Well the NHS won’t win them the election so now it is time to pull at the heartstrings against the other party.
So Ed Miliband says that under a Labour government, they’ll reduce tuition fees to a top level of £6,000. Hurray, Hurrah etc…. This sounds great and I have no doubt that when I watch the six o’clock news tonight it will be the lead story and it will sound great. The problem (as it often is) is that is you go beyond the headline, you’ll notice that actually this tuition fees drop would actually most effect the rich and actually do very little for the poorer people in society when it comes to how much they repay in terms of tuition fees. This is part of the total misconception about tuition fees that Labour have pandered to and fanned the flames of.
Tuition fees are without a doubt the most popular policy that most people simply do not understand. I was once told that actual finances and the reality meant nothing when it came to politics, all people want are the headlines and those with the loudest voices get the headlines. Oh joy.
Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis has an excellent breakdown of the policy and why it will actually only effect those who earn above £35,000 per year. You can read it in his article entitled, Labour’s plan to cut tuition fees to £6,000 is a financially illiterate policy. In it you’ll actually get some sense and some detail behind the headline grabbing policy.
The key line is thus, ‘It shows that only those with a STARTING SALARY of at least £35,000 – and then rising by above inflation each year after – would pay less if you cut tuition fees (we have assumed the student also takes out £5,555 in maintenance loans per year). Now £35,000 is a solid income but many people in their 20s won’t reach that type of level, in fact many people won’t throughout their lives. So why would Labour want to push ahead with a policy that in effect actually doesn’t help those they are saying they are trying to help?
The fact is simple. Politics isn’t about substance. Politicians don’t actually want to do the right thing, they want to sound like they are doing the right thing. I don’t include all politicians in here obviously but it is something that if you read policies and go beyond the stories in the newspapers and on the TV news, you’ll start to learn this more and more. If you want a complete story then you have to read beyond the headlines and beyond whatever bias a media firm has (more so with print that broadcast media).
This isn’t about actually helping students, it is politics, pure and simple. It is a great sound bite that evokes an emotional response. Labour had been pinning their hopes on making this election over saving the NHS but that hasn’t done much in the polls. Now it is time to do a populist attack on the Lib Dems on a policy that the Lib Dems won’t be too proud of. Not because the policy is bad per se but it goes against what they wanted (and still actually want) to do.
Coalition politics, when Labour have to do it with the SNP for the next five years you can bet the Lib Dems will jump on any policy Labour don’t get through that is on their manifesto.
The facts are that more people from disadvantaged backgrounds are going to university than ever before. Once people get their head around the system and realize that you only start paying the fees/loan back when you are earning £21,000 a year and not a penny more, people are understanding that they indeed can afford to go to university because the fees don’t actually cost them a penny until they are earning a decent salary.
Labour introduced tuition fees, then they trebled them, now they want to double them from where they were when they were in power and in doing so only help those that are most well-off and I thought Ed Miliband was trying to take Labour back to their ideological roots, in fact either he’s a) chasing headlines or b) going for the middle class vote.
Either way it will be popular with many people, the problem for Labour is it’ll be popular to those people who are already intending to vote for them. You see the Lib Dem emotional vote has gone and it isn’t coming back this year but it has already gone, putting the squeeze on a vote that has already disappeared seems relatively pointless. It puts Ed out there but if enough people read beyond the headlines and look at the finances behind the plan they’ll realize who it benefits. The question is will the electorate do such a thing? Time as they will tell all…
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