Ellen Pasternack

When I was seventeen, I signed up for a student loan to cover the cost of going to university. Teachers, parents and the university system were in unanimous agreement that the loan was a good deal, enabling me to study and then pay back what I owed once I started earning a good salary. I was not told that going to university would mean allowing the state to seize arbitrary amounts of my income to plug gaps in its budget for most of the rest of my working life. But that is what is happening, as is quite transparently admitted by the current government. Those on a Plan 2 loan, like me, have nine per cent of all income over a threshold – currently £28,470 – taken in repayments from their payslip each month.

It’s not a good time to be an American XL Bully. The breed, an extra-large pitbull variant, has been blamed for a threefold rise in fatal dog attacks in the UK; after a series of high-profile maulings, bullies have today been added to the list of breeds restricted under the Dangerous Dogs Act. Incidents involving the dogs have been met with a bizarre insistence from some quarters that no, there is nothing especially dangerous about the XL bully. The RSPCA has long opposed ‘breed-specific legislation’, and denies that any breed of dog – including those bred for fighting, or, in the case of one prohibited breed, hunting down escaped slaves – poses more of a risk than another.