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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Why is it that the writers of such peices are so convinced by there virtue they remain anonymous? If they are so correct, surely they’d be shouting their name and beliefs from the rooftops!
I take it the downtick is the anonymous IT reporter?
My thoughts too, Dings. I am actually surprised at this article given the amount of coverage we’ve had about the ways in which CBDCs can be used against people. Is this just a clever piece of gaslighting, I wonder?
Why should we be fearful of CBDC’s?
The answer in a nutshell – because our government is pushing it.
I could extrapolate and refer to its intended roll-out worldwide and the organisations pushing it but there is no need. Let’s keep this local. Fishy and his treasonous conspirators are pushing CBDC’s therefore it is definitely NOT in our interests.
That is all we need to know.
To be fair you are anonymous as well. ——But I say to the guy who wrote this article. –“Wait and see”.
I choose to remain anonymous because I post stuff that might lose me my job. Supporting CDBCs is unlikely to have the same consequences – in fact quite the opposite.
Perhaps I’m being thick, but the sand dollar is an alternative to the Bahamian dollar – I doubt that people who are concerned about CBDCs are worried about their existence at all, more that they are being pushed to replace existing currency.
Central bank….safeguarding liberty. Lol.
Sorry but this seems like it’s full of holes. The state and the central bank save us from the overreach of private companies – but it’s the state and the central bank and other regulators and laws that have largely pushed private companies into their overreach.
The examples given where take-up has been low also seem irrelevant. The fear is when cash and any transactions NOT involving CDBCs are made illegal. Think it can’t happen? Dream on. I thought lockdowns couldn’t happen. I didn’t think a UK government would ban smoking, or tell people what boilers and cars they can and cannot buy, what food they can eat, what pronouns to use, what speech is “lawful”, that they cannot tell males and females that they are males and females.
Attempt 3 with this nonsense, still remain convinced it’s a terrible idea. Try again. God give me strength.
Wholeheartedly agree
Interesting to see who will be the first group to be targeted with the ‘payments made in CBDC only’ stick – my guess is benefits claimants, on the basis of being captive group, so take it or leave it; tax can be deducted at source “for your convenience”; and will provide platform for future checks/taxation on any other sources of income. Will also force early adoption upon the group currently most cash reliant. You could bet good money that enforced ‘early adopters’ will not include treasury/BoE officials, govt ministers or employees of the Tony Blair Foundation.
The protection I desperately crave is from the state and its relentless abuse.
All through my life I have noticed the “it will never happen” people have a loud voice at the time before it happens. Sounding sceptical of “bad stuff” happening can make someone seem sensible and steady. And it is generally good not to panic at every problem that might occur. People are aware that doing so simply isn’t a healthy state of mind and so mix up those who avoid reacting to ANY strategic possibility with the voice of reason and wisdom. But then, on the other hand, I’ve noticed many of such people do not have an iota of understanding about strategic implications and often are terrible at identify strategic inevitabilities. So when for example the right to veto was removed by (I think it was the Maastricht treaty), all the “Mr sensibles” who seem, indeed, oh so sensible, all chorused “there’s no need to worry, it’s not practically going to be any different” and how wrong they were. Not just a little bit wrong, you only had to be a bit logical and have a fraction of Gary Kasparov’s capacity to think strategically to be infuriated. Infuriated that they were so dumb and infuriated that the couldn’t see the obvious. The same again when local councils were allocated RIPA powers. Remember that? The same cry of “it will be fine, don’t worry” was issued by the same crowd. That resulted in such clear and egregious overreach, even government in a rare moment of “let’s address a bad policy” saw it was a bad idea and reversed it.
The author, rather weakly, acknowledges he got his prior predication wrong and, exactly reminiscent of the “the veto doesn’t matter” people tries to minimise his error rather than think more deeply about it. He then, to really show he has the blinkers on, goes on to say:
“If some eco-zealots then went to the bother of assigning merchants some kind of eco-virtue score, or in the majority of cases where they hadn’t got around to scoring a merchant then scoring the general category of the merchant instead, then you could attempt to make some kind of eco-assessment based not on what you bought but where you shopped.”
So clearly is entirely oblivious to the fact precisely that already exists – it’s called an ESG score, it’s become extremely important to corporates in a manner akin to China’s social credit system for private citizens and it is largely responsible for driving corporations into wokeness, wiping billions off the value of Disney, and is very much a driving force behind the Nigel Farage debanking scandal. It is driven by globalists. Even worse, he may be in fact aware of it, but wholly unable to connect the dots, see the big picture or even begin to appreciate the strategic inevitability that will unfold (and which drove the reason he failed to see the nordic black card as a possibility).
They are the Chorus: there’s no such thing as a slippery slope.
The “nothing to worry your little heads about here” brigade always remind me of Ted Heath appearing on our TV screens to ‘refute’ (ie, lie about) the effects of joining the (then) EEC:
“There are some in this country who fear that, in going into Europe, we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified.”
Which wasn’t what the Attorney General had just told him but, hey, it won him a…ahem…”prize” from his Euro-chums. I’m old enough to remember that broadcast, clearly: I don’t forget and I don’t forgive.
Indeed. A bare faced act of treason, abrogating our Sovereignty to a foreign power. A heinous crime committed by almost every Prime Minister since Heath.
Every Tory PM (including Thatcher) right up to Cameron continued to uphold that lie.
…..and an ocean going yacht (with crew) called Morning Cloud. Now how does a career politician, from a humble background, afford to indulge in the sport of kings I ask?
DS, please stop posting articles from Tony Blair. This is trolling at its finest.
Your comment falls into a special category of haiku like software engineer joke. A great example.
The next pillar of the digital gulag: slavered over at Jackson Hole and Davos since at least 2019 and now being implemented, in lockstep across the world, irrespective of whether populations want it or not, and with plenty of wholly unconvincing blandishments about safety, inclusivity and “convenience”. The agencies in love with CBDC – central banks, national governments, BlackRock/Vanguard, unelected NGO’s, the WEF – are not our friends, nor deserving of our trust. When they come bearing unsolicited “opportunities”, I will be keeping my hand firmly on the cash in my (physical) wallet.
I beg to differ. Since when has a currency that is dependent on the internet and therefore open to surveillance, lack of privacy and control ever been more secure than actual cash in your hand, fiat currency though it be? This article makes bold statements and assertions none of which I believe to be true. In fact, it seems to toy with the version of reality that I inhabit. Now I may be far too radicalised to give any time of day to thinking about the benefits of CBDCs but I have done a lot of reading and can summarise that here:
Anyone handing over control of their own private transactions to unaccountable organisations whose interests have never been ordinary people’s prosperity or freedom needs their head examined.
They’ll be saying we got it wrong about CO2 and vaccines next. Say no to CBDC.
This is all rather naive. They are all doing it out of worry for poor ppl lol, they are just so kind. I’ve got a bridge to sell the writer of this article.
What worries me is that you have already admitted that you got something wrong previously “in my previous article I had said this kind of thing would not be possible” in relation to Sweden’s Do Black credit card.
I have worked over the decades with many software specialists, and the one thing they have consistently shown is an inability to predict the future accurately – does anyone remember the Y2K debacle?
All memory was wiped in March 2020 when we entered the Brave New World of The Science.
I think we are about here…
Is this guy dense?
His argument that governments won’t or can’t use CBDC to control people is… that actually private companies like PayPal are doing exactly that with their payment systems.
Worse still he says all this with an arrogant, condescending tone.
Presumably his argument is, in order to protect people from discrimination from private companies, better to give all the power to the central authority who will make sure mo one is discriminated or debanked.
What a complete utter tool.
“But what about Sweden’s Do Black credit card that Laura highlights, launched in 2019 by Doconomy and which limits spending based on CO2 emissions? Not a popular product with Daily Sceptic readers I dare say. I admit this caught my attention because in my previous article I had said this kind of thing would not be possible, yet here it was.”
———-
That phrase reminded me of something else our oh-so-trustworthy-and-benign Establishment did, only recently:
“China changed what was possible. It’s a communist one party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”
Neil Ferguson …. who is largely responsible for destroying the economy and millions of lives with his “impossibility which suddenly became possible.”
https://unherd.com/thepost/neil-ferguson-interview-china-changed-what-was-possible/
Trust the tyrants in the British Establishment with CBDCs on the basis that someone who remains anonymous THINKS something isn’t possible …. when we KNOW it’s precisely what the Chinese State is doing isn’t going to convince anyone who is paying attention and has even a few functioning brain-cells.
I’m not poor, or marginalised. I’m comfortably off and have no debt of any kind. I’m using cash for nearly all my off-line purchases now. And I intend to keep doing it.
So, CBDCs will protect us from the overreach of private companies? Possibly true. But then what will protect us from over-reach of goverments and the central banks? What will protect my rights as an individual from big technical companies AND central goverments? I think the assumption here is that politicians and central bankers are nice and uncorrupt!
Any way, why is there a lack of public debate about this? It is like the excess death issue- no debate. None what-so-ever.
Perhaps examples of CBDCs should be taken from Russia and China rather than the Bahamas?
The over-reach of private companies in large measure is enabled by EU legislation – that Fourth Reich which supposedly we left. Get rid of the legislation.
But there is the competitive free market process. There are alternatives to PayPal and the big banks.
As I understand it, many of those debanked other than the under the EU regulation, are small traders who want to deal in cash, and some banks don’t want to handle cash deposits.
Others I suspect have accounts more expensive for the bank to maintain, than the money going through them, or rather the running balance. If money is going out as fast as it is coming in, the bank has no ‘float’ on the account to use to earn money, it just has the cost of the transactions going through the account.
The solution to this would be to introduce an account fee, and transaction charges – as is the case in France.
The British have got used to ‘free’ banking and ‘free’ credit cards – although years ago it wasn’t like that. There is no such thing as ‘free’ – the money has to come from somewhere. And that somewhere is closing branches and not handling accounts that cost more than they are worth, lower deposit rates, higher credit rates.
It is time British people and their welfare statist mentality where they expect they should have whatever they want paid for by others, realised: TANSTAFL – There Are No Such Things As Free Lunches.
Well some early banks were when somebody paid for them to guard their bullion.
Believe that they did a big trial in Uganda. Went down like a lead balloon apparently.
It is a little difficult to pinpoint – is the writer a shill or a moron?
I’m going with shill who is pretending to be a moron.
At the end of the day, people will find a way around it. I suspect over time local physical token-based currencies will arise, which will spread across the country and eventually morphy into something to be used in a given country. They might end up calling it a national currency or some such.
As the excellent Italian phrase has it “ci fai o ci sei?”
Cui bono?
Never mind the technicalities, let’s look for motive.
Parliament concluded that there was nothing CBDCs did that currently could not be achieved by existing electronic transfers and payment systems.
The Bank of England was unable to produce any evidence that CBDCs would provide any advantages and benefits to consumers over and above existing currency.
That being so… we adopt new technologies because they offer advantages and benefits over existing tech. If not the new tech fails when offered to the market. This is why legislation, subsidy, bullying is being used to force us to abandon tech that works and use green tech that doesn’t and is more expensive.
Therefore CBDCs would fail when offered to the market, being a costly failure.
Therefore why would Central Banks want to introduce something, by their own admission. offering no advantages and benefits to users if they knew it would surely fail?
Therefore it is reasonable to consider, it won’t fail because they know it will not be voluntary and will be imposed.
Therefore if CBDCs do not benefit the people, whom will they benefit and what will the benefit be?
The House of Lords called CBDCs a solution on search of a problem!
Canada.
Truckers and people helping by donating from their digital accounts. Government apparently stopped and froze accounts of donors and donees.How was this possible.
They could not have done this if cash were king Mr. Ananymous (whom I understand recues digital projects for a living, see previous propagand article).
And don’t banks get a rake off from every payees account per transaction?
And it will be placed on the BSV Blockchain. You heard it here first, fellow sceptics.
Along with, eventually, every one of your main personal possessions converted into a digital asset. Want to sell your house? Sorry, block chain is not showing proof of your ownership or title. Perhaps you’d like the government to take ownership of this stranded asset and charge you rent for continued occupation (subject to you meeting our “terms and conditions”)?
A simple question for the brave anonymous writer: in my wallet, I have a couple of twenties, and a credit card. Which method of payment can be stopped by an external body, and which one can’t? Take your time.
Good one, Charlie.
Also electricity is needed for connection from shop to bank. Given the ‘ent-zero’ crap outages are going to become common.
where I live we often have power outages which means sometimes people get stuck in shop(automatic doors) or can’t check out their shopping(electric tills). I will stick to using cash at all times.
The incessant push / bullying for everyone to have the ‘smart’ meters installed is another sinister method to control compliance by reward / penalty measures.
Sorry, I’m not buying it. We’ve seen what our power-mad leader-class are capable of. Mealy-mouthed, virtue-signalling and completely uncaring. Vax-pass was a conspiracy until it wasn’t. Fool me once…
Whenever a new power is granted, imagine it being deployed by your worst enemy against you.
The Internet, while wonderful in many ways, has morphed from its benign, optimistic beginnings to become a corporate/govt plaything and is also responsible in large part for spreading the social contagions currently attacking our rights and freedoms. Unintended consequence, or the product of human nature?
The Anonymous IT reporter is a coward. Who are you and what makes you so sure about this?
You’ve made a worthwhile point in the last paragraph, in that people will always want the option to use some kind of cash equivalent, and that digital forms of cash are far more convenient and efficient. However, you’ve also conflated two different parts of the issue, then attempted to argue both sides. When you refer to “Public money, in the form of well-designed CDBCs” is an example. If it’s a CDBC, it’s not public money, and vice versa.
However, the underlying point is valid: Now that most personal spending is done through digital means, i.e. credit cards and other online transfers, the potential for malicious control of personal spending by central authorities is abused already. Personal Digital Currency (PDC?) is needed by many people already, and CDBCs have proven, so far, to be largely irrelevant.
The virtue of cash is that it is anonymous and hard to control. Whatever protections you put in place around a “personal digital currency” can easily be suspended or ignored by the state, with the excuse of some “emergency” or other.
And – an often overlooked advantage – if you come and try to take my cash, I can hit you (not that this in any way condones, etc etc)
Possession is nine tenths….
I still don’t trust CBDCs. Unless they guarantee that cash will still be used alongside them and equal to them.
With cash you can buy goats or you can buy gold. You directly own and control your own finances and nothing apart from a catastrophic financial collapse can switch that off. But even this would still not change the fact that you have independent legal tender in your pocket.
If we see the abolition of cash as inevitable to be replaced by a system of centrally controlled digital state tokens, it is then inevitable that we become slaves to the administrators of that system and at a stroke we have introduced the ultimate mechanism of control that enables our rulers – whoever you think they might be or whatever relationship you envisage them having with big tech – to switch our lives off at the touch of a button.
This part is absolutely key and the fact that you completely gloss over it shows that you’re either a shill for this nightmare or a ludicrously optimistic ISS astronaut who’s not been home for 4 years.
Either way we’ll never know because for some reason we don’t know who you are.
It isn’t private money. It’s none existent money from thin air which we – the taxpayer – pay interest on. The value of output (The People) in this country is £2.5TN. We don’t need banks to print money and cause even further tax in the form of inflation. We don’t need a £50BN/year interest debt burden on money that never existed. Thankfully there are alternate ways to trade like precious metals, produce, sweat equity and genuinely private crypto.
I wonder if the author is sponsored by WEF, WHO or United Nations or any woke left wing government. I suspect most readers of this publication would beg to differ with his argument
Kiddies put away your paywall and keep using cash. You will be sorry if you do not. It is your future