Dr Gabriel Siles-Brugge, Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester, talks about the background to TTIP at University of Manchester Policy Week 2014. In this podcast he gives a historical backdrop running up to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, detailing trade agreements and policies which add context to the current proposals.
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Professor Clive George, the author of the book ‘The Truth About Trade’ talks about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership which is a series of trade negotiations that are being carried out the European Union and the United States. Many of these negotiations are being carried out in secret and they have sparked some controversy about their nature and outcomes.
As a trade agreement, TTIP is about reducing the regulatory barriers to trade for big business and covers areas like food safety law, environmental legislation, banking regulations and the sovereign powers of individual nations. In an age where companies are starting to sue countries for loss of profit, these negotiations should be thought about deeply. For example Bayer has sued the European Commission to attempt to overturn a ban on the pesticides they produce that are killing millions of bees.
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We now are in an age where we must deconstruct everything in terms of the forces of industry and economics. This includes the industrial educational complex, the dominating force of finance in organised learning. Marshall McLuhan is very well known for developing communications theory, and is famously attributed with the expression “The medium is the message”, which speaks of the different affordances which each medium has for communicating information. Speaking has different affordances from writing, radio has different affordances from television, clay has different affordances from paint… Read more…
Invisible Colleges are a significant part of our common intellectual heritage, a social behaviour which extends into the distant past.. The 17th century holds an important history in the development of thought. It saw people like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes formulate questioning ways of thinking in our world, encouraging and establishing cultures of exploring the world in which we live, and cultivating a personal relationship with the knowledge of the universe. Read more…
The creation of social opportunities makes a direct contribution to the expansion of human capabilities and the quality of life. Expansion of health care, education, social security, etc., contribute directly to the quality of life and to its flourishing. Read more…
Many understand intuitively the notion of education as a public good. Broader approaches to societal development are often harder to “sell” than narrowly focused reforms that try to achieve “one thing at a time”. This may help to explain why the powerful intellectual leadership of Manmohan Singh in bringing about the needed economic reforms in India in 1991 was so concentrated on “liberalization” only, without a corresponding focus on the much needed broadening of social opportunities. Read more…
Despite the requirement in the guidance notes for Local Authority Pay Policy Statements to clearly state what they think the relationship should be between the pay of chief officers and staff who are not chief officers, there is a lack of policies for assessing, justifying and achieving appropriate pay multiples.
Rather than creating independent policies to assess what fair and justifiable pay ratios might be and how to achieve them, they are almost unanimously justified as following from the ‘objective’ and uncontrollable processes which are used for setting pay and grading structures. A recurring justification in statements is that the pay multiple ‘results from the detailed implementation of the pay policies as set out earlier in this statement’. Read more…