The Life of Cata

Many people have said a lot of things about the vote that is taking place in the houses of parliament today. Basically, our MPs are voting to decide whether or not they should allow universities to raise tuition fees up to £9000 per year. The fees are currently set at £3000 per year and back when I started university in 2005 they were £1000 per year. Let me start of by showing a picture of Mr. Clegg form back in April/May this year. This is before the general election, when Nick’s future looked very promising indeed. He’s signed an election pledge promising to vote against any raise in tuition fees. Many more in the Liberal Democrats signed a similar pledge.

Fast forward to election night and the promising predictions of the Liberal Democrats getting a third of the countries vote, turned out a disappointing 1% increase from the previous election, and 6 seats lost (much thanks to the ‘first past the post’ system). But much more importantly, it thrust the country into a hung parliament situation where neither party had majority in parliament. The Liberal Democrats started negotiation with the Conservatives in hope to form a coalition. (Why they chose the Conservatives over the Labour Party which they have more in common with is a whole other discussion which I don’t intend on bringing up here. Needless to say, I can see both sides and with the Conservatives getting the largest percentage of the vote, I guess they had some sort of right to try to form a government.)

A week and a bit later the ‘Con-Dem’ (not their choice of abbreviation) coalition was formed. As time passed by we discovered that the price that Nick Clegg and his MPs had to pay for a piece of the power cake consisted of sacrifices so large that we barely recognise them for what they used to be. To me, they’ve become a mere extension to the Conservatives. They even gave up on the most important part of their election manifesto; proportional representation. It should have occurred to me then, that with a party who’s willing to give up the fight for their core beliefs, it would only be a matter of time before old pledges were forgotten or just plainly ignored… and so this forgotten pledge has resulted in the destruction of the Conservative’s head quarters, the burning of pictures of Nick Clegg and Vince Cable along with weeks of sometimes violent protests.

Now a lot of people (mainly supporters) have said that a raise in fees won’t be so bad. They say that poor will get 2 years worth of tuition paid for them. Well, seeing as most courses are 3 years, that still leaves the last £9000 to be found or borrowed from somewhere. They say that graduates won’t have to start repayments until they earn more than £21000 per year. Hmmm, so let’s take the average student here. You manage to get the grades to get into the course you want to study. Your parents aren’t rich enough to pay for your tuition, but they’re not poor enough for you to qualify for the two years of free tuition (so pretty much most families). If the course if three years you’d then have to borrow £27000 to pay the fees alone. On top of that you’d take out a loan to cover living costs. Say that your parents can afford to give you some money every month and you only take out the minimum loan. That’s still about £7000 per year, which means that by the end of your degree you’d have accumulated a debt of almost £50000. Isn’t that just a lovely way to start of your working life? Especially if you can’t/don’t have to pay it back straight away and it just sits there accumulating interest.

The point that I’m trying to make here (and I don’t see why this isn’t obvious to everyone) is that education should be free. When did education become ‘the business of education’ for sale on the free market to the highest bidder (a bit of an exaggeration, but you get where I’m going with this right?). I, like many others out there, am just worried how far this can go, and if a decision like this one is ever reversible? By this government or the next…