A British education is prized all over the Indian subcontinent. Despite the anti-colonial and almost anti-British view of history that school textbooks in India propagate, studying in England retains vast prestige. The foremost leaders of the country’s anti-colonial pantheon were all educated here – Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, you name it.
Young people from the subcontinent tend to be highly motivated and go on to excel in some of the top universities in Britain. However, as British economist Joan Robinson said, whatever you can say rightly about India, the opposite is also true.
In the last two years, there has been a massive influx of Indians with student visas into England who are here not so much to study as to drudge. Vast numbers of young Indians who have entered the island since 2021 have used their student status as merely a back-door to working here. Even though the Home Office allows full-time students to work only 20 hours a week, this rule is flouted as many work in informal sectors and are paid in cash.
Scores of these youngsters come to this country as postgraduates, manage to find bog-standard ersatz universities in Britain where they secure admission through the help of extortionate middlemen ‘agencies’ based in India, make their way here and find work stacking shelves, delivering food, bartending and also serve as general factotums in ethnic restaurants. Because they work informally, it is easy for employers to exploit them and pay them ridiculously low wages. A home office raid found employee conditions approximating modern slavery in a south Indian restaurant in Wembley where workers were paid about £5 an hour.
While working during the course of one’s studies itself is perfectly fine, making it the sole purpose of coming to the U.K. is pernicious, both to the putative students and this country. ‘Doing part-time’ has become so rife amongst Indian circles in Britain that social media pages have sprung up in several Indian languages documenting the lives of recent arrivals who eke out a living from menial jobs. A small business owner in Lewisham looked aghast at me when I said “I don’t” when he asked where I was working part-time while a student at the LSE.
Third-rate universities in the U.K. are also to blame for creating a teeming class of pseudo-students by paving an easy path for them to come to this country. A look at their entry requirements are revealing. Leeds Beckett University, which ranks 102nd in the U.K., expects its Master’s applicants from India to have only a 2:2 from an Indian college. What’s more, it wants them to score a mere 6.0 in the standardised IELTS English test. London South Bank University, ranked 96th, does not even mandate an English test and accepts English grades an applicant scored in an Indian high school.
Even though the value of degrees from these universities is highly questionable, they boast of a significant body of international students. The University of Roehampton, ranked 111th, says 14% of its students are international and “warmly welcomes a healthy cohort of Indian students each year”. This is because people who apply to study here are not interested in the degree as much as the lucre to be accrued from exploiting the student status. Indian students have even resuscitated some moribund colleges in England. According to the Economist, about a quarter of all students in the University of East London (UEL) are from India, which previously drew its pupils from only three boroughs in London.
What happens after their student visa expires? Here comes the graduate visa, which grants foreign graduates from U.K. universities two years leave to live and work in the U.K. Finally, the pseudo-students can do overtly what they’ve been doing covertly through the length of their degree. I have personally seen many Indians in the U.K. who pass a Master’s degree of dubious value from an obscure university, secure the graduate visa and continue to work as Deliveroo or Uber Eats drivers, cleaners and bartenders. Not surprisingly, 41.4% of all graduate visas were granted to Indians last year.
The only party that benefits from students coming to the U.K. to go to third-rate universities are those universities. They revel in foreign cash as they dole out useless degrees to pretty much anyone who wants it. They churn out foreign graduates that go on to take up blue-collar jobs for which they did not require a degree qualification, taking away those jobs from a local unemployed British person.
It is time, therefore, to crack down on graduate visas to Indian students who don’t go to the top universities in the U.K. Australia blazed the trail this year banning student visas to students from certain Indian states as they were found to be dropping out quickly to work. But why just Indians? The sheer numbers speak for themselves. Indian students surpassed Chinese as the largest group of foreign students in the U.K. last year at 139,539 pupils or more than a quarter of all international students. As noted already, they also secure the largest share of graduate visas. Allowing them untrammelled access to the country even though they take Mickey Mouse degrees, in lowly institutions and are not here to study anyway is perilous. It makes a mockery of student visas, diminishes the prestige of a British education and perpetuates the excessive dependence of universities on foreign cash.
Restricting graduate visas to graduates of Russell Group universities will mean that only those who are sincere about studying will come here, which is what Britain must aim for – attracting the best.
Whitehall considered a similar plan last year, but it was dropped because of the unholy degree of dependence on foreign students of U.K. universities. Without an annual influx of Indian students, places like the University of East London would go bust. An educational system that leans so heavily on foreign students, particularly when they are just gaming the system to obtain visas, isn’t fit for purpose.
Aditya is a writer and has a Master’s in International Relations from the London School of Economics (LSE). Find him on X (Twitter).
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It could never really happen anyway. If such a treaty were to be accepted it would be an implicit destruction of any country’s sovereignty and thus and ruling power structure would immeditely become defunct. All of the power players know this. They just feed you this to give you the impression that you’re still in Kansas. We were very lucky to be exposed to the film The Wizard Of Oz because it contains several hints and warnings and they have become subsumed into our psyche.
That’s why I’m amazed sunak hasn’t signed it. Yet..
The Jabs are dangerous ! Hopefully they will soon be like trying to sell a car with square wheels ( mind you if it was classed as Eco friendly some muppets would buy them
)
So I imagine the WHO might just tweak that little part of the treaty, and let countries hold on to all their domestically produced jabs. So now the deal becomes: We, the WHO, will repeal the sovereignty of all signatory states during times of pandemic, “potential” pandemic or “potential” global health alert, deny the autonomy and freedom of their citizens and halt all democratic processes as we know them – and that is all fine because we’ve taken away the clause that requires the governments of such states to poison citizens of other countries as well as just their own.
What? Won’t sign because
our sovereignty would be given away? No, because the poison death and injury shots would be given away. Unbelievable. Clown World.Absolutely correct not to sign it. We should only think about compliance in the event that we’re mandated to hand over the lot, 100%. Having ‘got rid,’ we should then refuse to sign in any circumstances.
The real rulers know that we are heading for cataclysm or reset. The game is to keep the charade going on long enough to maximise their gains. Part of that is having a much reduced population after the catclysm. If you look at events from the perspective of a coming catastrophe then they start to make more sense.
That is ‘their’ hill to die on!
Look at investments in areas that are currently desert they know that things are shifting. In Russia the pole shift is common knowledge. They are already building a trade route in the Arctic with China which will bypass Anglo-American channels. To begin with it will be with high tech icebreakers but they know that the far north is going to thaw very soon. Similarly the Brits know the fate of this country in terms of climate – significantly worse. It makes a big difference if you are armed with this knowledge. How many people actually think about their people or brethren.
I fear that this is just part of the scam.
UK Gov: Look! We’re being all tough about this, Protecting our sovereignty. Not putting up with any bullshit.
WHO: OK. You don’t have to do that bit about sharing stuff. You just have to do lockdowns and masks and stuff and closing schools and doing tests and surveillance when we say so.
UK Gov: Great! (Trebles all round! See, we aren’t pushovers. We were really tough with them!)
Once again, currently-sovereign nation states are shying away from the risk of becoming outliers assuming the the WHO is going to form a kind of “club of nations” (much like the UN), this time comprised of the signatories to the Pandemic Treaty and the amendments to the IHR. Much as local populations of potential member states have absolutely no desire to be part of such a “club”, the governments of those member states probably feel themselves pressured into joining so as to avoid the the vilification and isolation from the rest of the world that they fear might result from the abstention from signing. All of this is completely unfounded, of course, as people hold national and individual sovereignty to be of greater importance than their representatives in government do. So any state that boldly refuses the coercive offer to serve under a “pandemic dictatorship” will earn the respect of the world as one who stood up for the sovereignty of the nation and its people.
Given the regard that the recent vaccines are held in by many, it seems to me that giving 100% of them to the WHO would be ideal provided that Tedros, Gates and their cronies are required to be injected with all of the doses.
Jacob Rees Mogg pushing the establishment line with no counter argument. Where is oFcom! Only joking, would not want to entertain that state censor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Hmz9-Ok34
Yes I guess the UK thinks it is absolutely fine to give away its sovereignity to the WHO, but dear Lord don’t take away are unsafe and ineffective vaxxes
. This country, this government has its priorities mixed up.
‘has its priorities mixed up’
That’s too kind, too gentle a way of describing the government – not the country, by the way: the government of whatever tint is not the country, nor does the government represent the views of the vast majority of people – far from it. We don’t live in a real democracy, for heaven’s sake!
The Uniparty government represents only its own views. An elite cabal of liblabcon has been managing this country for 100 years and mismanaging it appallingly since the end of WW2.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the cons or the labs who sit on the front benches or the opposition benches; they take turn and turnabout again and again (only fair!) with the limp dims occasionally allowed to snuggle up to whichever faction needs propping up after a doubtful ‘election’ result.
There are alternative ways of viewing the bubble-dwellers who have a stranglehold on this country’s politics: they are either incompetent morons or they are cowardly traitors to every British man, woman and child.
Only incompetent morons would even think of signing up to China’s lickspittle Tawdry Tedros’s Treaty and the WHO’s blatant attempt at a power grab to further the ends of the globalist malefactors.
Only cowardly traitors intent on selling us all down the river for personal gain and approval from their masters would sign up to the Treaty of aforesaid globalist malefactors who care nothing for nations, national sovereignty, and the native people’s rights to freedom, independence and self-rule in their own land.
‘Mixed-up priorities’ don’t come into it. The Uniparty Undemocrats who misgovern our country are either unfit for purpose or they are treacherous scoundrels.
This is Sunak electioneering, trying to look tough, standing up for British sovereignty. Two years earlier and he’d have signed it. Had the election been last month, he’d now be signing it
Starmer will be signing it soon after the next election, if Sunak hasn’t signed it by then.
To my mind, the biggest threat facing humanity is the political class, on a par with the super-rich.