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! 

Britain Today today is brought to you by English Beat's 'Save it For Later', and a sad kitten who has eaten too many biscuits. 

From the nation that brought you colonialism comes more immigration hypocrisy, this time with the hysteria preventing artistic exchange.  Daft as a paintbrush.  On a somewhat similar topic, Anton Vowl writes intelligently on 'white' Britishness (and rumours of demise). 

Under daft as a brush, see also: Lord Young, who has resigned after suggesting that during the 'so-called recession' we've 'never had it so good'.  The most interesting comment, of course, has been over whether what he's gone and said might be true: tosh, says the Spectator, though, wait a second, says Stumbling and Mumbling.  Meanwhile, Dave Osler at Labour Uncut notes that Lord Young (and his well-off ilk) have always had it better. 

More big news came last week of course in the looming spectre of the royal wedding.  My thoughts about Prince William don't get much far beyond wondering whether he is actually the most boring man in Britain, or whether an accountant from Milton Keynes might just pip him to the title.  For sheer entertainment value I'd rather see Fergie and Andrew try it all over again (after re-uniting on I'm a Celebrity, of course).  Anyway, here's Paul Richards on the wedding, the monarchy, and the Labour party's relationship to it all. 

The Indy reviews Jesse Norman's The Big Society and suggests it might be the clearest explanation yet (but that isn't necessarily saying much!). More book reviews over at Open Kingdom, where two books about why the Tories didn't gain a majority at the election are put head-to-head. 

Since the Coalition took power, Britain has become one of the 'most data-friendly countries', according to Datablog which wonders whether government spending data can really change the world?

Here's the full text of Nick Clegg's recent political reform speech.  Worth reading, I think.  In more Clegg coverage, William Davies asks 'who is the fairest of them all?'.