PM Corbyn would create a student fees dilemma
Chief reporter Martin Shipton reads the Welsh Labour manifesto – and identifies a problem that would come back to haunt Carwyn Jones if Jeremy Corbyn was to end up in Downing Street
WELSH Labour likes to portray itself as a party that cares for ordinary people. While distancing itself from Jeremy Corbyn, it’s happy to take on his general election slogan “for the many, not the few”.
Decades ago, before the huge expansion in higher education, it was possible to characterise university students as part of the few rather than the many.
These days, however, they definitely constitute part of the many, not the few.
They haven’t fared well financially over the last 20 years. The introduction of tuition fees represented a major departure from the generally held UK position that education should be free.
When he was Prime Minister, John Major rejected the idea of charging fees to students in defiance of advice from senior civil servants.
Tony Blair, however, didn’t resist the advice and introduced fees for all students enrolled on a university course.
In Wales, there was more opposition to the concept and the introduction of fees was delayed until Plaid Cymru swung behind the policy and voted for it.
In 2010 the Liberal Democrats infamously promised to scrap fees if they got into government – instantly doing a U-turn when such an unlikely eventuality came to pass. The fallout in trust and electability lasts to this day.
When tuition fees in England shot up to £9,000, Carwyn Jones and his then Education Minister Leighton Andrews made a virtue out of pegging them to around £3,000 a year in Wales. He spoke movingly of the people who came up to him in supermarkets or sent him emails thanking him from the bottom of their hearts for keeping the fees so (relatively) low.
All good things come to an end, however, and in the run-up to last year’s National Assembly election there was a chorus of voices – often from highly paid academics – saying the policy was unaffordably expensive for taxpayers and that it made no sense for Welsh Government money to go into the coffers of English universities.
Clearly the young people should be attending universities in Wales instead – and coughing up fees on a par with their counterparts across the border.
An inquiry into university funding and the student fee structure that supports it was set up. It was known as the Diamond Review.
Conveniently for Welsh Labour its final report wasn’t due until after the election, giving the party a perfect excuse for not confirming the bad news that everyone knew was inevitable.
On this policy Labour sat out the election – stonewalling over what it would do when the Diamond Review was published.
Instead, the party came up with a mantra that it wanted to pass off as a promise: “The package will be the most generous of any nation in the UK”.
After the election, Carwyn solved the problem of not winning a majority of seats by inviting Kirsty Williams, the sole remaining Liberal Democrat, to become the Cabinet Secretary for Education. She’d bought the argument about the need for tuition fees to rise and instead favoured giving students help towards their living costs.
When the Diamond Review was published last autumn, its conclusions were miraculously in accord with the views of Ms Williams, and they quickly became the new Welsh Government orthodoxy. New students who in future must pay fees on the scale of those paid in England will have the consolation of meanstested grants, and loans.
How wonderful in such circumstances that Jeremy Corbyn has decided to scrap tuition fees if elected, raising expectations that the Welsh Government might do the same. Sadly, however, there’s no guarantee that would happen at all.
After resurrecting its mantra from last year – “The package will be the most generous of any nation in the UK” – all we’re promised is another review.
The Welsh Labour manifesto published yesterday states: “Welsh Labour has always been clear that education should be free and if funding allowed, there should be no tuition fees.
“... When a Labour government is elected at Westminster we will undertake a further review of the impact of any changes made in England on universities and students in Wales and follow the Diamond Review model of consulting with students, universities and employers about any changes in Wales.”
It would be richly ironic if students in England ended up with no tuition fees to pay while those in Wales had to keep coughing up. Carwyn’s casual meetings with members of the public in supermarkets as well as the contents of his email account probably wouldn’t be so quotable.
We’d be into new territory. Up until now we’ve had people in England looking jealously across the border at free prescriptions as well as much cheaper tuition fees. There’s been something of a devolution dividend.
But if students in England have tuition fees scrapped when those in Wales don’t, Welsh students would certainly consider themselves to be the victims of a devolution deficit.