back of the cab listening to Gordon Brown’s press conference on 5 Live”, Watt recalls, “and as we turned the corner to go to the Electoral Commission, Gordon actually said that I had broken the law. There was no police investigation, there was no criminal investigation at that stage, but Gordon told the world that I had broken the law”. It was a stomach-churning moment for a man who, only the day before, had been promised by senior colleagues that he would be looked after – it was an unwritten rule that he would be supported, rather than condemned, until the furore died down. In stark contrast to being supported, “the Prime Minister of the country [was] standing up and saying, ‘a crime has been committed, he’s guilty as sin… and at that point everything had changed. I said to someone I was with ‘they’re going to throw everything at me now’.”

This was a shameless piece of political manoeuvring – an attempt to scapegoat a man who had already paid with his job in order to shield the big players from the spotlight of the scandal. Watt is in no doubt as to who was the architect of this strategy. “It was a very Gordon thing to do – you find someone to blame and you blame someone hard, you keep blaming them… apportioning blame was a huge part of his approach to politics”.

Perhaps, he reflects with hindsight, the events of late 2007 were a blessing in disguise. His wife, who felt that the job was taking over his life, had threatened him with an ultimatum just months beforehand – it’s me or the job – and Watt admits that he would certainly have been divorced had he continued as General Secretary. “There’s no trade off at all – it’s basically the party or nothing, the job or nothing, so there’s no trade off… I would have stayed, and I would have rationalised it, it would have been for the good of everything else. I would have been doing it for entirely altruistic reasons – I would have been lying and deluding myself, but that’s politics.” It’s a startling insight into the insularity of the ‘Westminster bubble’, “a very, very strange existence in which you’re obsessed with things that the vast majority of the population just aren’t obsessed with at all”. This is one of the more keenly-felt components of Watt’s critique of 21st Century politics, and his shoddy treatment at the hands of senior Labour Party figures clearly rankles with him to this day. There understandably remains residual bitterness towards those who had promised to protect him, especially Gordon Brown, for whom he “hugely, massively” lost respect.

Having been cleared of any wrongdoing by the CPS in 2009, Watt had the opportunity to set the record straight. His book, provocatively subtitled My Story of Cowardice and Betrayal at the Heart of New Labour, caused something of a stir on publication just months before the 2010 general election. A damning indictment of a Prime Minister whose popularity amongst the electorate had all but vanished, he was “absolutely pilloried by party loyalists for the timing of it”, but has no regrets. In terms of revelations about the complete breakdown of the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, Watt accepts that whilst he was, “the first person from inside to actually say it”, he had merely, “confirmed what people knew but had always denied”.

Nonetheless, Peter Watt remains a passionate supporter of the Labour movement, and talk turns to the future. As someone with considerable experience at the heart of the party, he is uniquely placed to consider where a party in the doldrums with an ailing leader must go from here. But there are endemic problems within the party which need to be overcome before there can be any talk of winning elections. “I think we are a split party… there is a real schism in the party about the future direction that the party needs to take, and the policy implications for that”, he argues. Moreover, there is some scepticism as to whether or not Ed Miliband is the right man for the job. Watt voted for David, not Ed, during the leadership election, though he insists that he can foresee a scenario in which we have a Prime Minister Ed Miliband by 2015. In order to achieve this, however, Miliband must first overcome his presentational difficulties. “I think what Ed finds it difficult to do is to connect emotionally with the electorate… he just can’t make a speech. He’s very wooden and unimpressive, but when you see him on a one-to-one or talking to an audience he’s very impressive, and quite natural.”

Far more crucial than presentation, Watt argues, is that Labour regains a sense of what it stands for, of its core ideals. He is unequivocal that, “you just can’t win an election from the left”, and is sceptical of the Labour leader’s apparent efforts to redefine the centre ground of British politics. Instead, Watt is convinced that Miliband’s chances of overhauling the Coalition government in three years time lie with him having the cojones to take tough decisions and set out a vision for the future.

“What Labour has got to do is send some really strong, powerful and unambiguous signals about its general direction of travel. So for instance, we say we are in favour of welfare reform and making work pay, but we’re going to vote against everything the government’s doing on welfare reform; we accept the fact that the deficit is too large, but actually we don’t agree with the government’s cuts and we wouldn’t make them, but if we win the next election we accept the fact we can’t reverse them.”

“We’re not being really big and bold and saying, that’s it, there’s the line, that’s what we believe in. And that’s all we need to do at this stage. We need to be painting big bright colours and we don’t, we just keep nuancing and writing in shades of grey.”

Peter Watt’s book ‘Inside Out: My Story of Betrayal and Cowardice at the Heart of New Labour’ is out now

Carnivorous woe at University Place

Was there ever a crueller mistress than false hope? Today life dealt me a savage blow, a blow from which it is doubtful I will ever recover; I am left wracked and wretched, lying helpless at the bottom of a great chasm of despair.

It began as so many tales of calamitous misfortune begin, with an innocuous lunchtime lasagne. The meal deal allowed for thrift, the fare was not wholly unappetising. The diet coke was not own-brand. The garlic bread was acceptably tepid. But the star of the attraction, a lukewarm hulking mass of carbohydrate and grease, was what really did the damage. The first bite was a bite like many others that have gone before; sludgy and damp, almost devoid of taste, just as was expected. Flaccid pasta and congealed cheese substitute; my hunger was soon to be abated. Life was good.

But then things took a startling turn for the worst. I discovered a bean. A green bean, there was no mistake. A foreign body in an otherwise trusty lasagne. At least I prayed that was what it was. Hurriedly, I took the third mouthful, fork trembling with heart-in-mouth trepidation. Alas. All that was to be encountered was more congealed cheese, a wayward tomato, and, horror of horrors: another bean. I continued, hope fading rapidly, to be replaced by the dark realisation of a truth I simply could not face. Thinking back on it now brings a cool shiver down my spine. Surely this could not be. The sign said lasagne. I ordered lasagne. Lasagne was dumped unceremoniously onto my expectant plate. Yet lasagne was not what I was now in the process of masticating. I had been duped. For no matter how many bites I took, the story did not change. The pasta turned to poison in my mouth; for here I was, sat in the University Place café, with not a single piece of meat on my sorry plate. Not hidden behind the soggy garlic bread, not squirreled away behind a carrot. There was no doubt. My meal was vegetarian. I retched. I balked.

I went to McDonald’s.

It’s all about the bento box

Bento, literally meaning Japanese takeaway, traditionally consists of Japanese-style vegetables, rice and a choice of fresh fish or meat. In recent years, bento has been transformed to include wider ranging ingredients such as sesame seeds, cashews, delicately sliced fruits and teriyaki sauce. Traditionally popular during Hanami, during which Sakura (cherry blossom) are in full bloom throughout Japan, bento is arguably becoming a largely stylistic and popular choice among the westernised world. These special boxes will provide you with a great source of protein, fibre, vitamins and all that other good stuff you may be craving after inflicting that traditional pasta student diet upon your body. So where can you get bento? Here are some great places to start:

Samsi Japanese restaurant
36-38 Whitworth St

Yakisoba
360 Barlow Moor Road, Chorlton

Sakura
Arch 2 Deansgate Locks, Whitworth Street West

Walrus
High Street, Northern Quarter

 

 

 

The real deal

A common scenario: you’re in University and it’s lunchtime but you haven’t brought any food. Your earlier decision to sleep for an extra two minutes, rather than hastily making a sandwich, now seems unwise. So, where’s the best place to grab food on-the-go; where can one find the best meal deal?

I’ve chosen five options, all near or on campus, which I deem to be the forerunners in satisfying the incessant hunger of students. The three categories are price, quality and range of different items included in the deal.

Boots

Price 2/5 – You’ll probably have to break into a fiver to get this meal deal at £3.29, and no-one likes doing that.

Quality 4/5 – Boots know what they’re doing when it comes to food; it almost feels like Christmas.

Range 5/5 – This is meal deal heaven. Triple sandwiches, Innocent Smoothies – the range seems limitless.

Overall: 11/15

Morrisons

P 1/5 – Instead of a fixed price, Morrisons offer a “buy 3 items, get the cheapest free” deal. This means you’re likely to pay upwards of £3 and you’ve always got one eye on the price of your items. Bad move.

Q 4/5 – I do like Morrisons’ food, and they haven’t let their standards slip for their meal deal.

R 4/5 – There’s an exciting range of food to choose from, so you won’t be disappointed.

Overall: 9/15

Sainsbury’s

P 3/5 – I reckon £3 is the most you can justifiably spend on lunch when you’re on the go.

Q 5/5 – Sainsbury’s shine when it comes to quality; you can get their “Taste the Difference” sandwiches – which cost £3 themselves – as part of this meal deal. Winner.

R 4/5 – No sandwich is too exclusive for this deal, and the drinks extend to Tropicana and Copella. There’s also a pleasing range of snacks; even Walkers Sensations make an appearance.

Overall: 12/15

Subway

P 2/5 – It’s £3 for a sub (which is essentially a glorified sandwich) and a drink – no snack though.

Q 4/5 – It’s Subway. Enough said.

R 3/5 – Unsurprisingly, you can only purchase 8 Subs in this lunchtime deal, but there’s enough choice. Drinks are refillable which is always nice.

Overall: 9/15

Tesco

P 4/5 – Coming in at £2.50, this is the cheapest and very reasonable.

Q 3/5 – I find Tesco to be a safe bet; reliable but nothing special.

R 2/5 – There’s a good range of sandwiches but the limited drinks and snacks let it down badly. Furthermore, you won’t save that much because the three items tend not to amount to much more than £2.50 normally.

Overall: 9/15

 

So, if you do forget to bring a packed lunch, Sainsbury’s meal deal gets my choice for lunch on-the-go. With its prime location on Oxford Road, it’s no surprise it’s heaving every lunchtime.

Oh, and if you’ve ever wondered about Spar’s meal deal – don’t. Trust me.