So what of Mr Blair? I rest my case (passim). And Michael Howard? The best that can be said of him, I suppose, is that in retrospect and with the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that he wasn’t going to retain for very long the title of the worst and most illiberal Home Secretary in living memory.
A young man on a visit to Australia kicked a rugger ball over the cross-bar and between the goal-posts, and the entire British nation went berserk. (The English, anyway.) The enormous victory parade held to celebrate the return from Australia of plain Sir Jonny (as he then was, or was about to become) far exceeded the protest demonstrations against George W Bush’s visit and the parade held to mark the end of the Falklands war. Now Jonny is a hot tip to replace the Queen, given that her knee problems seem likely to make it impossible for her to continue long to reign over us, notwithstanding our fervent prayers to the contrary every time we sing the national anthem. King-designate Jonny is also widely expected to appoint himself to form a government as soon as Mr Blair’s dodgy tummy compels him to offer the new King his resignation (which incidentally means the whole ministry resigning, too: eat your heart out, Gordon). "Swing Low, Sweet Chario-ot" has already replaced God Save the Queen as the new national anthem, not only in tribute to King Jonny but also as a mark of respect to the Muslims and the National Secular Society. There is a movement in the EU to appoint the new young King and his magic rugger boot President of the Commission in recognition of his Jason-like feat, not to mention his foot, in retrieving an ornamental gold cup from the southern hemisphere for Europe. A grateful nation has awarded its youthful monarch-to-be a pension for life of 10 million Euros a year and a time-share on the Algarve in addition to the Civil List and other royal expenses. The empty plinth in Trafalgar Square is to be occupied — no, not by a statue of King Jonny, but by the statue of Nelson from the top of his column, where it will be replaced by a new statue of Jonny already being sculpted jointly by Tracy Ermin and Damien Hirst . There are even reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury has been looking uncharacteristically worried in recent days. What a drop goal! At least we have got our priorities right.
This evening (who says that Ephems is behind the times?) the meeting to approve Giscard d’Estaing’s enormous new draft constitution (265 pages of tightly-packed PDF file on the Web) for the European Union ended in an acrimonious failure to agree. The unfortunate Irish, as the incoming EU Presidency, now have to try to pick up the pieces. The official British government line has ‘matured’ as this controversial document has undergone successive scrutinies. At first it was little more than "a tidying-up exercise" to collect past treaties and agreements into a single document. Then it was some necessary adjustments to enable the EU to cope with its immense impending expansion from 15 to 25 members. Finally it was a fight to the death by a determined team of Blair and Straw to defend Britain’s historic right to control its own tax, foreign and defence policies. The initial "tidying-up" version included a rather impatient dismissal of mounting pressures for the constitution, once agreed by governments, to be put to a referendum in the UK, as it will be in several other EU countries. Now Mr Blair seems to be equivocating on the possible case for a referendum, although as of now there’s no agreed constitution to hold a referendum on. Jack Straw is surely right in saying that failure to agree now on the draft constitution is not a disaster. Clearly there will have to be procedural changes, some controversial and of real importance, to accommodate EU expansion. But it’s far from obvious that we need a vast new treaty masquerading as a constitution and containing the sort of windy, grandiose French abstractions which, translated into more pragmatic English, reveal their emptiness, pretensions and lack of connection with the real world. Meanwhile Europe has had a bracing foretaste of what to expect when Poland takes its place as one of the half-dozen biggest member states of the EU, having seen the Poles doggedly defending themselves to the point of a breakdown of the entire conference against any attempt to reduce their voting power in the Union to a level roughly commensurate with their population.
In case I might be thought to have exaggerated the awfulness of the bloated sentiments that we’re being called on to endorse as part of our legally binding constitution, here’s a sample:
"Conscious that Europe is a continent that has brought forth civilisation; that its inhabitants, arriving in successive waves from earliest times, have gradually developed the values underlying humanism: equality of persons, freedom, respect for reason,
Drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, the values of which, still present in its heritage, have embedded within the life of society the central role of the human person and his or her inviolable and inalienable rights, and respect for law,
Believing that reunited Europe intends to continue along the path of civilisation, progress and prosperity, for the good of all its inhabitants, including the weakest and most deprived; that it wishes to remain a continent open to culture, learning and social progress; and that it wishes to deepen the democratic and transparent nature of its public life, and to strive for peace, justice and solidarity throughout the world…"
A pretty rum description of a continent which has been characterised from the earliest times by savage internecine conflict, the unutterably cruel practices of religious wars, the Inquisition and the Holocaust, racism and xenophobia on a grand scale, the relentless persecution of immigrants, the imposition of colonial rule on much of the rest of the world (sometimes by measures harsh enough to make one’s teeth ache), the infliction on its poor of such inhuman hardship that whole generations have been forced to flee to other, more hospitable continents in which to try to rescue their lives, and wars on such a gruesome scale as to have dragged in Americans, Asians, Africans and antipodeans to share the horrors inaugurated by the "continent that has brought forth civilisation" ( © Giscard d’Estaing). Presumably it looks better in French.
The wonderfully colourful (pun intended) and lively Diane Abbott, black left-wing Labour MP, has been liberally, or illiberally, reviled by the knee-jerk egalitarians for her courageous decision to send her son to a private, fee-paying school, because she has no confidence in the ability of the local state schools to give the boy the education he’s capable of, or to give him the confidence and aspirations necessary to head off his infection by the dreadful culture of very many black adolescents in inner-city and other urban areas, a culture which glorifies drugs, violence, anti-social attitudes and activities of every kind from vandalism to mugging, obsessive victim psychosis, corrosive self-pity tinged with reverse racism, and all the rest of the poisonous brew. Of course other city teen-agers are vulnerable to the same infection, but Ms Abbott rightly points out that black youths are most seriously at risk. Abbott acknowledges that her decision contradicts her previous protestations of support for state education, is at variance with her past criticisms of other Labour MPs who have made similar (and often considerably less controversial) decisions about their children’s education, lays her open to charges of hypocrisy and even treachery in betraying her and her party’s principles, and damages, perhaps irrevocably, her reputation for principled consistency. "Diane Abbott disgraces Labour: By opting to send her son to a private school, the Hackney MP has shown contempt for state education," proclaimed William Dyaz in The Observer, going on to threaten her: "Diane Abbott’s decision to send her son to a private school has made me mad, so mad that only her de-selection as our candidate at the next general election will appease me." With sympathetic comrades like that, who needs Tories? Abbott disarmingly refuses to "defend the indefensible", saying only that she had to choose between her political reputation, perhaps even her career, and the interests of her son as she (almost certainly correctly) perceives them. She’s confident that when she looks back in future years on the decision she has made, she won’t have any need to feel ashamed, or to avoid looking her son in the face. E M Forster had something civilised to say on the same lines[1]. Diane’s a brave lady, and all genuine egalitarians should wish her well.
The prime minister is evidently determined to press on with his plan for differential ‘top-up’ university fees — different fees charged by different universities and faculties, to be paid at the start of the student’s university career by a loan authority to which the student will refund the amount advanced to him (or, more likely these days, her) after graduation in yearly instalments, but only when his or her earnings begin to exceed a cut-off point, currently set at £15,000 a year. Both universities and the state will give means-tested scholarships so that students from poorer homes won’t have to pay the fees at all, either up front or after beginning to earn more than £15,000 a year; or else will be charged (and lent) reduced fees. The government’s search for a new and additional source of funds for tertiary education is made more urgent by its declared target of having 50 per cent of all young people going on to some form of higher education, an increase on the present situation of some 7 or 8 per cent, although if there’s any rational basis for setting the target at 50 per cent I have yet to hear it. Serious objections are being made to this plan, from the government’s left (the LibDems and well over 100 Labour back-bench MPs) and from its right (the Tories), as well as from some, but not all, of the liberal press. It’s strongly supported by a raft of university vice-chancellors and heads of colleges, desperate for more money than the government is willing to provide out of taxation, and equally strongly opposed by student union leaders.
The weakest argument against the scheme, it seems to me, is that allowing different universities and faculties to charge differing fees will lead to élitism, a two-tier university structure, and the effective reservation of the top universities and most prestigious faculties to the affluent middle classes, with the children of working-class families only able to afford the cheaper also-rans. It’s unfortunate that this is emerging as the main plank in the anti-government case, because it’s the most easily rebutted. It’s obvious that some universities and faculties incur much higher costs in delivering education than others; that some enjoy more prestige than others; and that for numerous historical and social reasons, class prejudice and discrimination tend in many cases to colour both choices and accessibility of university and faculty. It’s equally obvious that some universities and faculties need more money than others to continue to function and to build on their strengths and specialisations. But there’s no necessary logical progression from this to the proposition that therefore students should pay differing fees according to the costs of their courses. Students are only ever going to contribute, if anything at all, a small proportion of their total costs. The rest will always have to come from public funds, and there’s no reason why those contributions from the state shouldn’t continue to absorb the differentials just as they do now.
The real question is whether the balance of advantage lies in making students — or rather graduates earning more than the set annual income — pay an arbitrary proportion of the costs of their higher education, in order to relieve the taxpayer of the necessity of paying more tax (or the government of the obligation to find a way of transferring the costs from lower-priority spending to the higher education budget). It’s argued that possession of a university degree enhances the student’s later earning power by some average amount, from which he or she may reasonably be asked (asked!) to make a contribution in repayment of the expense incurred at university. But this average conceals a huge variation in the earnings of graduates, from those who become researchers, teachers, middle-ranking civil or municipal servants, to those who go into banking, insurance, business, show business and the media, some quickly earning very large salaries and other benefits. It’s hard to see any justice in imposing the same rate of repayment obligation, which is in practice simply an extra tax, on the graduate who has just scraped past the £15,000 threshold (far from a passport to wealth) as that imposed on a young City gent on around a million a year. There’s even less rhyme or reason, surely, in excusing from any repayment at all the young man or woman who has been given a scholarship at university because of coming from a low-income family, but who goes on after graduation to earn five or ten times the income of a former fellow-student from a marginally better-off home who has barely managed to prise his or her earnings above the threshold.
The fact is that those whose degrees help them to earn more than non-graduates already “make a contribution to their education” by paying more income tax than those who earn less than themselves. Why single out university graduates for a special higher rate of income tax than those whose prosperity is derived from other factors, such as inherited or donated wealth, ruthlessness, chicanery, superior intelligence, hard work or plain good luck? True, it may legitimately be asked why those without a university education should “subsidise” through their taxes those luckier or cleverer than themselves who have had an earnings-enhancing university education funded from general taxation. But there are two answers to that: under virtually any conceivable system, there will be an element of subsidy benefiting those educated at public expense, whether or not they are made to contribute some part of the cost from their own pockets, then or later; and, even more cogently, the whole of society benefits from the existence of a university-educated element with, one hopes, trained and analytical minds and skills that raise the levels of management and administration, government, the professions, the arts and public and professional discourse, all vital for the quality of life of everyone. The argument that beneficiaries of public services such as education should pay back part of their costs when able to do so could equally be applied to the National Health Service (why should those who keep themselves fit by a daily work-out subsidise with their taxes those who smoke or eat too much?) or to secondary education (why should those who leave school at 16, or indeed earlier and illegally, subsidise those who stay on until 17 or 18 and thus improve their later relative earning capacity by getting good A levels?).
There are two more killer arguments against the proposals. Lower-middle-class and working-class families, and indeed many others too, are famously averse to incurring large debts. Not all of them can hope to get scholarships to reduce or eliminate the need to borrow the money for later repayment of fees. How many of them will consent to their bright offspring going to university if it means a son or daughter shouldering a massive debt running into tens of thousands of pounds, and an obligation to start paying it off the moment later earnings exceed an extremely modest £15,000 a year? If this had been a condition of university entrance, neither my father nor indeed myself would have dared to launch me on a university education. The same is true of my wife and of a raft of our university contemporaries with whom we have discussed it. This will be a huge deterrent to university education for the less well-off and even for the comfortably-off — but by no means rich — middle classes. Even more dismayingly, the whole scheme drives a huge hole through a basic tenet of socialism, indeed of any reasonably progressive principle of politics: certain essential services such as health and education, sewerage and street lighting, defence and policing, town and country planning and protection of the environment, are best financed collectively, even if some derive more benefit from them than others: and any consequent inequality is properly corrected by progressive taxation related to ability to pay, not calculated by the extent of the individual’s use (or lack of use) of the services provided. It’s a topsy-turvy world in which proposals for the partial commercialisation of higher education are forced through by a Labour government against the opposition of socialists, social democrats and Liberal Democrats — and Tories.
