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11th September 2013: The world's gone mad and I'm the only one who knows
13th August 2013: Black is white. Fact. End of.
11th August 2013: Electric cars, not as green as they're painted?
18th June 2013: Wrinklies unite, you have nothing to lose but your walking frames!
17th May 2013: Some actual FACTS about climate change (for a change) from actual scientists ...
10th May 2013: An article about that poison gas, carbon dioxide, and other scientific facts (not) ...
10th May 2013: We need to see past the sex and look at the crimes: is justice being served?
8th May 2013: So, who would you trust to treat your haemorrhoids, Theresa May?
8th May 2013: Why should citizens in the 21st Century fear the law so much?
30th April 2013: What the GOS says today, the rest of the world realises tomorrow ...
30th April 2013: You couldn't make it up, could you? Luckily you don't need to ...
29th April 2013: a vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE, because THE ABOVE are crap ...
28th April 2013: what goes around, comes around?
19th April 2013: everyone's a victim these days ...
10th April 2013: Thatcher is dead; long live Thatcher!
8th April 2013: Poor people are such a nuisance. Just give them loads of money and they'll go away ...
26th March 2013: Censorship is alive and well and coming for you ...
25th March 2013: Just do your job properly, is that too much to ask?
25th March 2013: So, what do you think caused your heterosexuality?
20th March 2013: Feminists - puritans, hypocrites or just plain stupid?
18th March 2013: How Nazi Germany paved the way for modern governance?
13th March 2013: Time we all grew up and lived in the real world ...
12th March 2013: Hindenburg crash mystery solved? - don't you believe it!
6th March 2013: Is this the real GOS?
5th March 2013: All that's wrong with taxes
25th February 2013: The self-seeking MP who is trying to bring Britain down ...
24th February 2013: Why can't newspapers just tell the truth?
22nd February 2013: Trial by jury - a radical proposal
13th February 2013: A little verse for two very old people ...
6th February 2013: It's not us after all, it's worms
6th February 2013: Now here's a powerful argument FOR gay marriage ...
4th February 2013: There's no such thing as equality because we're not all the same ...
28th January 2013: Global Warming isn't over - IT'S HIDING!
25th January 2013: Global Warmers: mad, bad and dangerous to know ...
25th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
19th January 2013: We STILL haven't got our heads straight about gays ...
16th January 2013: Bullying ego-trippers, not animal lovers ...
11th January 2013: What it's like being English ...
7th January 2013: Bleat, bleat, if it saves the life of just one child ...
7th January 2013: How best to put it? 'Up yours, Argentina'?
7th January 2013: Chucking even more of other people's money around ...
6th January 2013: Chucking other people's money around ...
30th December 2012: The BBC is just crap, basically ...
30th December 2012: We mourn the passing of a genuine Grumpy Old Sod ...
30th December 2012: How an official body sets out to ruin Christmas ...
16th December 2012: Why should we pardon Alan Turing when he did nothing wrong?
15th December 2012: When will social workers face up to their REAL responsibility?
15th December 2012: Unfair trading by a firm in Bognor Regis ...
14th December 2012: Now the company that sells your data is pretending to act as watchdog ...
7th December 2012: There's a war between cars and bikes, apparently, and  most of us never noticed!
26th November 2012: The bottom line - social workers are just plain stupid ...
20th November 2012: So, David Eyke was right all along, then?
15th November 2012: MPs don't mind dishing it out, but when it's them in the firing line ...
14th November 2012: The BBC has a policy, it seems, about which truths it wants to tell ...
12th November 2012: Big Brother, coming to a school near you ...
9th November 2012: Yet another celebrity who thinks, like Jimmy Saville, that he can behave just as he likes because he's famous ...
5th November 2012: Whose roads are they, anyway? After all, we paid for them ...
7th May 2012: How politicians could end droughts at a stroke if they chose ...
6th May 2012: The BBC, still determined to keep us in a fog of ignorance ...
2nd May 2012: A sense of proportion lacking?
24th April 2012: Told you so, told you so, told you so ...
15th April 2012: Aah, sweet ickle polar bears in danger, aah ...
15th April 2012: An open letter to Anglian Water ...
30th March 2012: Now they want to cure us if we don't believe their lies ...
28th February 2012: Just how useful is a degree? Not very.
27th February 2012: ... so many ways to die ...
15th February 2012: DO go to Jamaica because you definitely WON'T get murdered with a machete. Ms Fox says so ...
31st January 2012: We don't make anything any more
27th January 2012: There's always a word for it, they say, and if there isn't we'll invent one
26th January 2012: Literary criticism on GOS? How posh!
12th December 2011: Plain speaking by a scientist about the global warming fraud
9th December 2011: Who trusts scientists? Apart from the BBC, of course?
7th December 2011: All in all, not a good week for British justice ...
9th November 2011: Well what d'you know, the law really IS a bit of an ass ...

 

 
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According to Wikipedia, Julie Burchill is an English writer and columnist “known for her provocative comments”. Well, in this case we're not so sure about “provocative”: we think it's all pretty sensible. Here she is writing just before Christmas about the student protests in the Independent ...
 

 
Every conflict at some point produces a photograph which seems to sum up what a thousand words of journalism couldn't. The nine-year-old girl fleeing a South Vietnamese napalm attack which showed how wrong American involvement in the Vietnam war was. The toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein which showed how right American involvement in the Iraq war was. The erection of the hammer and sickle over the Reichstag which finally gave the Master Race notice to lay down its arms and open its heart to the Red Army.
 
And now, that pampered, pompadoured ponce of a poltroon, swinging from the Union flag on the Cenotaph.
 
Charlie Gilmour's father is an old Etonian poet; his stepfather a superannuated rock star worth around £78m whose most famous ditty insisted, somewhat amusingly under the circs, that "We don't need no education." The creature himself has been on the books of Select Model Management and has – quelle surprise! – tried his soft white hand at journalism, writing music reviews for the Guardian.
 
And here is this vile body, more Beau Brummel than Che Guevara, talking about the reward Mummy and Uncle-Daddy gave him for being a good little soldier and getting into Big School: "I've always loved good-quality clothing. My parents said that if I got into Cambridge, they would buy me a Savile Row suit. They made me two suits – a single-breasted day suit and a slim-cut dinner suit, which is useful, as there are all sorts of feasts and formal occasions at Cambridge."
 
The cherry on the festive cake is that Gilmour is a history student who didn't know what the Cenotaph was. What do you bet he thought “The Glorious Dead” was the name of a band?
 
Make no mistake, this was not a foot-soldier of the wretched of the Earth rioting in defence of his survival – this was the spawn of privilege and entitlement rioting in defence of his privilege and entitlement. Since even the tiny bit of social mobility there was in this country came to a halt, the young rich have seen areas previously open to bright working-class youth become as mindlessly theirs as a trust fund. The Word magazine noted recently that – while fewer than one in 10 British children attends a fee-paying school – 60 per cent of rock music chart acts are now ex-public school, compared with one per cent 20 years ago.
 
And on top of this, the public-school educated children of millionaires believe that it is their right to have their educations funded by those who leave school at 16!
 
Well, I didn't go to university but almost everyone I know did, and with no exceptions whatsoever I honestly cannot see what the point was. They were all qualified and equipped for the positions they hold when they left school - the three years spent at university were just three years of boozing and bullshitting funded by the taxes of people who had the actual gumption to remove themselves from the playpen of education and get a job as soon as legally possible.
 
In a belated reaction to this fact, the accountancy firm Deloitte plans to start hiring school-leavers rather than graduates from next year, as businesses become convinced that university degrees are worthless. University-educated hacks are forever banging on about how dreadful it is that all young people today want is to become famous on reality TV shows, but in a society where all the interesting jobs automatically go to the dreary spawn of the bourgeoisie, it's often the only option. The print unions were pilloried for passing on jobs through the generations, but we now see it in media, music, acting and modelling.
 
Meanwhile, many non-U universities have effectively become holding centres where poorly educated teenagers can prolong the school experience for another three years, staving off the long years in the call centre pondering on exactly what doors their 2:2 in Media Studies was supposed to open for them. The clever working-class youth of this country has been socially and spiritually "kettled" - hemmed in, suffocated and stifled - since the year dot by the privilege and entitlement of Charlie Gilmour and his ilk. And they have sustained a great deal more damage than a smashed mobile phone, as I believe the poor little oofums did.
 
Gilmour and his gaggle are part of the problem, not part of the solution, and the sooner these natural-born dunces recognise that and step away from a higher education that seems highly unlikely to alter their state of ignorant bliss, thus leaving the resources involved to the clever and poor amongst our student body, the better.
 
Swing on THAT, you useless brat!

 

 
The GOS says: Here, bloody here! (Or 'Hear, bloody hear!' if you prefer. I went to university too, you know).
 
What puzzles me is why people think we should be paying for kids to be trained in stuff we don't need and don't want. If they want to be engineers or physicists, fine – we need those, so let's pay for them to be trained.
 
But how exactly do we have a deep-felt need for experts in media studies or knitting (no, I'm quite serious, Brighton University has courses in knitting. They don't call it knitting, but that's what it is, nevertheless)?
 
I'll grant you that some arty-farty types like musicians and actors and dancers are quite ... well, not useful exactly, but they do fulfil a rôle which society should not be without. Let's not forget that in the 1980s music earned more foreign currency for Britain than the steel industry. However in my experience young people who want to do those things will learn them anyway. They don't need to go to university to do it (my own 1960s degree was in music; the course at one of the more prestigious universities was almost totally useless and the lecturers appalling. I became a tolerably good musician despite my education, not because of it).
 
So I imagine that aspiring knitters can, if they want it enough, acquire their woolsmanship skills without the help of the taxpayer. Just think how much money we could save if we closed all the university departments offering useless courses to semi-illiterates. Trouble is, what to do with hundreds of out-of-work lecturers in cultural semantics, 14th Century counterpoint or macramé? The state already supports far too many work-shy scroungers making little or no contribution to society.
 
By the way, back when I was at university there were only one-third the number of students there are today. University education was seen as a privilege, not a right.
 

 
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