The SNP is abolishing university top-up fees entirely for Scottish and EU students studying in Scottish universities.
Scottish university students don’t pay top-up fees like English students do because education is a devolved matter and MSPs decided not to introduce them north of the border for Scots although English students studying in Scotland have to pay them. Top-up fees were introduced in English universities for English students entirely thanks to whipped Scottish Labour MPs after the majority of MPs from English constituencies rejected them.
Currently, Scottish university students have to pay their tuition fees and take out student loans to finance themselves whilst at university. However, from 2009 tuition fees will be abolished altogether for Scottish students and the loans will be replaced from 2011 with maintenance grants meaning that Scottish students will be able to study at university for free.
There is a price to pay though – the cost of wiping out all these charges is £2bn per year – but don’t worry, the English taxpayer is footing the bill.
Alex Salmond is now determined, to test and challenge Labour and it attitude to Scotland. For Labour, devolution was about retaining power in Scotland, with the SNP now calling the shots, Devolution is returning to bite Labour’s ass.
There was no bigger example of Labour riding roughshod over the devolved administration than the Bliar agreeing a deal with Libya that would have seen the Lockerbie bomber released (mind you they’ve spent the last ten years releasing IRA killers so it’s nothing new).
Labour just refuses to accept that Scotland is no longer it’s fiefdom. I’m loving it, Salmond is not going to be a party to any more Labour dity tricks, he is going to question their motives on every single issue.
They’ll have to bankroll the radical proramme of the SNP,
Taxes in England will have to rise as the Council Tax is abolished in Scotland.
Voters in England will be outraged at the disparity of England and Scotland and will punish Labour even more.
It may well see the end of Labour for good, we may have to suffer in the short term for the long term good as Labour are fond of telling us.
You only reap what you sow as they say…
I would be happy to see the of to the UK as the result of this.
LOL I meant – happy to see the end of the UK
Given that the UK has a deficit this year of £35bn and is headed for a £700bn cumulative deficit by 2010/11, it sounds to me like English taxpayers are having enough trouble paying their own bills, never mind sustaining the fiction that Scotland is being in any way ‘subsidised’…
In which case Scotland is responsible for a higher pro-rated share of a net deficit. We’ll have to bear that in mind when we present you with the invoice for the last 300 years. 🙂
The academics would appar to disagree. Scotland has been in surplus since 1979 according to the Constitution Unit at UCL. In light of this, it’s very generous of you to give all the credit for that huge deficit to the Welsh and Northern Irish, but I fear you’re being too modest.
Anyway, be sure and send that invoice, but make sure you keep a copy. That way, you’ll be able to compare it with the one we’ll be sending straight back for 30 years of oil, gas and corporation tax revenues 🙂
The academics would appear to disagree. Scotland has been in surplus since 1979 according to the Constitution Unit at UCL. In light of this, it’s very generous of you to give all the credit for that huge deficit to the Welsh and Northern Irish, but I fear you’re being too modest.
Anyway, be sure and send that invoice, but make sure you keep a copy. That way, you’ll be able to compare it with the one we’ll be sending straight back for 30 years of oil, gas and corporation tax revenues 🙂
According to the Treasury it’s been running at a deficit and they’ve got a vested interest in pretending that Scotland isn’t subsidised because it’s breaking up the union.
Hmm, cunning folk, those Treasury mandarins. And there was me thinking that to preserve the union, most folk just whinged about subsidied Scots to browbeat them into maintaining the status quo.
Actually, the Treasury produces no such figures about Scotland’s fiscal situation. The only attempt by any branch of government to assess this is the widely-excoriated GERS report produced by the Scottish Executive.
You’d like that report, because in producing its headline ‘borrowing requirement’ figure for Scotland, it excludes oil revenues entirely. By systematically underestimating revenues and overestimating expenditure (allocating over £500m of English-only spending on courts and tourism to Scotland, would you believe?), it conjoured up an £11bn ‘deficit’ for Scotland in 04/05.
But let’s assume for the sake of argument that the GERS figure is true. Now since the UK government had to borrow £39.7bn in the same financial year, even with the benefit of the oil revenues being counted, how do you explain the balance between these figures if England was in overall surpus? (I’ll give you a clue – England wasn’t in surplus at all!)
For what its worth, I think England needs her own parliament. However, the case for English self rule, whether within or without the union, shouldn’t have to rely on dodgy, self-serving claims about the alleged state of the Scottish public finances. Potentially, you’ve got a great set of arguments and you’ve got right on your side – why get sidetracked in a debate like this which only serves those who support the status quo?
I am an American and, if I may, I’d like to add my two cents to the conversation as a word of warning as to what we call “tuition” and your government obliquely defines as top-up fees has done to the state of higher education here in the US. In order to allow you to understand my position, a history lesson is in order. Up until World War II the American education system was much like Britain’s in that the most well-heeled were admitted and university studies were strictly for the purpose of creating scholars and, most importantly, well-rounded citizens with strong critiical thinking skills. After the war, our government passed the GI Bill giving many returning GIs the ability to go to university, making most the first memeber of their entire family to ever go to what we call college. The entry of mass numbers, often from the working class, entering the pseudo-socialist confines of American higher education frightened a great number of conservative including the likes of Joe McCarthy. Something needed to be done to halt the potential indoctrination of impressionable young men not only at universities but also in union-afiliated manufacturing jobs and from exposure to the leftist ideas being pumped out by the biggest Satan of all, Hollywood. It was feared that by over exposure to philosophies peddled in these bastions of Reds (uni, unions and the arts) to the post WWII generation in the ’50’s could do damage to potential capitalistic successes in heightened consumerism that was to follow and undermine the imperiaist direction of America’s foreign policy. So blowhards like Joe McCarthy did all they could to drive socialism and all other liberal ideology from these institutions. It wasn’t terribly successful but it did soften the espousals of leftist thinking on American college campuses (with the occasional flair ups during the Vietnam War).
Concurrent with this ideological struggle in the US, is the growing phenomenon of corporations and government agencies using the talent pool in American universities as a sort of research and development laboratory strictly built for their own purposes.These captains of industry and directors of government policies (who had grown accustomed to the generosity of the hand outs given to them during World War II as a means developing products and technology that had long been placed on the back burner) began using this untapped resource of energetic yet unsavvy “workers/students” to do the grunt work for all the new technological research necessary to keep America industry and it’s military competitive. The effect of these policies have turned the university from a center of learning to a center of amphetimine-fueled lab rats posing as students running in circles in a clear plastic ball for the shear pleasure of corporate America and the Defense Department; meaning the American university student body, for the most part (with the occasional bone thrown to pet projects that only have purely cultural ramifications) have become instruments of slavey for economic and security needs that tend to benefit the few.
Why is any of this important to the average British university student? Well, because Britain (and much of the rest of Europe as well as significant numbers of Asians and, well, damn near the rest of the world) is, for better or worse, competing with American university model and losing it’s edge. There has been a huge brain drain from the rest of the world into the American system because on a purely economic level other university systems cannot compete with the huge endowments of most of America’s universities, not to mention the large amounts of money collected by hook or crook by the students (mostly undergraduates) themselves in the form of tuition. An British graduate student, for example, f they should decide to study in the US (depending on their area of study) can expect to work with some of the best instructors, use some of the most expensive materials, and have access to some of the latest technology in the world. A British university, with their comparatively smaller budgets can hardly begin to compete. Unless, of course, they start charging students more and start allowing private interest to impose it’s will on the academic curriculum. Sure you’ll be able to compete for the best students. But these students will work as underpaid grunts in highly specialized projects and be forced to lose focus on the rest that higher learning has to offer (other than pub crawls).
So now the British education system, as is the British way of life, is at a threshold. Follow suit with the Americans or continue to hold on to tradition. You each need to ask yourself, is the purpose of higher education to produce learned, broad-minded, well-rounded, critical-thiking citizens or is it to create an educated yet narrowly-aware, overly-specialized, easily-led drone for the machine? It’s up to you.
There is no “British” education system, that’s the whole point of this post.