Weekly news - Bob Crow & Tony Benn / UCAS data scandal / Labour's youth job plan

Well, what a mortal week it was for left wing politics, with RMT trade union leader Bob Crow dying of a sudden heart attack on Tuesday, and Old Labour stalwart and all-round inspiration Tony Benn dying on Friday morning. In a way, the week serves as a sombre reflection of the negligible footprint of socialist values and influences on 2014’s market capitalist beach.

Whenever anyone refers to trade unions nowadays, it is always seared through with caustic reference to the chaotic power they wielded during the 1970s, bringing about the ‘Winter of Discontent’; together with just how primed they were for someone like Thatcher to arrive on the scene and smash them to irrelevant obscurity with the heavy mallet of privatisation. Which is a shame, since trade unions, if operated conscientiously and to the traditional syndicalist ethos, could still play a very valuable role in British society.

It’s worth noting, my banker flatmate remarked, that despite Bob Crow’s Marxist credentials, the belligerent way in which he ran the RMT, effectively cornering the market on public sector pay in London, exerting pressure to push his members’ salaries ever higher with scant regard for the rest of the public sector, was not far removed at all from the world of finance and banking.

This aside, there can be no denying the success with which he performed his duties; and in a week in which nurses and NHS staff are livid at news of miniscule pay increases, the value of his tenacity and commitment to workers can scarcely be exaggerated.

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In other news there was yet another data scandal, this time the university admissions board UCAS who, it has been found, have been selling personal details of students and parents to companies such as Red Bull and Vodafone to use for marketing purposes.

Aside from the ethically moribund nature of, for all intents and purposes, a monopolistic organisation trading in the details of (to a large extent) children; this revelation raises all kinds of troubling indicators as to the full-scale commercial revolution of the higher education system, now content to treat students as little more than consumers to flog products to.

The group Big Brother Watch note that UCAS are operating within the boundaries of data legality, but it is the devious and underhand manner in which such activity has been largely concealed from students and parents that is most perverse. Why should they only be able to opt out of the database at the cost of being excluded from mailings relating to jobs, university courses and other relevant information?

It is yet further proof that in Britain today, anything about everybody is up for sale. And where exactly is the National Union of Students (NUS) on this issue? Incredibly, there appears to be nothing at all about the scandal on their website, when on the contrary they should be leading the outraged charge, demanding of UCAS explanations, justification and reform.

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The Labour Party finally appear to be mobilising themselves, trying to shoehorn their way off the sweaty sole of the centre ground on which they've been squirming since the last election.

In the approach to Osborne's final Budget announcement before the General Election, Ed Balls unveiled Labour's youth unemployment initiative, that 18-24s unemployed for over a year would be assigned minimum wage work for 6 months with an 80% likelihood of companies taking them on permanently thereafter. This would be funded by a one-off levy on bankers' bonuses and restrictions on higher rate pension tax relief.

At face value this would appear to be a very populist policy, tackling the twin evils at either end of the zeitgeist see-saw; siphoning off from the obscene bonuses in the banking sector and funding much-needed employment for the disenfranchised young. In fact, policy-wise it seems almost too good to be true, and therefore will probably prove far more complex and unwieldy to affect in reality.

For a start, where are these job placements supposed to magically appear from? Will they in fact be merely employment mirages that once companies have taken the government subsidies on offer will swiftly dissolve into thin air? And will a swipe on bonuses actually be enough to securely fund the plans anyway? Especially given the unscrupulous conniving of financial institutions who are already trying to circumvent the media backlash around 'bonus season' by stealthily rewarding employees through salary remuneration schemes.

Of course, cynicism is often too comfortable a divan on which to recline.

With this in mind I'm determined to try and pay heed to the late Tony Benn's apposite words that remaining idealistic and determined to affect change (on however minor a scale), is the surest way in which to live your life.

After all, to surrender to disillusionment and disaffection in the face of perceived hopelessness is to achieve nothing more than the maintenance of the status quo, and by the nature of your apathy strengthen the position of the powerful who continue to exert their will on the powerless.