University Fees 
fatal distortion

The dismal story of the Government compromise on University fees is a telling one.  Having allowed the issue to creep up on them, and to require an "urgent" solution, Government Ministers have minimised Treasury commitments by placing the full burden of additional funding upon the shoulders of students themselves, so that poor students will effectively face a life-time of income-tax bills higher than their fellow graduates from wealthier backgrounds. 

It is common ground that our universities, having been driven to expand throughout the 1980s and 1990s without matching grant increases, desperately need additional resources - staff salaries are falling seriously behind "the market", and research and tutorial resources are hopelessly stretched.  Yet the mantra of the salariat (both Tory and Labour) is that these additional funds must not come "from the State" by way of the deployment of tax revenues.  Why?  Becasue if they did, there would be a substantial increase in the size of the "State budget" (i.e. the proportion of Gross Domestic Product taken by the State for the pursuit of public purposes), and the electorate would object, punishing the Government responsible at the next Election. The Labour salariat would not retain their jobs, collectively or even individually.

The refusal of the Labour salariat to adopt a socialist solution (that is, levying a Graduate Tax and funding the universities from the public purse) was driven by simple electoral terror, nothing less.  And after all, the key skill of the new salariat is getting re-elected - nothing less, nothing more.  Whatever was to be done, the Treasury had to be able to say that the funding came from other pockets, not those of the State.  Gordon Brown is already in deep trouble, on that score, with the £21bm indebtedness of Network Rail - he could not allow further funding to burden the public purse.  The electoral implications were simply too threatening...

That is why students are being made to pay the lion's share of the additional bill.  They are the other pocket, even if easy terms must be devised, to get the money out of them.  The State will of course continue to pick up the primary tab, as at present.  And outright grants for students from poorer households are to be increased (details yet to be forthcoming).  But apart from that, every student must pay his/her way - either by parental contributions at the time, or (for the less lucky) many years of debt repayment.  Charles Clarke had the audacity to call this a "market-based solution" - well, so it is, in a way - but he should not be proud of that.  Because the market is one in which the wealthy will continue to be advantaged, and the poorer students continue to carry the burden of their poverty.  Nothing socialist there, then...

Clarke obviously does sense the shame of  this, and will try to force the issue of economic discrimination by pursuing positive discrimination in favour of poorer students.  There is to be a new "Access Regulator" to supervise universities' performance on this front.  I am deeply unhappy about this escape-route, chosen by Clarke to resolve a dilemma of his own making - it is wrong in principle.  I believe that this form of discrimination will eventually be seen to conflict with doctrines of equality of entitlement in education (as is currently happening in America, even attracting direct intervention by George Dubya).  If Labour continues to pursue this seedy compromise, it will not be long before a disadvantaged middle-class student, excluded from Balliol in favour of a student from a poorer family, successfully sues the College or the Regulator under the European Convention of Human Rights...  Watch this space.