In the week the Home Office took a break from its usual work of charging like a wounded bull to tweet:

contribute your views to our consultation on how we can best reduce the number of students who come to the UK

(h/t to Anton Vowl)

As it turns out, I'm in an excellent position to give some advice on this.  I'm carrying out research on contemporary Britain; research it would make a lot of sense to do at a British university.  But I'm doing it at The University of Melbourne.  I am, in Home Office terms, a success story. 

Firstly, a few statistics.  In 2008/9 there were 368,970 non-UK students (this includes EU students) studying at UK universities.  Of these, 183,385 were postgraduates.

It's these postgrads (are you listening, Home Office?) that I'm going to focus on.

The postgraduate research and learning community, along with the academic community in general, is a mobile one.  Students and staff will move to follow supervision, interests, specialisations, funding, security, facilities and culture.  (It's these things, rather than proximity to what I'm studying, that make Melbourne a brilliant choice in my case.) 

If the Home Office wants to stop student movement, it's these things that it should look to.  The most effective policy for making sure overseas students don't want to study in the UK is simply to make UK universities unattractive internationally. 

Excellent work has already been done in slashing international scholarships.  Given the vitality of postgraduate research, making admissions dependent on who can pay rather than who has the smarts is a clever step towards reducing the UK's competitiveness. 

More good work is happening to reduce academic job security, and this can be hastened by increasing the move to managerialism.  If the most talented academic staff are driven elsewhere, this will in turn reduce the UK's competitiveness when it comes to supervision and specialisation. 

With the best staff and students instead working away in up-and-coming overseas universities, the UK's competitiveness when it comes to academic culture will be reduced dramatically. 

Those remaining students still mad enough to cling on by this stage should hopefully be cut adrift by attacks on facilties.  Close the libraries.  Get rid of the computers.  Cancel the journal subscriptions.  Kill the services while at it: health, counselling, chaplaincy, careers. 

By this stage, there will be a trickle-down effect to undergraduate students, many of whom will now stay in their home countries or travel to the new crop of big-name universities who will have by this stage leapfrogged UK instititions. 

And the best thing about this whole plan to reduce international competitiveness is that it will finally succeed in converting UK universities into simple sausage factories for future cubicle dwellers. 

Education schmeducation.  The neoliberal dream will have come true! 

Seatbelts on, please.  This is going to be a biggie. 

There has been quite a lot of comment about the student protest.  I tend to agree with this suggestion from The Spectator that the violence is likely to help rather than hinder the Coalition's cause. 

There has also been a lot of political moaning about the European Court's judgment that British prisoners must have the right to vote.  I'm with Kate Green: so they should. 

Off course the other big news has been IDS and his work-for-the-dole scheme.  Well, it isn't quite.  The idea, apparently, is to pack long-term (12 months+) unemployed off on a month's community service.  Excellent comment from Jackie Ashley (who took a Guardian comments bashing for it).  More discussion on the carrot and the stick from ToryDiary.  (Though must we have the spurious 'supporting families' bits ... says this daughter-of-multiply-reconstituted-families.)

Ross McKibbin in the LRB has a must-read on the current political/economic situation.  Add this to a very interesting perspective over on the Inequalities blog on 'why the welfare state doesn't matter any more'. Elsewhere, Sunny Hundal writes on why the left shouldn't oppose all cuts and Jonathan Todd argues that Labour must consider (and articulate) multiple futures, not just certain post-cut doom.  

Oldham post-Woolas (you done good, Harriet) is shaping up to be one to watch.  ToryDiary look at whether it should be given to the Lib Dems ... or if the Tories should put up a good fight.  Regardless, we might see here the North's first real political comment on how the Coalition is going. 

Amidst all of this political talk, Kerim Friedman's look at Bourdieu and the role of the public intellectual hits the spot nicely. 

Over at the CofE, the final reccommendations from the Faith and the Future of the Countryside conference have been released.  It has been a bit of a speaking out week for the Church with ++Rowan expressing grave concerns about welfare reforms.  (Although that Telegraph link dramatically hypes up 'church in crisis' over the flying bishops!)

Michael Young (author of 1957's Family and Kinship in East London) remembered.  His life and work calls, Paul Richards argues, for a Good, not a Big, society. 

I reckon the 70s are fast becoming the new 60s as the darling decade of scholarly research.  Andrew O'Hagan writes on the 70s style. 

Whew!  Can I have the weekend now? 

The big palaver has been Demo2010, the student protest march in London which turned ugly.  The threat of violence is often inherent in a protest, but it often seems doubly so in a student one.  This was of course not violence igniting throughout the crowd, but the usual "yeah, that showed 'em" brigade who excel at ruining it for everybody else.  (On HE reform itself, see this article about Mandelson, Labour and the Browne report.) 

The shouting-and-placard-fest marks David Cameron's 6 month anniversary as PM.  He'll be out for his tea, then.  ToryDiary's Paul Goodman reflects on 6 months of 'Dave'.

North-South divide watch: now then, here's summat on that.  (I am reminded to review Helen Jewell's book on this.)  

An interesting post by Aaron Peters at LFF on 'anxious aspiration'. Peters' solution is a Labour politics of 'familiar fairness in unfamiliar times'.  Yet, elsewhere, Mark Vernon writes that 'a rigorously fair [society], would, actually, be an inhuman one.'

Phil Woolas has gone, but questions of racism and political campaigning remain.  Two responses from the Labour blogs: Dan Hodges suggests 'Phil Woolas is our fall guy' and Jon Lansman responds that 'this isn't a working class racism problem, this is a Labour problem'. 

Finally, stepping away from the politics!  On the heritage front, No Tech Magazine have sniffed out a bunch of free online pamphlets about things like tool care, hedging, and dry stone walling. Also, British Waterways are planning big work on the canal network.  Someone remind me to try and see the lock gate workshop at Stanley Ferry!