STUDY in DEBT

My own university studies, taken up in the late 1960s, were not wholly a gift from the nation. My generation received student grants but these were means-tested and my father, being relatively comfortable, was obliged to contribute financially to the cost of my further education. Bless him, he never troubled me with knowing at what level he continued to subsidise me even as, for a while, it ominously appeared that I might be turning into what was known as “an eternal student”.

Another tag that attached itself to our generation was that we were “the children of Robbins”. The 1963 report delivered to the government by the committee chaired by Lord Robbins recommended an extensive expansion of higher education and enunciated the principal that university places “should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment”. The then government embraced the Robbins Report in its entirety. This was, incidentally, a Tory government; Sir Alec Douglas-Home became Prime Minister just a week before the incumbent Education Secretary, whose services Home had retained, accepted Robbins. He was Sir Edward Boyle, by a wide margin the most liberal education minister the Tories have ever fielded.

Lionel Robbins: our Daddy

Another quotation evokes the climate in which my baby boomer generation grew up, a most delicate and fastidious line that appeared frequently on notices in shops: “Please do not ask for credit as a refusal often offends”. There were no credit cards in those days and only the most disreputable elements in society asked for anything “on terms” or, in the vernacular, “on tick”. To buy furniture and other large items by hire purchase – in other words, on an instalment plan – was thought to betray a low class mentality. Respectable people “paid their way”.

Sir Edward Boyle, more liberal than Vince Cable

The arrival of the Diners’ Club card, then American Express, then Visa and Access and Mastercard transformed all that. Nowadays you’re thought a fool to pay in cash, chequebooks are being phased out and people think nothing of causing a queue to build up at the checkout because they’re waiting for the PIN to go through to pay for a carton of milk on credit.

The mindset that believes that the only way higher education can be financed is on tick and that students should be happy to graduate with substantial burdens of debt built into their futures – futures in which the housing ladder will anyway be out of reach for decades and no pension schemes will take care of them before they are at least 80 – is utterly alien to my generation. “Live now, pay later” was a dreadful warning for us when we were young. “Study now, pay later” is an obligation to any present school pupil hoping to pursue her studies.

You might imagine that the political generation who have lived with the recession that began in 2008 – which originated, you recall, in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco that caused the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the States – would be scrupulously cautious about resorting to credit as a tool of governmental policy. As always, lessons are only learnt when it suits. Universities are expensive and need to be paid for. What better way than to load the cost onto those who, in the crudest terms, benefit most? This is not a party political question. Labour introduced tuition fees. Politicians of all colours are mired in this mess.

The point is made that, for the sake of argument, a welder should not be obliged to stump up for some middle class kiddie sitting on his arse for three years pretending to read media studies. Put like that – in that highly reductive manner – it sounds like a bloody outrage. But we all pay for stuff that does not obviously benefit us. I have no children but I finance general education from nursery to present graduation level. I don’t drive a car, but I pay for roads and – you could say that roads benefit me, though a non-driver, in myriad ways, but you’d be hard put to argue that I derive much benefit from this provision – parking lots. I don’t support – indeed I vehemently oppose – the UK breaching the sovereignty of other nations, but I am still obliged to finance the Afghan War, as I was to pay for the invasion of Iraq. I don’t especially relish funding bankers’ bonuses, Trident, the Olympics, Trooping the Colour or Strictly Come Dancing, but I am not invited to vote on specific disbursements of public funds.

Nick Clegg in his subsidised Ziggy Stardust phase

Moreover, it is extremely narrow to propose that degrees in objective and scientific disciplines are the only ones to bring benefit to the whole of society. I am as disdainful as you are about some of the modern study areas that seem – on the face of it and without our troubling to go into it – indulgent and unprofitable. But whichever way you cut it, the more educated the populace – the electorate – the better.

In broad terms, an extension of general educational attainment benefits the whole of society. To fix such educational attainment in public philosophy as a privilege that must be paid for far into the future by its agents is a destructive and reductive argument. You want your doctor, your solicitor, your children’s teacher, your accountant, your chief constable, your MP, your poet, your philosopher and the maker of your television programmes to be competent and to deliver the goods. So you benefit if they are fully educated. That’s not a bad investment for society to make on your behalf.

The government argues that the deficit requires all to make sacrifices. It’s a seductive but also a reductive argument. Government is a process of choice. Economic policy is not shaped by what is affordable but by what is chosen. I would argue that foreign wars are not affordable. I maintain that everyone knows that the Taliban will take over in Afghanistan within six months at the most of NATO’s withdrawal and therefore that every day further spent in a country that, as history shows, will not yield to foreign invasion is a day – and the lives sacrificed on that day – wasted. But this government, like its predecessors, professes to imagine that building up resentment against ourselves across the Muslim world somehow guarantees the safety of our own streets. So the government chooses to spend money on waging futile war rather than on college provision or any other pressing matter at home. As I put it, they prefer to destroy livelihoods at home so that they can continue to destroy lives abroad.

Vince Cable as a student Macbeth: "Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,/Loyal and neutral in a moment? No man"

And then there is the Lib Dem dilemma. The argument is advanced that the Liberal Democrats have to be "realistic" over tuition fees because they are partaking in a coalition government. I would rather propose that, in making their solemn pledge over tuition fees during the election campaign, the Lib Dems were then being far from realistic. In what circumstance did they anticipate forming a government other than within a coalition? How far – if at all – did they plan for an accommodation in practice with either Labour or the Tories? They sprinkled undertakings like confetti because they did not imagine that they would ever be called upon them. Now, in the harsh glare of administration, the chickens have begun to come home to roost.

So I suggest that the cynicism demonstrated by Nick Clegg and his team resides not so much in the stance on tuition fees that they have taken in government but in the stance that they adopted in opposition. There is a warning here for Ed Miliband and he has shown some realism in resisting the temptation to pledge that a Labour government will repeal the government's measures. It probably won’t do him any immediate electoral good because people are, even now, susceptible to the promises of politicians. But it’s a shrewd move.

Nick Clegg well cast as a supremely arrogant student

There can be little doubt that the Lib Dems will, in the fullness of time, be punished at the ballot box for their antics on this issue. By a quirk of governmental dispensation, it fell to Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, to execute the government’s policy on tuition fees. Cable’s own humming and hahing this last week about how he might vote has made him look a fool. Nick Clegg as deputy PM and Lib Dem leader has been the lightning rod for the students’ righteous anger. Both of them have been badly wounded by this episode. It’s hard to find much sympathy. We all recall Cable’s lethal thrust, when acting Lib Dem leader, against Gordon Brown at PMQ’s when he noted “the remarkable transformation of the Prime Minister from Stalin to Mr Bean”. This is not yet the moment, but I have readied a letter to The Guardian noting the remarkable transformation of the Business Secretary – whom David Cameron introduced to his new department as “an absolute star” – “from absolute star-turn to Mr Has-Been”.