Bring back free education: scrap student fees!
The introduction of student fees and loans, a major step to privatisation of education, is presented by Labour ministers as an egalitarian measure, designed to produce more money for education, levied from those who will get better jobs in the future.
But it is obvious to everybody - except a well paid labour minister, or somebody hoping to become one - that if you charge fees at the point of education, then the people who will have greatest problems paying them are the poorest working class families.
These are also the people who will feel most reticent to get into huge debt through the loan system, since they come from a position where debt is seen as a trap.
But Labour ministers claim in reply that their new system is means tested: only a third of students pay the full fees, another third pay a proportion, and a third pay nothing.
However the government don't means test the student, but their parents, who in most cases pay the fees, making a nonsense of the argument that this is a tax on high earning graduates.
At 18 years you are old enough to vote, fight wars, or work for low wages: but if you are a student you are seen only as an appendage to your parents.
And what a means test it is! Payment towards fees starts if the parents' joint incomes are over £17,000. The only exemption from these earnings, before tax, used to be mortgage-interest. This year the government has even dropped this exemption.
So who are the third of students who don't pay fees?
The one-third of the population who go to university are heavily dominated by the middle and upper classes: only 25 per cent are from blue-collar families. How many middle-class families earn less than £17,000? Even most blue-collar families earn more than this.
Parents whose joint income is over £33,000 (only just above the government's figures for average earnings per person!) pay the whole fee.
Yet ministers claim only one third pay the full fee. The sums don't add up.
One sixth of students went to public school: clearly all these come from wealthy families, and must pay the full fee.
So can it be true that only one-sixth of the families whose sons or daughters went to state schools had a combined income of more than £33,000?
The figures are becoming ever even less believable: the government claims that when the threshold for payment is raised next year to joint earnings of £20,000, half the people will pay nothing.
Either the government is lying, or tens of thousands of well-off families have found a way around the system.
Baroness Blackstone, the government's education spokesperson in the House of Lords, said in a letter to the Guardian that "generous loans" [sic!]were available to students.
Gobbled up
In fact the loans available are £3,800 in each of the first two years, and £3,300 in the third. In many areas this would all be gobbled up by students' rent.
Most landlords make students pay for 10 or 11 months. So how would the Baroness like to live on a few hundred pounds a year?
This has to cover food, clothes, travel (with train fares soaring, and with the cheapest housing usually requiring a bus ride to college), books, entertainment, and everything else.
It is clearly impossible to live on this.
So poorer students have to go to work. All have to work during the holidays, not so they can travel around the world, but to have money for term-time. Most also have to do paid work work during term-time itself.
How can you study and work?
What this government wants to do, following on Tory policy, is to reduce the idea of education to a financial issue: it is seen as no more than preparing to better yourself financially.
Families that have made financial sacrifices are seen as more likely to pressure their sons or daughters to get well-paid jobs.
The students themselves will be lumbered on graduation with debt which from the end of this term will be in the region of £20,000 each (£10,000 student loans, along with debts to banks and other lenders). None of this debt is interest free: interest is charged straight away, at inflation rate.
So graduates are forced to look for jobs on a salary high enough to pay this back - as well as put a roof over their heads. As business gets more control of the education system through donations and sponsored research at universities, so graduates are being produced whose sole aim is to earn more money.
Any question of developing themselves culturally, or helping develop society is seen as a side issue.
But ministers know that many students will not be able to get well paid jobs. That's why they have lowered the threshold for starting to repay loans to £10,000 from £15,000.
This threshold is worked out a weekly basis - so if in any week you earn more than 1/52 of £10,000, you immediately start repaying your student loan.
Are £10,000-earnings high? Could Blunkett and his colleagues live on this?
Under the old system, student grants were paid on a means tested basis, so the richest families did not get them: and there were no fees.
The Tories turned part of these grants into loans, but it was the Labour Party that finished the job, driving the final decisive nails into the coffin of free higher education.
What is the solution?
All education should be free. If the ministers are really worried that there are too many high earning graduates, then they could easily put the higher rates of tax back on for the top earners - the progressive tax system that the Tories scrapped.
This would pay many times over for free education, and negate the need for any business finances in the education system.
The only reason students are paying fees and only getting loans, is so that the rich can continue to pocket the Tory tax cuts.
Some students are still fighting fees and loans and are fighting to keep financial interests out of education.
In the forefront are those refusing to pay fees, (there are at least 50 of these in Oxford) these should be supported with demonstrations all over the country.
The national demonstration called by the NUS on November 15 should be supported. Wherever possible demonstrations should be turned into occupations.
There should be calls on the trade unions for support, since working-class students are the most affected.
Student bodies should co-operate with Trades Coun-cils, asking local union branches to seek support throughout the union structures.
David Blunkett and other Labour ministers must be told that their policy is not working, and cannot work. They must act urgently to change it before they wreck the lives of thousands more young people.