Best Of

The Turing scheme was nowhere near as good for the students as Erasmus is . Bozo thought he could dupe the gullible by sticking the Turing name on it .

You keep posting this, but you never say why! Do you have a link to a comparison?

It's difficult to compare Erasmus with Turing because they are completely different beasts. We can say that Turing is a lot more limited in what it offers than Erasmus. The key difference is that Erasmus is a student exchange programme that comes with funding, while Turing only provides travel bursaries and is not an exchange programme.

The big advantage of Erasmus to the institution is that it keeps the fees of the outgoing student.. While it effectively has to take incoming students for free, the marginal cost is minimal of an extra student in a course they are already running. For the same reason it doesn't matter too much if they take more students than they send.

Under Turing, institutions are "encouraged" to waive tuition fees while their students are abroad. But they have no incentive to do so and is actual loss of income for them. Which means students potentially have to pay additional tuition fees while they are abroad unless their institution has entered a bilateral arrangement with a partner abroad. This is a hassle for the institution and much more limited for the student compared with the market offered by Erasmus.

Good review of the two programmes here

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9141/

I see there is no mention of the £570m per year cost in the question.

Instead it mentions 'without paying extra fees'.

According to the BBC there were 9,900 UK students who participated in Erasmus in its last year so if an equivalent number took part that would make it about £57k per student.

Compare with the Turing scheme which seems to be benefitting about 40k students for only £100m.

Once again the EU is exposed as a waste of money and this government yet again shows it couldn't get interest free credit at DFS.

I don't understand the logic of Erasmus.

40k people is considerably more than 9,900.

£100m is considerably less than £570 million.

If we have a half billion pounds lying about to spend on tertiary education, why not give it via Turing which was already helping four times more people at 1/6th of the cost?

There doesn't need to be any logic as it is the EU and so some people will wave their pompoms automatically.

It would be interesting to know if there is some financial limit at which they would consider it not worth it.

£1bn ? £2bn ? £10bn ?

So now you have explained you don't understand how Erasmus works, why should we pay any further attention to your comments?

Keep waving the pompoms.

And why not, after its not your money that will be funding gap years for some Henrys and Henriettas.

Voters support middle class kids dossing around for a year abroad. 👍

You, and the poll question, are not quite right. It's not just for university students - it includes apprentices and FE college vocational students, many/most of whom are not middle class. In 2018/19 10,000 Erasmus beneficiaries were university students, and 8,000 were from the latter groups. And you may not have noticed, but a lot of university students aren't middle class these days.

Personally, I'm pleasantly surprised by the polling on this.

The polling is worthless without any mention of the cost.

No one is interested in the cost. Big government figures are meaningless. Millions billions shmillions....if only we were all accountants we might give a shit

And that's why the national debt is almost £3bn and why the debt interest is now £2k per person per year.

The national debt is, of course, almost £3tr.

Millions, billions, shmillions as Roger would say.

But real money when its being deducted from your pay.

To be fair if you deducted 3tr from my pay you’d end up with close to negative 3tr

Voters support middle class kids dossing around for a year abroad. 👍

You, and the poll question, are not quite right. It's not just for university students - it includes apprentices and FE college vocational students, many/most of whom are not middle class. In 2018/19 10,000 Erasmus beneficiaries were university students, and 8,000 were from the latter groups. And you may not have noticed, but a lot of university students aren't middle class these days.

Personally, I'm pleasantly surprised by the polling on this.

The polling is worthless without any mention of the cost.

No one is interested in the cost. Big government figures are meaningless. Millions billions shmillions....if only we were all accountants we might give a shit

And that's why the national debt is almost £3bn and why the debt interest is now £2k per person per year.

The national debt is, of course, almost £3tr.

Millions, billions, shmillions as Roger would say.

But real money when its being deducted from your pay.

...

At some point we need to meet fire with fire, like hacking Russian TV and showing footage on all channels of Putin getting rogered senseless by fantastically well endowed porn stars wearing Stalin facemasks.

Belgian politicians and finance bosses targeted by Russian intelligence over seized assets

Exclusive: Key figures at frozen assets depository among targets of intimidation campaign, say European intelligence agencies

Belgian politicians and senior finance executives have been subject to a campaign of intimidation orchestrated by Russian intelligence aimed at persuading the country to block the use of €185bn assets for Ukraine, according to European intelligence agencies.

Security officials indicated to the Guardian that there had been deliberate targeting of key figures at Euroclear, the securities depository holding the majority of Russia’s frozen assets, and leaders of the country.

EU leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday are debating whether to approve the lending of urgently needed funds for Ukraine secured on Russian central bank assets, critical to maintain Kyiv’s war effort through 2026 and 2027.

Officials believe the campaign is the responsibility of Russia’s GRU military intelligence, though there is a debate about the degree of threat. “They have been engaged in the tactics of intimidation for sure,” one European official said.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/17/belgian-politicians-finance-bosses-targeted-russian-intelligence-seized-assets

At some point soon Starmer needs to tell the country that we are effectively at war. Get sensible and stop focussing on fripperies. We have become so removed from that mentality - I remember how the phone books as a child had guidance pages of what to do when a nuclear war starts - this isn’t about telling people to hide under a table and you will be fine when the bomb drops. It’s about a national mindset change where people stop thinking about being influencers and start looking outwards at a world where they might have to fight. If you like a ruck on a night out join up. The whole country needs to start thinking about getting their shit together. Start being serious.

“Starmer’s Vietnam” will go viral before he even finishes the speech.

Tell the country that we’re at war with Russia over the Ukraine and watch support for the Ukraine collapse. Give or buy them kit and quietly help the Poles get the bomb.

Ball.

A war is explaining why we are now going to fire back. Anyone who understands the current situation already knows that's what we now need to do. The Russians have been trespassing on the gain line for over a decade. Now they need to be reminded that they are no longer a superpower and that they have no right to launch attacks against the UK. How many more British citizens must die before we declare Putin's Russia is an enemy and subject to the full weapons at our disposal.

https://x.com/atrupar/status/2001397828141175194

Trump on Venezuela: "Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had -- they took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn't watching. But they're not gonna do that. We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. They threw our companies out. And we want it back."

Wasn't Trump president for much of this time he's wittering on about?

The original nationalisation of the oil was in the 70s.
More recently, 2007:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/may/02/oilandpetrol.venezuela

Incidentally, it would be incredibly stupid to try and steal Venezuelan oil. So par for Trump.

Pre Chavez the domestic oil industry was (perhaps surprisingly) moderately well run. Sure, various elites stole money, but the actual operations were conducted on a fairly sensible basis.

Chevez changed that. He made a speech which puzzled the Economist, in which he condemned the managers of the industry for "reinvesting too much money". Then he fired them and put in his own guys.

Much of Venezuelan oil is thick, tar like stuff. Very hard to extract and refine. Some was of a much higher grade. The oil from these easy-exploit-wells was sold to pay for the very expensive extraction equipment for the harder to extract stuff.

Chavez demanded (and got) maximum production and maximum money out of the oil industry to buy votes and line the pockets of him and his supporters. This meant ending investment in extraction, largely. And using methods to "push" more oil, faster out of well damaged them. Combined with expropriations of foreign companies, this resulted in a collapse in the oil industry. Which staggers along at a tiny fraction of what it used to do.

To restart things would take many billions of investment. Which Venezuela can't get - no one will put money onshore there after multiple rounds of expropriation of foreign companies.

Even if you invest the money, you then have large amounts of expensive, heavy crude. True, some American refineries *used* to be setup for that stuff. But they've been converted to other work, long since. And few other refineries around the world take heavy stuff.

So going after Venezuelan oil would end up costing billions for a product that few want.

Voters support middle class kids dossing around for a year abroad. 👍

You, and the poll question, are not quite right. It's not just for university students - it includes apprentices and FE college vocational students, many/most of whom are not middle class. In 2018/19 10,000 Erasmus beneficiaries were university students, and 8,000 were from the latter groups. And you may not have noticed, but a lot of university students aren't middle class these days.

Personally, I'm pleasantly surprised by the polling on this.

The polling is worthless without any mention of the cost.

No one is interested in the cost. Big government figures are meaningless. Millions billions shmillions....if only we were all accountants we might give a shit

And that's why the national debt is almost £3bn and why the debt interest is now £2k per person per year.

I see there is no mention of the £570m per year cost in the question.

Instead it mentions 'without paying extra fees'.

According to the BBC there were 9,900 UK students who participated in Erasmus in its last year so if an equivalent number took part that would make it about £57k per student.

Compare with the Turing scheme which seems to be benefitting about 40k students for only £100m.

Once again the EU is exposed as a waste of money and this government yet again shows it couldn't get interest free credit at DFS.

I don't understand the logic of Erasmus.

40k people is considerably more than 9,900.

£100m is considerably less than £570 million.

If we have a half billion pounds lying about to spend on tertiary education, why not give it via Turing which was already helping four times more people at 1/6th of the cost?

There doesn't need to be any logic as it is the EU and so some people will wave their pompoms automatically.

It would be interesting to know if there is some financial limit at which they would consider it not worth it.

£1bn ? £2bn ? £10bn ?