Mark Field Event
- Mar 15, 2015
- 4 min read
On Thursday 5th February 2015 we were very privileged and lucky to have MP Mark Field come and provide a discussion as per the second event of the trio of general election debating series at University of Westminster.
Mark was the first person in his family to go to university, during which time he was secretary of the Oxford University Association. On an interesting note, David Cameron was also in the same university at the time and was a year below him! Ditto for Boris Johnson who was in the year above! Mark recalls that student life was less tough in his time, although he strongly expressed that university provides a broad skill base. Mark graduated with a Law degree and then became a corporate lawyer at Freshfields, a Magic Circle law firm. He subsequently went into business and later was elected to Parliament. Mark has been a local MP for the constituency of Westminster and the City of London for fourteen years.
Mark began to discuss how to pursue a successful legal career and emphasized how adaptable a law degree is; in that it provides a variety of transferable skills which can be used in any career path. One of the statistics he provided us with was that 60% of congress in the USA are lawyers. (Just goes to show that having a law degree, you do not have to become a solicitor or barrister! You can become anything you want with a law degree!) To further this point, Mark noted that in society one needs lawyers to marshal their thoughts and to make succinct points on paper.
The transition of Mark’s talk from law then subsided into politics (he is a Member of Parliament after all!) When discussing about immigration and housing issues Mark said that,
“It’s good to bring students from abroad to study in the UK. I feel UKIP’s policies are counter-productive. Students from abroad come here to study and later go on to become ambassadors for the UK when they return back to their home countries such as India and China.”
Mark highlighted that, “if you get a referendum, it may just be the beginning of a debate not the end of it. The fear that applies to middle class peoples in West London is capitalism. At present, we are in a very fluid time after recovering from the financial crisis of 2008.” Thus the importance of our young generation voting is stressed here.
One student questioned how Mark would encourage students to vote tory (slang word for the conservative party’. To which Mark simply answered, “By voting conservatives you are stabilising the economy.”
Another student put forward whether the tory government should make deals with UKIP. Mark clearly set it out to us that the conservative party were not interested in joining forces with UKIP and proudly added that he “was one of the rebels who voted on having a referendum on the EU (European Union) in 2011.”
An additional question put forth to Mark was whether students can expect higher standards of education because of higher fees. I will be very honest about this when I say that Mark did not provide a convincing answer when he asserted that “the quality of English degrees remain that of a high standard, and the fact that students are coming from abroad to have a university degree in the UK means that we have to place a higher value on the fees. I can assure you that our education is going to be at its highest quality.” I’m pretty sure the value and quality is still worth the third of the current tuition fees UK citizens are having to pay not the full nine grand…
One fantastic question posed by one of our students was “Is it justifiable for the government to spend £20billion on Trident?” Just a quick brief, Trident is a reference to the ‘UK Trident programme’ which is responsible for the operation, manufacturing and selling of British Nuclear weapons – as if we did not need enough conflict in the world already. Mark responded that, “we do need to focus on where our place in the world is going to be. There is not much appetite to join the EU army… the truth is by voting for a conservative government we are going to be investing more money into the NHS.”
I was quite curious myself to see how the conservative party would go on to stabilise the economy, so I proposed the following; “Could we not cut down the bonuses from banks and large co-operations and executives and contribute some of those proceedings to speed up the process of getting out of the recession?”
As with every question, he thanked me for it and promptly replied that “It’s a myth. It is a global myth and a common misconception that if we cut bonuses from the banks and large companies and start executing mansion taxes and fleece the rich that we can solve our financial deficit. However the problem is, if we do that, then we will lose some of that business. We have to be careful when it comes to bringing regulation to banks, because otherwise they may not want to do business with us anymore. If that happens, then we lose business and our economy will further worsen, there has to be a balance.”
Well I received an answer. Probably not the most optimistic one I was looking for, but hey perhaps I was expecting too much. He is a politician after all.
Author: Asha Mistry (Magazine Editor of the Bar Society - LLB Law, Second Year)
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