UK university fees

Good grief.

Every Government announcement should include the phrase “There is no truth in these comments,” and they should hire some proper Cretans to announce it.

If as you say fixing the cap at £3000 until 2010 was a ‘sop to the [backbench] opposition’ then by definition the govt would have preferred not to have a fixed cap at £3000 until 2010 – but equally to describe that preference as its ‘secret’ policy is odd. I note that the THES article says (though you would hardly guess this from your summary) that ‘there was no suggestion that the Government intended to break its promise to maintain the current cap until 2010.’

If the Govt is saying to various interest groups who likewise would have preferred not to have a fixed cap at £3000 until 2010: of course as a matter of substance we agree with you; but as a matter of process we are committed to what we have promised; but also as a matter of process we’ve got no problem with you continuing to argue against what we have promised – what exactly is ‘unethical’ about that? This is just the basic stuff of government – assembling coalitions, making compromises, managing interest groups. To pick it out as worthy of special censure seems to me a case of displacement – i.e., what really bothers you is the substance of the policy, so you are over-sensitive to aspects of process which otherwise wouldn’t bother you. (Here’s an analogy which might help to separate substance from process. When govt first got tough on drink-driving, in order to get the measures through the commons the minister undertook to ensure that police would not hang around outside pub car parks trying to pick up patrons driving home. Would you have had any problem with the same minister privately meeting anti-drink-driving groups and saying: we’ve got no problem with you campaigning for police to hang around pub car parks…?)

Chris – the quote you reply with, and which you need to justify your claim that the govt is ‘selling the electorate a false prospectus at election time’ is by an academic who I doubt has any inside knowledge and indeed admits to be ‘guessing’. The quote I used, by contrast, seemed to be the considered opinion of the author of the article – which is why I used it in support of my charge that you were misrepresenting the THES article as a whole by implying it supported your interpretation that the govt is ‘selling the electorate a false prospectus’. And of course if I accepted your interpretation, I would not be trying to excuse it as ‘the basic stuff of government’.

I’m not a long-time reader and I’m sorry I guessed wrong on your views on the substance (in fact, it sounds like we broadly agree on the substance of this issue). But I’ll risk compounding the insult by hazarding another diagnosis: sensitised by what you see to be the govt’s sharp practice on other issues, you no longer give them the benefit of the doubt on anything. You may not think they deserve the benefit of the doubt. Fine, but you still risk devaluing the currency of the charge of ‘unethical’ behaviour if you apply it to every case which could possibly be interpreted as such, rather than restricting it to those cases where such an interpretation is actually, on balance, persuasive rather than merely possible.

And you propose to fund this how?

The need for more income for higher educuation in the UK is so important that this sort of shenanigans, very modest by the standard of politics in any country, is entirely justified.