Pro-cuts? No, just anti-left.

Like everyone else, I don't think the government's move to cut funding to Higher Education budgets are very wise. Most other countries around the world, like the US, are increasing their spending because they recognise that education is the best way to, er, educate people - and thereby making them more skilled, and help the country's (and the world's) economy recover after the downturn.

I think that there should be more investment - not by students, but by government, to make sure access is fair and as equal as possible after school. I am not, however, in power.

And nor is Malcolm Grant. I have seen a lot of 'the Provost has Mandelson's ear' around, but that's a load of tosh. Mandelson may well let the Provost tell him what's what with Higher Education, but at the end of the day it is Mandelson that is Secretary of State. Why would the vice-chancellor (for that's effectively what he is) of one of the world's top institutions beg for a budget cut? It makes no sense.

Secondly, if you're looking for a villain in this, why not Mandelson? He's the one who came back from the dead (again) to form BIS. If you want any indication of who it is that doesn't care for HE, it's certainly the creator of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Universities, although they are part of the remit, don't appear anywhere in the department's title! I'm sure the Provost had something to do with that too, right?

I'm unhappy about all of this - the cuts, the redundancies, the potential detriment to my education. But I just don't see how that detriment is a real threat - cuts are being made to ensure UCL is solvent, and able to sustain the coming years of neglect from governments set on cutting the overall deficit by any means. Even four years ago, UCL was running at a deficit of almost £10m a year- and the planned cuts then failed to properly materialise. When your cash reserves are only £100m against those deficits, it's clear that you don't have long to act.

The choice is to spend your cash reserves sustaining current levels of activity, in which case you come out on the other side of turbulent times with literally no cash in the bank - your lecture theatres are run down, your staff underpaid, your libraries understocked as cash becomes really scarce - or you cut some activity, store some cash to make repairs, improvements even, and when government finally ups the budget again, you have a nice pot to fall back on in case they cut again. It's what LSE have done. And they're well clever with money, innit.