Labour MP Tan Dhesi in the Commons
Labour shadow minister Tan Dhesi has been warned to “pay people what they are worth” after trying to recruit unpaid volunteers to carry out “long term” work in his office.
A job advert on Working For An MP asked for “committed” people “passionate about helping others” and who “take satisfaction from getting stuff done” to volunteer for the Slough MP for no pay.
Tasks for the role included answering the phone, opening post, updating Dhesi’s website, writing to constituents, monitoring media coverage and other basic admin.
Most are jobs which would normally be carried out by a caseworker or parliamentary assistant, positions which would attract a salary of around £30,000.
Why student participation in quality assurance matters
Some 49 countries, including Turkey, contribute to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and to the Bologna Process and embrace reforms based on common values, such as facilitating student and staff mobility and employability, autonomy for institutions, academic freedom, freedom of expression and independent student unions.
One of the key indicators in the EHEA’s Bologna Process implementation reports is to ensure student participation in higher education processes. Student participation is monitored in terms of their participation in the governance of national quality assurance organisations, in their role in institutional evaluation teams (as a team member or observer), in the preparation of internal evaluation reports and in decision-making processes regarding external evaluation and monitoring processes.
How should we tackle moral panics about free speech?
If there are any institutions that should be above culture wars, they are universities. They live or die by their commitment to ethical standards in research and their mission to ensure that students in the course of their studies learn to think critically about challenging ideas. Yet despite their achievements during the pandemic, universities are currently under attack by governments in many parts of Europe for allegedly embracing ideologies and restricting free speech.
The Polish Minister for Education recently announced that, “especially in the humanities and social sciences”, the way things are going is “not in the direction we would like”. Legislation has been promised to guarantee that academics expressing conservative, Christian or nationalist views will not be disciplined.