For too long the Lib Dems have been on the back foot over tuition fees. For too long we’ve accepted the Labour line that we have somehow betrayed the youngsters of this country and ruined higher education. For too long we have been passive and quiet celebrating about what amounts to a great achievement for such a small party. Today is the day I say no to Labour lies. Today is the day I stop accepting lectures, won’t you join me?
It’s worth noting that what set me off was the amount of crowing with the know it all tone today that University applications are down 2.4%, but courtesy of @StuartBonar we know that number of babies born 18 years ago down 2.3% on previous year.
So where do you start in combating Labour. The first is giving a bit of historical perspective. Labour are not perfect, and have never been perfect on the subject of higher education and tuition fees.
Labour History
1) In 1996, John Major comissioned the Dearing Report in response to a funding gap in Higher education, by September 1998, the Labour government had issued a response which said
“The Government plans to introduce an annual tuition fee of £1,000, representing about a quarter of the average cost of a course. Tuition will continue to be free for students from lower income families. Other full-time students will pay up to £1,000 per year depending on parental income. The cost of the fees will be balanced by increased loans for maintenance.
This also meant that ‘The student grant of £1,710 is abolished to be replaced by income-contingent student loans.’
I wonder how progressive it was scrapping grants and introducing debts for the first time into the student system? I wonder what Mr Labour Livingstone said? Well he accused ministers of “whipping away a ladder of opportunity which they themselves had climbed”
Quite.
2) Then in 2001, Labour were re-elected with this sentence in their manifesto… “We will not introduce ‘top-up’ fees and have legislated to prevent them” Yet in 2003, Less than two years after pledging not to introduce top-up fees, Labour publishes a white paper setting out proposals allowing universities to set their own tuition fees up to a cap of £3,000 a year.
Quite a betrayal to all those students who voted for Labour right?
3) Lastly, in the dying throes of the Labour government, Lord Mandelson implemented the Browne review (something promised in 2004 to placate Labour rebels). Now i’m not a mind reader, and nor did I expect Mandelson to be, but if you place Browne, a man who is a former chair of BP, in charge, you must expect some sort of recommended increase. Now Labour were either politically ignorant, or just down right lying to claim they expected any other.
Even Labours manifesto in 2010 said they’d support the outcomes of the Browne review. Which coincidentally recommended removing the cap on fees.
What makes all of this much much worse than a Lib Dem position? In 1997, Labour had a 418 out of 639 seats in parliament, and in 2001, 413 out of 659 seats. Those are two over whelming majorities that really allowed Labour to do what they liked.
The role of the Liberal Democrats.
What Labour conveniently forget to, is the size and political position of our party. With just 62 out of 650 MPs, we represent around 8% of parliament. That means in coalition, we simply could not win everything. Tuition fees was not one of our big 4 policies on the front page of our manifesto.
It begs the question how many red lines can there be? Was it worth breaking government to see a tory majority to do so?
It would have been nice if our MPs had abstained like the coalition agreement had allowed, but do I blame Nick, Vince et al. after working so hard on making the bill as progressive as possible for voting for it? No. No I don’t.
That comes from the strength of the bill.
The bill is a good one. Let’s keep saying it!
Lets state the points
1) For the first time, nobody shall pay any fees up front.
2) For the first time, their is loans available for everyone who needs them
3) Trebling tuition fees doesn’t always mean tripling your costs
4) Earn under £21,000 and you’ll never repay
5) Repayments will be £540 a year lower than now
6) Many people will never pay it all back
In fact, putting my own details into the Student Loan Calculator, (For verifiable purposes, my undergrad course has been priced at £8,500. My loan was £4,500 a year, and the last job I applied for matching my skills was £18,500) shows me that I’ll only pay back £7k in its entirety. That is actually a saving of £15,500 over my life time (3 years x £3k + 3 years x 4.5k = £22.5k)
If that isn’t a better system. I’m not sure exactly what is worse about that system!
Labour have played the politics of fear. Attack them for it.
Its been a bruising time to be a Liberal Democrat, not only has the level of bile and rhetoric thrown at us by the Labour Party, we’ve been led to believe its coming at us on the doorstep too (It really isn’t in my experience) we have failed to take into account what Labour are saying and doing, and missing a very good point.
Labour are practising the politics of fear. They’ve been telling students that they won’t be able to afford their degree. That they’ll be saddled with debt that will affect their life chances.
Those are just damned lies. Lies that make students worry, that scare them into thinking they won’t have the cash to pay for university, that it’ll affect their credit ratings and mortgage and life chances. Yet we know that no one has to pay anything up front, that no one will come crashing on the door for the money if you aren’t earning enough to pay for it, and that the information that you are a graduate can’t be used against you in financial terms.
I find it ironic that same Labour government produced this video enclosed in the Guy News segment, telling people that higher costs were an investment they shouldn’t worry about.
If uni admissions are down, it’ll be because of that scaremongering and the failure to communicate the facts.
We’ve also missed a chance to go on the offensive about Ed Milibands pretty vacuous announcement that he’d cut the sticker price from 9k to 6k. Which was highlighted as nothing more than a tax cut for the richest graduates here and here.
So we didnt attack Ed scaring applicants away with spurious hyperbole, and then offering a tax cut for the richest?
So next time a Labour Party member tries to tell you that tuition fees are the great betrayal, you tell them that
a) they introduced fees
b) Introduced top up fees
c) Set the terms for the Browne review
d) Promised to support its outcomes
e) Refused to go into coalition with the party that would have kept fees down
f) Promised to raise fees to 6k
g) Offered a tax cut to the richest graduate
h) scared away the poorest in society from applying
That isn’t a record to be proud off. That is a record to be ashamed off
Excellent Article!
Entirely correct, as well. Labour seem to be acting on the premise that 9k is totally unacceptable… while introducing fees, raising them, and then doubling them are all perfectly all right, necessary steps.
The £1,000 to £3,000 is also the same effective trebling of fees that we see them criticising them us for.
They’re trying to gain a moral high ground that they do not deserve. We have to remind Labour, and most importantly, Britain’s students of this.
Thank you for putting all those points together: I am going to share this as widely as possible.
You are right that Lib Dems (largely because of an innate sense of fairness) seem to have been allowing the bitter amnesiacs of Labour to rewrite their past unchecked. See my blog entry on the economy with its post scriptum on labour and tuition fees from earlier this year http://carolinepage.blog.suffolk.libdems.org/2011/04/23/i-need-to-remind-labour-party-members-what-socialists-actually-thought-before-the-last-election-2/ .
It is particularly terrifying that Labour, while seeing itself as a party of the people, is prepared to talk down education and wilfully damage the future of so many of today’s young people just in order to try and prove that the Coalition has got it wrong.
The chinese have an expression for such cynical, wicked, destructive behaviour: ????????? – “their conscience has been eaten my a dog”!
Speaking as a Lib Dem I think that both parties have been just as bad as each other.
The system we substantially improved was already quite good and progressive to start with. The tuition fees system that Labour introduced wasn’t bad at all – a very good an innovative way that allowed graduates to contribute to their tuition as and when they could easily afford it without risk.
Whichever party has been in power, the following has happened:
• The party in power campaigned on promises against tuition fees until elected and they change their mind. The system they put in is reasonable but the electorate are pissed off at them for saying one thing during election time and another in power.
• The party in opposition use the electorate’s disappointment to their advantage and start making unreasonable attacks on the progressive system, propagating untrue myths that it makes higher education unaffordable for poorer students.
So as disgusting as Labour’s opportunistic behaviour has been over this, they’ve only been giving us a taste of our own medicine that we’ve enjoyed dishing out to them for the last 12 years or so.
I was wondering how come almost 80 people had retweeted my birth stat tweet… thanks for the plug, sir. An excellent post, as always.
I think you were already there! Although ive seen it making a reappearance in my time line, maybe that helped!
You make the right conclusion – as Lib Dems, we need to be much more vocal in trumpeting the successes of the coalition that wouldn’t have happened without Liberal Democrat ministers present – increase in income tax threshold, restoring the pensions-earnings link, overturning the gay blood ban, legalising gay marriage, pupil premium and many more. This also needs to apply to tuition fees. The problem is that the rhetoric on tuition fees, at least on university campuses, is not being led by Labour students, it’s being led by socialists and the far-left. We’re never going to win against their proposals, promising (as they can) the world, paid for by simply “taxing the rich more”. It’s a fight we cannot win as our hands are tied by the system, meanwhile they are proposing an entirely new system and so can promise anything inside their mythical utopia.
However, regardless of that, your post commends the system for being far better than the one it replaced. In terms of the deal for students, that may be true. But what has happened, pretty much unnoticed by all except those on the far-left, is that the government has taken what is no more than a long-term punt on the repayment levels of students under the new deal. To make the figures work, the government has made an arbitrary assumption about the number of students, and the value of their debt, that it will have to write down 30 years into the future. If these numbers are off, and they don’t need to be off by much, then the exchequer is going to end up losing a lot of money under this deal. Taxpayers are going to be subsidising student debt. If that’s the situation it fundamentally undermines the premise of this system and we might as well have gone the whole nine yards and kept our pledge and pushed for free university tuition for all. I for one don’t believe this is sustainable, but I also don’t believe the new system is any better, in the long run, for the government and the taxpayer than the previous one. Of course, this won’t affect this government, or even the one following it. By the time this problem comes to light, those who have implemented the system will have long escaped the Commons. Finally, and this is perhaps the most ingenious bit of all, is that as the debt is only going to be realised in 30 years or so, it can be removed from the current government books, instantly reducing the deficit a little bit more for the time being.
I’m not trying to say that your points are invalid, because, as far as the political implications of the new deal are concerned, I think you’re right on the money about keeping up the pressure on the Labour Party about their previous record on this and their current alternative. All I’m saying is that there is a good case to be made for the new system being economically more disastrous for the taxpayer in the long run than the system it’s replacing.
Saying what labour did wrong is putting up a “strawman” to argue against so that it is easier to argue against the points they make by discrediting your opponent. This is generally considered to be an invalid form of argument as it does not properly engage with the actual issue, so all of the labour part of your post can be ignored, anyway who cares what they did. Just because they’re not whiter than white doesn’t give others an excuse for pursuing policies that are also misguided or a betrayal. I am not a labour supporter but my concern is not with what they are doing or have done but what policies are being enacted by the current government.
Dealing with the actual debate on tuition fees instead of labour betrayal. I find it completely bazaar that the fact you may not be required to by all or most of it back has time and time again been portrayed as a good thing. Firstly, because if you have not succeeded in earning above £21,000 it may not have been to your advantage to go to university in the first place. Secondly and far more importantly, a policy which is been sold on the fact that many people won’t have to pay it back is appalling as it will leave a hole where that money will be. It is a short termist policy which takes money from the future which at some point will come back to haunt the country. In reality there was little point in raising tuition fees in the long term as the government are still going to pay for it but further down the line when it is another governments problem. A future generation will be expected to pay the £15,500 you have “saved”, a generation I think will have enough worries already considering the little that is being done to plan for the exhaustion of oil resources.
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Hey Arthur
Low earners not having to pay back the full amount is a good thing because it ensures only those who can easily afford it have to pay. This allows the student to go to Uni without risk of bankrupting themselves if it doesn’t lead to a good salary. The interest on those loans where the full amount is paid expected to cover the losses due to those defaulting.
What’s your preferred solution? Saddle low earning graduates with unaffordable debt payments?
Why have you waited until today?
When local activists met East of England MPs in December 2010, I asked for this topic to be part of a national campaign BEFORE the May2011 Council Elections. Nothing happened until after hundreds of Lib Dem Councillors saw their vote slump and lost their seats.
I gave (a briefer version of) this message in my own Spring 2011 Focus – the one before my election Focus. My vote stayed up – but it was NOT enough to get the seat.
All very well and good, but the way you attack Labour for their inconsitant record just reflects poorly on politicians as a whole. After all, it’s true that free tutition was on our mannifesto (for some reason): if we attack them for not holding up their end of the bargain, we say that the bargain they ought to have held up was superior, which it wasn’t.
Free tuition would be a redistribution of wealth from the poorest in society to the richest. That is an unavoidable fact, and it is for that reason that our legislation was superior to the promises Labour made: that’s why they broke their promises. The line of attack should be about holding up the bill as a continuation of Labour’s policies, thereby exposing them as hypocrites and liars.
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