WHY SHOULD WE PAY BOMBER’S UNI FEES?

THERE are many grotesque aspects of the Manchester suicide bomber that defy belief — most obviously, how this 22-year-old thought that teenage girl fans of the pop star Ariana Grande deserved to be singled out for murder and mutilation by his highexplosive nail bomb.

But one of the more banal facts about Salman Abedi has also baffled me.

We have been told that he was, for two years, a student at the University of Salford. Yet Abedi, by all accounts, was lazy and stupid.

A fellow pupil at Burnage Academy, which the suicide bomber attended from 2009 to 2011, told a reporter: ‘He was a bit slow, you know.’

Someone who taught him there described him as ‘a dislikeable boy who displayed mediocre rudeness and refused to complete his homework’. Another of his former tutors had the teenage Abedi under his charge at Trafford College on a course ‘for people who are exceptionally low level’ and defined him as ‘very slow, uneducated and passive’.

Yet this was the very person the University of Salford accepted as a degree student ( reading Business and Management). What sort of entry qualifications are required, that such a delinquent thicko was accepted?

It’s not as if the University of Salford is one of our most undistinguished seats of learning. For almost a quarter of a century its chancellor was Prince Philip (although he was succeeded by Sarah, Duchess of York, with whom one does not associate rigorous thought).

In a recent survey of British universities, Salford was ranked 83rd of 119. So the institution whose requirements were met by Abedi is by no means the bottom of the barrel. Yet this makes it even more concerning: what must be the entry standards of those 36 universities ranked lower than Salford?

This is relevant to one of the battlegrounds of the election campaign. The Labour Party is pledging to abolish university tuition fees, at a cost of perhaps £11 billion a year to all taxpayers.

I’d be happier to subsidise this if I thought that all those who attend university were suitable for tertiary education. But the truth is that thousands of them should never be at university, gaining worthless degrees which lead nowhere in particular.

Even under the current system we have had to fork out for Abedi’s degree course. He was given almost £15,000 by the state-funded Student Loans Company to support his degree at Salford.

He dropped out — and it’s now horribly clear how he spent some of those thousands of taxpayers’ pounds designed to pay for his course: making bombs to blow us up.