Tories scrapping tuition fees … but there’s a catch
The BBC just reported that the Tories have announced a policy to scrap university tuition fees when (or if!) they next get to power – and they intend to replace it with loans on commercial rates of interest. Now, I went to University in the mid-1990s, and left about the year before Labour introduced tuition fees. Until about 1998, tuition was free, and there was a system of “maintainance grants”, which under the Tories was slowly whittled down until very few people were poor enough to get one by the time I was at college. This may well be because the number of students going into higher education got bigger and bigger, as apprenticeships and other non-academic training became less available.
I was involved in the student union at Aberystwyth, which was dominated by a left-wing independent / Plaid Cymru (Welsh nationalist) tendency, and it was very supportive of what was known as “free education”, that is, a return to pre-1979 grant levels, and a total opposition to tuition and top-up fees, which is what the National Union of Students (NUS) was demanding. Not all the unions were like this – there was a group called “New Solutions” which was criticised for trying to get turkeys to vote for Christmas, i.e. in favour of scrapping the NUS’s full-grant demand. In hindsight I think the NUS’s old policy was unrealistic, but the Labour group which dominated the NUS wanted rid of it. The fact that the “opposition” within the NUS was dominated by Socialist Organiser types did not help matters either.
The Labour group contended that we couldn’t possibly demand a return to pre-1979 grants, it would just cost too much, and said that we needed to be “in the debate” if we wanted to win it. Not long after the NUS conference passed this policy in 1996, Labour announced its present policy. I asked an official at one of the London student unions what he thought of this, and he said that it shows they were listening to us! Now that we were telling them what they wanted to hear, they listened.
As for this new Tory policy, one wonders if we can trust the Tories with anything after what happened the last time they were in office. Still, some would say it was better than now – there were some maintainance grants and no tuition fees, and now it seems that it’s not just “no return to pre-1979” but also “no return to pre-1997”. The bit about commercial interest rates is disturbing to say the least – if the government are giving out student loans at normal personal loan rates, why bother anyway, as people can just go to the banks? It will certainly make it difficult for any Muslims wanting to keep away from usury and whose families don’t have the money to pay the costs outright to go to college. Are the community going to help its youth in this, in the event that the Tories are able to carry out such a policy?
