The thing about tuition fees…

The thing is, that I am a staunch egalitarian. I really really like free education, as an empowering social mobilising force. So when our dear leader David Cameron’s Dictaphone suggests that we scrap our opposition to tuition fees I go all grumpy for ten minutes and mumble about reviving the Social Democrat Party.

The problem is that university isn’t really education, at least at Cambridge it wasn’t. It was very much a teach yourself to teach yourself environment, full of CV bloating extra curricular activities and social networking (not that I, as a physics student, had time to take the slightest bit of notice of any of those things of course…). For all the talk of getting everyone to go to uni, we should remember that it’s not actually necessary for existing in the big bad world of deadlines, national insurance payments and traffic lights (nor does having a degree guarantee you the success it used to).

The thing is, I am inclined to say that I think that a graduate tax on those who take three gap years to puff up their employment prospects isn’t actually that bad an idea; these guys are about to be big enough to pay society back, let them pay for it, at least in part.

But were going to need some fairly major changes to the current mess before I’m remotely happy.

The current nonsense prevents people obtaining mortgages, privileges the set whose parents can afford to just pay the fees outright, saddles people with crippling debt even if they don’t get the career boost they anticipated, and generally leaves me anxious about how long it is I’ll be getting letters telling me that I was charged another £40 interest this month (whoever said those loans were low interest can eat their words humbly please….)

As such, I propose the following mash up of the rules, such that the graduates who do well out of the whole thing actually pay something back, and the people who were lost along the way are guaranteed a normal financial situation after the ordeal is over.

Firstly, we need to anonymise the debt aspect of it. People shouldn’t be traceable to the loan, and should be able to sign up for mortgages and the like without the stigma of several thousand pounds debt on their back. As far as I can see this doesn’t necessarily mean no longer calling it a loan, it just means the data must be anonymised from the prying eyes of credit rating organisations.

Secondly, there’s no way Eton boy is getting out of it just because his dad can pay up in advance, this needs to be compulsory on every graduate them-self, which I think means a graduate tax, as opposed to a student loan/tuition fees system. I basically mean that instead of taking out a loan, you go to uni for free (without any tuition fees), and you then pay back an amount based on your income afterwards; thus if you end up earning £16,000 for the following 25 years you don’t still have £3,000 remaining to pay off and are barred from a mortgage.

Thirdly, it shouldn’t be contingent on paying back a certain amount, but should be linked to earnings for a time period– long enough to deter procrastination and avoidance (“oh, if I just take a gap year I won’t have to pay off my loan”), but short enough not to be a deterrent (“I would rather spend 3 years climbing the greasy pole and then keep more of my income for the rest of my life”), say somewhere between 5 and 10 years from graduation (you would fiddle the duration and the percentage to make the numbers work out).

As far as I can see, this would mean Vice Chancellors would be able to run a decent budget, without the lobbying leverage to persuade the government to up maximum limits on the fees they can themselves charge (they would be just another treasury budget in with the rest of the scrum again), and we lose all of the crazy social consequences of charging people directly for their tuition (more rich kids, and a new type of snobbish discrimination against graduates).

This, by the way, is much more socially groovy than the current system – from each according to his means, to each according to his need and all that 🙂

Disagree with me? Well so did I, two days ago. Comment and see if you can tempt me back.

The Speaker

Thank goodness he’s gone quietly. 

The problem I had with the speaker was not that he blocked expenses reform. Let me make that very clear; that was the responsibility of all elected members, and especially the Government, who failed to act over a long period of time, and that is very much the subject for another post.

The reason Michael Martin had to go, which was apparent immediately at the time I heard it in the “Today in Parliament” pod-cast, was that he took sides. He abused the position of speaker to silence his critics, and even worse to abuse them publicly. I am not a fan or Kate Hoey, nor of Norman Baker; they seemed hypercritical of the speaker at the time, and someone other than the speaker should have been there to defend him. As it was, he chose to intervene himself, and and thus to sign his own death warrant.

I wrote to my MP (Meg Hillier, “Ms ID Cards“) to request that she vote in favour of any no-confidence motion that came before the house, after his disgusting abuse of his position of power during that debate. Luckily for our constitution, it didn’t come to that. 

What this doesn’t mean.

This certainly doesn’t mean that the expenses row is over. This was, in fact, nothing to do with the expenses row, except perhaps indirectly. MP’s abuse of this shoddy system of reimbursement remains a real problem, and if Local Parties aren’t willing to deselect their local candidates (and if they had any insight into electoral maths then they damn well would!) then the leaders must act decisively to sack such members, forcing by-elections with new candidates. This is especially true for front bench members whose claims breached the rules, or much more reasonably were simply unconscionable.

What we don’t need is opportunistic Tory posturing for a General Election. The country shouldn’t do things it will later regret in a hot temper! Waiting until the autumn for the Kelly report, and additional reform of the electoral system (STV at the very least, PR if possible) is the sensible thing to do. All we will get now from a General Ballot would be a bunch of extremists and independents, and probably a slim Tory majority (Thatcher-ism for everyone just as the recession was starting to recover – aaargh!).