“Little by little, the Government is seizing control of our great universities”, writes James Tooley in the Telegraph.

Fifty years ago this week, Lord Hailsham laid the foundation stone for the University of Buckingham. Even back in the 1970s, eminent scholars feared the increasing encroachment of the state on higher education, with deleterious consequences for academic freedom if it was allowed to continue. If a university could be created that did not receive government funding, they argued, then it could escape the need for state regulations. Buckingham was born as a beacon for independence, a bastion of free speech and freedom of thought.

Fast forward 50 years. Our founders would be shocked to see the all-encompassing regulations emerging from the Office for Students (OfS), the higher education regulator in England which took over university regulation in 2018. There are 25 sets of regulations covering an enormous range of topics, including its current major foci, equality of opportunity and quality.

Thank goodness that the University of Buckingham is exempt from this interference! Wait a minute, it’s not:

A private university like Buckingham, which doesn’t receive any direct government funding, has to satisfy all but three of these 25 sets of regulations – known as “Conditions of Registration” – even though ostensibly the regulations are to ensure taxpayer value for money. If a university is found to be in breach of any of these conditions, then the OfS has a variety of sanctions at its disposal, including removal of a university’s title and status, even if these were awarded through a venerable Royal Charter.

Scruton gave a lecture on Wittgenstein to a private circle of intellectuals. He was quick to notice, however, that “they were far more interested in the fact that I was visiting at all”, rather than deliberations on the rather impenetrable Austrian thinker. The sense of togetherness was, according to the recollection of a Czech dissident, “the most important morale booster for us”.

It is 2024, and in many ways the positions of Britain and Czechoslovakia (now Czechia) have reversed. It is now in Prague where freedom of speech and thought is tolerated, and it is in Britain where it is under assault – sometimes on the social level, but increasingly on the legal level as the recent legislation in Scotland shows. True, people seldom go to prison for expressing their opinions – like Havel did in Czechoslovakia – but lives have been destroyed nonetheless. Sackings, cancellations and character assassinations have proliferated in the country that was once hailed as the cradle of liberalism.

– Štěpán Hobza

"Chlöe Swarbrick says tax reform is needed in NZ. She says that adopting a capital gains tax is just "basic economic sense."  I wonder which books in economics she is reading? Das Kapital..."

"Chlöe Swarbrick ... says that adopting a capital gains tax is just 'basic economic sense.' I wonder which books in economics she is reading? 'Das Kapital' by Karl Marx? ...
    "[P]roductivity is particularly weak in NZ? [Why?] Because we are a 'capital shallow' economy ... Poor countries have lots of labour and little capital, which leads to low wages, whereas in rich countries it's the other way around. At present, NZ is driving up labour with record-breaking immigration — whilst GDP per capita, and productivity, are plummeting. So what is Swarbrick's mind-bogglingly contradictory intervention into the tax debate? That in order to improve our prosperity, it's 'basic economic sense' to tax capital more. Since when did you get more of something by taxing the pants off it?

    "The Green Party under Swarbrick has a new way to achieve its Net Zero carbon goal - its by aiming for Zero Capital and a Zero-Sized Economy."

~ Dr Robert MacCulloch from his post 'Chlöe Swarbrick says capital taxes are "basic economic sense", which goes to show she doesn't have any'