What hope is there ?

Part of political maturity is the realisation that mainstream politics revolves around the short term while the most important political issues inevitably are long term. The last few days have been a wonderful illustration of this.

Now I'm deeply unhappy about the cuts to higher education funding and the withdrawal of EMA from a number of my students, however are these matters more or less important than the UN Climate Conference in Cancun in Mexico ?

Over the weekend the delegates made an agreement to attempt to restrict the rise in temperature to 3.2 degrees. Most people who take an interest of climate studies will be aware that anything over 2.0 degrees will be disastrous for many parts of the world. So I'm left to conclude that while a poor target is better than no target, the representatives especially those representing the world's largest creators of emissions still haven't got a grip on the severity of the problem.

On Thursday Labour leader Ed Milliband refused to pair UK minister Chris Huhme to stay in Mexico. Now Huhme would undoubtedly have voted for the imposition of increased fees for students, but was not the greater interest served by allowing him to stay in Mexico. Would it not have shown some gravitas to have announced on this occasion, the future of the world should come first. No instead the leader of the opposition played parliamentary games.

On Sunday I picked up the Sunday Times expecting an analysis of the Cancun agreement, at first I believed that it had failed to make the deadline, silly me, tucked away on an inside page was a short article saying "nothing much." Even more galling was a larger article on Environment Secretary , Chris Huhme's maritial problems. How ridiculous that the breakdown of his marriage and his domestic arrangements should be given more column inches than the focus of his attention this past week.