Claymore ' 08

I was at Meadowbank in Edinburgh on Saturday collecting for the Gurkhas, and was able to chat to some of the people there.
Claymore is the main Scottish War Games event of the year. There are lots, but this is THE one. People come from all over the UK and the tiny ( and not so tiny) figures are all beautifully painted, set out and manipulated. This was the fourth year I have done this, and the organisers very kindly donate the door money to the Gurkha Welfare Trust.
The man at the next stand was from Middlesborough. He is a lecturer in engineering at the college there. We chatted about the Gurkha Highlander walk which is starting at the weekend and he talked of his fundraising walks.
He mentioned some German students who had taken part in one when on an exchange. He went quiet for a bit, and then started to tell me about them.
The German boys were the same age as his students, and he was embarrassed at how little his young men knew. The English boys in Germany had been completely at sea, as the Germans at the same age where about four years further ahead, and he had had to set up a special class for the Germans in Middlesborough - teaching them matters beyond the end of the college courses.
As he said, we no longer have the tools in place to educate even the relatively teachable to the degree required in the modern world. Our Universities may have been dumbed down to a great extent but the dross that gets drafted in are actually incapable of progressing beyond the first year, which is why the drop out rates are so high - such a waste of resources and time. He quite categorically stated that his students, even with the engineering degree they would emerge with, would actually not get jobs here, because the Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and Romanians that were coming over had better degrees and better understanding of the principles.
As he put it, " If only this bloody Government would leave us alone to get on with it, we could turn this around. Halve the University places, raise the standards again, and produce people who can actually do proper jobs instead of Travel and Tourism or Media. There won't be any Media left soon anyway - it will all have migrated to the Internet."
But his real point was the Government interference.
The best thing any incoming Government could do would be to stop all new legislation for at least 5 years and get rid of all the bad, ill thought out and unenforceable laws that have piled up.