Top up fees furore

Submitted by AWL on 25 November, 2002 - 3:21

Tax the rich to fund education
By Faz Velmi

After a long period of quiet, the battle over higher education funding is once again raging in the open. As an unholy alliance of Downing Street, big business and the elite universities pushes openly for higher, or even deregulated, tuition fees, splits at the highest levels of the Labour Party suggest that all is not lost if the student and labour movements respond with clear politics and the maximum possible counter-pressure.

Suggestions that the forthcoming Government review of student funding will open the door to top up fees had already prompted Clare Short to say she thinks such fees would be "elitist" and "a very bad idea"; this week even Gordon Brown has voiced doubts about Blair's enthusiasm for the proposal. Of course the left should not look to the Cabinet for saviours - Short is the Labour leadership's perennial fake-left "licensed rebel" while Brown's record proves that he is not one bit less anti-working class than his friend at No 10.

If the student left wing and the labour movement are to effectively combat the assault on education we need to be absolutely clear about our alternative to the different attacks the various factions of New Labour's hierarchy are proposing. We do not, for instance, believe that graduate tax is an acceptable method of financing higher education.

Above all we need to say that it is possible to fund public services through taxation - that is, by taxing big business and the wealthy. Government spokespeople and education commentators regularly talk about the limits of "general taxation" and the reluctance of "the taxpayer" to pay more for students. In reality, however, "general taxation" is no more a single homogenous source of revenue than the "taxpayer" is a single, hard-pressed individual. It would certainly be unreasonable to demand that low paid workers pay more tax. It would be anything but unreasonable to demand the same from corporations, shareholders and the super rich.

Since 1979, the richest ten per cent of society has increased its "share" of national wealth from 21% to 27%; the top rate of income tax has been cut by 43% and corporation tax by 23%. Since 1997 corporation tax has been reduced by more than £7 billion and inheritance and capital gains tax slashed; in the same period the average ratio between workers' and top directors' pay has grown from 1:11 to 1:18. Money lost through tax cuts to the rich now runs at many tens of billions of pounds - alongside chronically underfunded public services and increasing poverty. And, of course, it is not just students who have been told that their needs must come after the priorities of profit, it is also pensioners, nurses, firefighters and the entire working class.

The other Blairite myth is that free education only benefits what the Government calls "the middle class". In the first place it is no longer accurate to call students, as a social group, "middle class". Most students come from (usually better-off) working-class families and go into (usually better-paid) wage labour on leaving university. If "middle-class" is simply a synonym for "better-off" the Government's argument is false and illogical. It is precisely the most disadvantaged who have most to gain from free education. These are the people who are most likely to be deterred from applying to university because they fear debt and are most likely to drop out because of poverty, and who have applied in smaller numbers since the introduction of fees and the abolition of grants in 1997.

The Government maintains that since students are predominantly from privileged backgrounds, free higher education would be regressive. They simultaneously claim that, since access to university is no longer limited to the privileged, free education would be unaffordable. The dishonesty of the Government's argument demonstrates clearly its contempt for the idea of opening up post-16 education for all.
The student movement should respond not by cheer-leading the best of the bad options the Government is proposing - graduate tax - but by fighting back with a clear slogan: "Tax the rich to fund education for all".

National Union of Students demonstration against top up fees
4 December - Assemble 11am
ULU, Malet Street, London

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