Cameron is Wrong on Student Fees

In London on business tonight, which always gives a different perspective on UK politics than from just the domestic Scottish view.


Lead article by David Cameron in the Evening Standard makes the case for the Coalition’s university fee plans. “Before Protesting, Students need to get the Facts Straight”. He makes three main points; university funding can’t escape the cuts, universities need decent funding to excel and it’s all very fair because most graduates will pay less per month than now.

He is wrong in the detail as well as the principle.

Cameron states that the public “subsidy” to further education is £5bn per year and that we can’t afford it. That’s a big number but I actually though it would be more. It’s less, for example, than the £6bn corporation tax bill that Vodafone has (allegedly and legally) avoided. This is long term investment to create growth and wealth in our economy.

He argues that reform to university funding is needed to maintain a world class education system. Then gives the game away by suggesting this will come from students deciding where to “spend” their fees and so drive up standards. Market economics in further education. Kind of assumes you can afford the fees in the first place, doesn’t it David? Which I suppose feels natural if you come from your own and George Osborne’s background.

Finally he rests his case on fairness. The higher threshold will mean, he writes, that most students will repay less each month than now. Probably true, but they will go on paying for longer and the higher interest rates mean they will pay a lot more in total. Unless, of course, you are well enough off to pay the loan off early.

This is all about shifting the cost of higher education onto individual students and nothing to do with fairness.

I oppose student fees because I think they are unfair. Further education should be a right open to all and not constrained by fear of future debt. Nor should students be choosing which universities to attend based on how much they can afford to repay. Our whole society benefits from well educated graduates entering the workplace and those that go onto to earn high salaries will pay handsomely through general taxation.

In Scotland we seem to have an all party consensus on a “no fees” approach. I hope it continues.

I could – just – be persuaded down the route of a Graduate Tax. Though I see many issues with it.

Loading students with individual fees - the scale of which depends on which institution they aspire to study at - is something I will never support.

Read more...

The Real Tory Agenda

When Conservative candidate Jim Ferguson stood up at the Kingussie Hustings and told the audience that the public sector “generated no value” he was regarded as a maverick speaking only for himself.

Now we know that his thinking was straight out of Conservative Central office.

Listening to David Cameron yesterday, speaking with scarcely concealed enthusiasm about the huge programme of cuts he is planning in public spending was chilling. Not because of the scale of the deficit – the numbers he quoted were all in Alastair Darling’s last budget report– but because of what it says about how the Tories view the public sector.

To listen to Cameron speak, you would think it was public sector workers who had caused the recession, soaking up wasteful government spending in well protected jobs, whilst the private sector withered away. The reality is that its only by keeping investment going into the public sector over the last two years that we have stopped a much worse recession; indeed the slow recovery we are now seeing – lower borrowing than predicted and lower unemployment – is probably a direct result of there still being public sector workers with jobs and therefore money to spend on their homes, consumer goods, holidays, services and all the other small economic activities that are the bedrock of our small business driven economy.

How many families have got through the past two years because at least one family member had a job in the NHS, their local council, school or a care provider? Investment in new schools and hospitals doesn’t just build smart new buildings, it employs people, experienced workers as well as apprentices.

Cut a 100,00 jobs out of the public sector – with the spending power that comes with that - and you risk plunging the private sector straight back into another recession.

Labour’s approach to rebuilding the public finances was about getting the balance right between growth and spending; stimulate the economy slowly and steadily and you eventually get higher revenues from income taxes and VAT, so you need to cut spending by much less.

What Cameron’s speech yesterday told us is that the real Tory agenda is still driven by their instinctive aversion to public services. They want a smaller public sector – full stop – and this is their magnificent opportunity to deliver it on the back of financial scaremongering, blaming it all on Labour (“a big boy did it and ran away”) and a corner shopkeepers’ approach to economic planning.

All helped of course, by LibDem willingness to wield the knife as the price for power.  Danny Alexander seems to have gone very quiet all of a sudden........

Read more...