I have written before about the Browne Review and the coming changes to the way universities are funded, making it pretty clear that the deal was actually better for students than the one they get now. But two areas I didn't touch have been troubling me. First, I didn't look at the principle of whether students should have their university education funded. Secondly, there is one area on which Browne's reforms are very weak and the Lib Dems are fools for not noticing it.
Britain's current problems have arisen from a noble goal: to make university accessible to all. A consequence of this has been that the number of people going to university has increased. A lot. This may have been great for social mobility (debatable) but it was awful for the government's finances. There are now more people going to university than the state can afford. On the surface - and I think that this is where people are looking - this looks unfair. Before the expansion of HE students, who were rarely from poor backgrounds, got free higher education. Now university is open to all it suddenly isn't free.
The simple fact is that students never deserved state help. There is no reason why taxpayers should fund students. Why should the poor fund your university experience? Or rather, why shouldn't you pay for it yourself? You get a hell of a lot out of it - all the statistics suggest that graduates earn more than non-graduates. So why should non-graduates subsidise your education so you can earn more money?
They shouldn't. You should pay for your own studies.
My second point is this: there is a big problem with these reforms, but it's not with the top-up fees. That £9,000 figure has distorted the debate. Everyone is focussed on it. But the reason why £9,000 isn't a problem is because the government pays it for you up front, and you pay back when you're earning. If you do the sums, you'll see that someone paying back their loan earning £25,000 a year at the 9% rate on income over £21,000 will have to find just £360 per year. It's not the thing that makes university unaffordable.
The killer is what you have to pay UP FRONT when you're there. That is supposed to be covered by a maintenance grant and a means-tested allowance. But there is a real argument to say that the sums offered are not enough. For those with a household income less than £25,000 there will be a grant of £3,250. This is supplemented by a loan, which is to increase to an unspecified amount probably dictated by inflation and likely to be a little higher (for those with a household income of less than £25,000) than the current maximum of £3,497.
That's a little more than £6,747 a year. You can easily spend well over £4,000 on rent alone, particularly in London, leaving you with less than £3,000 to spend on food and clothes and heating all year. It's not enough. Most people will manage it because their parents will help them, which completely defeats the point. It's important to note that this isn't a new problem, it was part of Labour's initial reforms too: Browne's review just hasn't rectified it.
So students have focussed on the wrong thing. They've got caught up in an unwinnable debate over the £9,000 level and rejecting the bill outright, and have missed a real chance to make university more accessible to all. By lobbying hard students could have pressurised the government into increasing the maintenance grant and maintenance allowance.
An amendment of this sort would have been politically acceptable, in a way that rejecting the bill never could be. Not only would this have been a great benefit for students, it also would have been great for the Lib Dems, who are crying out for something positive to mask the bitter taste of this bill. I hope they realise it before it's too late.
As a footnote, I've read with some amusement that students at my former university UCL have been occupying a room (or something) in protest at the tuition fee increases which will be voted on in the Commons on Thursday. Some of the brave souls have come up with this song to mark the occasion. Favourite lines include (and I apologise in advance for the swearing, but it is, apparently, how you show solidarity, or make a valid political point, or something):
"We're all in this together as the proletariat." Sung while wearing a cricket jumper.
"The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains, working men of all countries unite." Impressed they got a melody out of this line.
"Fucking Tories." So edgy.
"Theresa May is a whore", which seemed a bit excessive to me.
Anyway, decide for yourself if you think people on the lowest incomes should subsidise this lot:
Two comments have caused much consternation this weekend. The first was from Enterprise Tsar Lord Young on Thursday evening, and led to his resignation on Friday afternoon. The second was from Vince Cable on Sunday morning. Both showed a combination of political naivety and wilful provocation.
It has been pointed out by many (see here and here for starters) that Lord Young's comments that people have 'never had it so good' during this 'so-called recession' contained an element of truth. Low interest rates are good news if you've got a mortgage and still have your job. But that doesn't mean he was right to say it.
Lord Young was probably fed up with generalised comments about the recession and how it was affecting people. So he sought to tell it as he saw it. But in doing so he made a sweeping, generalised comment of his own which undermined the government's narrative that its deficit reduction plan - and the job losses that will accompany it - is the only responsible way to deal with the effects of the recession. They also play in to people's ill-founded yet genuine concerns that the Tory party is the party of the rich, and that it doesn't care - or won't even notice - if they suffer. Any comment that undermines the government, however economically accurate it may be, is a foolish comment to make. It is right that he has resigned.
Vince Cable has also made comments that are totally accurate and completely foolish. Speaking to the BBC's Politics Show, he said that, on tuition fees, the Lib Dems 'didn't break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn't win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it's the coalition agreement that's binding upon us and which I'm trying to honour.' Spot on; but what on earth is he thinking?
The Lib Dems need the debate about tuition fees to go away. As quickly as possible. It is turning voters against them. So why would one of the most senior Lib Dems come out and deliberately provoke their (very noisy) opponents on this issue? Last week the CCHQ building was trashed by part of a 50,000 strong demonstration against this legislation. All he's done is start another round of media interest in the subject. NUS President Aaron Porter is back on the airwaves, calling the comments 'insulting'. Cable gains nothing from this. Neither does his party - in fact it just highlights the same 'broken promises' that Clegg talked about (see below) before the election. Sometimes, even if you know you're right about something, you should just bite your tongue and shut up about it.
Following the disunity displayed by the PLP on Monday this could have been a very difficult outing for Harriet Harman but her relentless focus on tuition fees left Nick Clegg struggling.
Harman's prepared jokes were excellent and she was on the front foot throughout. She began with a simple question to Clegg, asking if he could update the House on how his plans to abolish tuition fees were going. This brought howls of laughter from the Labour benches. Nick fought back with those tired lines about the deficit and the legacy of the previous government.
She pushed again with a Clegg quote from the election campaign in which he called the prospect of £7,000 fees a 'disaster'. Clegg started to warm up and retorted that the system was fairer than anything under Labour and that it would help part-time students 'shamefully treated' by the opposition.
Labour's Deputy Leader then landed the best line of the exchange about Clegg meeting some 'dodgy bloke' at freshers' week and doing something he'd regret. The backbenches on both sides were laughing now - even William Hague couldn't hide his smirk (see above).
Clegg hit back by arguing that Labour was far from the party of students, pointing out that Labour had introduced tuition fees after opposing them in 1997 and introduced top-up fees after opposing them in 2001. They also set up the Browne Review and now disown its findings. He then asked Harman if she'd be going outside to explain to demonstrating students what her party's policy was.
Then Harman got to the real meat of the debate, and hammered home what should be a central part of their attacks on the coalition. Fee increases for students are not to increase funding for universities, but to cover the money that the government is cutting from universities. 'What is the cut to the university teaching grant?' she demanded.
Nick lost his bearings. He'd been defensive but generally assured until this point but here he started mumbling about the Labour party's plans to make massive cuts, which he couldn't be specific about because Labour don't even know what they are.
Harman came straight back at him, asking if he'd been taking lessons from the PM on how not to answer questions. She said the cuts to the university teaching grant were a 'staggering 80 per cent' and that the government had 'pulled the plug' on university funding. By now Clegg's responses were incoherent, as he said something generic about being progressive and fair.
Labour's Deputy Leader finished by mocking the Lib Dems' pre-election pledges. Clegg then tried to cram in a joke about the PLP's Mutiny Monday, but it was way too late and totally off topic. He looked completely lost, complaining that before the election he didn't know how bad things would be in government after Labour.
It was a big surprise to see Clegg so weak in debate, given that it's supposed to be one of his strong points. He didn't really land a single attack on Labour, and his Mutiny Monday joke was deployed out of desperation. Harman, on the other hand, was assured and relentless in her attack on the Lib Dems leader. In truth she has an easier time attacking the Lib Dems than Miliband has with Cameron, because they are so vulnerable on the compromises the are making. Even so, she defeated Clegg with some panache yesterday, matching excellent prepared jokes and quotes with points of real substance.
Today's outing was totally lacking in direction - Ed Miliband appeared not to know which topic to ask questions about. Problem was that Cameron didn't get into a groove and made some odd jokes which didn't really land in return. Ed started with two questions on Yemen and the recent terrorist plot involving cargo flights into the UK, which were interesting, but lacked a cutting edge as he was just asking for information.
He then switched to Tuition Fees, which was today's big news, and asked two questions about that. First how the government was going to balance its commitment to build trust in politics with election promises not to raise tuition fees and secondly, and much more effectively, by pushing at the Lib Dems by questioning how this policy would go down in Sheffield (Nick Clegg), Twickenham (Vince Cable) and Eastleigh (Chris Huhne).
Cameron wasn't in full flow at this point at all. He came up with some weak line about how the policy would create strong, well funded, and independent universities before making a very lame joke about the 'Milibandwagon', which didn't even make sense. But he picked up, accusing Ed Miliband of breaking his word by going back on the Labour manifesto and asking the Labour leader to join the consensus on university reform and stop playing games.
But then Miliband again switched direction and asked if, in a time of austerity, it made sense for the PM to put his personal photographer on the civil service payroll. He made his best attack of the afternoon with a gag about the photographer 'doing a nice line in airbrushing' (which was hilarious) next to his worst line, a rehash of the old 'I ask the questions' from four weeks ago.
This got Cameron a bit flustered, and he responded by saying that Ed Miliband hadn't got any answers, which didn't make sense as he'd asked him a question about his photographer and this is Prime Minister's Questions. He rolled out some figure (£5oo million) as an example of how much Labour spent on communications in government, and then proceeded to talk about how Miliband was dodging the debate on Tuition Fees.
The debate ended with Miliband pushing on the photographer and accusing the PM of causing Broken Britain by breaking his promises on VAT, Child Benefit and Tuition Fees. Cameron pulled out one of his better lines by accusing the Labour leader of being opportunistic, full of 'lame soundbites', against everything and for nothing.
What I don't understand is why Miliband didn't push further on Tuition Fees. He could have raised a cheer from his backbenches with a line about the poor being squeezed out, or about the rich being able to pay up front and avoid debt, but he didn't. In a way it helped, as the photographer joke was his best of the exchange and salvaged it for him, but it was a pretty directionless performance against a Cameron who was not on top form and really could have been beaten today.
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