Wednesday 10 November 2010

Can You Hear The Students Sing?

Today students, lecturers and supporters will march against the proposed rise in tuition fees. As someone who had to leave university because of Labour's tuition fees made it unaffordable for me (principally as they were introduced without even allowing families to start saving for them!), I can only offer them my full support.

I may not be a social liberal, and definitely appreciate the Orange Book way of looking at things, but I am with the left wing of our party on this issue. Sara Bedford's excellent post on the subject says all I would want to say, and I'd suggest you read it immediately.

I think the Coalition is doing some important and worthy work, but fighting tuition fees is part of our parties core values. We must remember not to lose sight of that. Even if it means aligning ourselves with hypocritical Labour MPs who slam us even when they INTRODUCED the bloody fees in the first place. Even then, we must defend students.

If you feel benevolent and particularly generous, this writer always appreciates things bought for him from his wishlist

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I see that Cameron has finally let the cat out the bag about why tuition fees are being raised.

He stated to an audience of Chinese uni students that Increased fees would give English universities like Oxford, Cambridge, London Imperial, University College London, Manchester, Exeter and Newcastle the resources they needed to maintain standards and compete with institutions in America, India and China.

He added: "We won't go on increasing so fast the fees of the overseas students.

"In the past, we have pushed up the fees on overseas students as a way of keeping them down for domestic students. Yes, foreign students will still pay a significant amount of money, but we should be able to bring that growth under control."

So it appears that we have to tighten our belts to make it cheaper for foreign students to study here - I'm sure our poorer domestic students will be glad to hear what their sacrifice is all about.

Hodge Podge said...

I'm sorry to hear you had to leave uni, that really sucks. I probably wouldn't be doing my physics degree if the fees were £9000- my career plans just aren't solid enough, and people would only be that definite about what they want to do in a minority of cases.