All I wanna do is *ching* and take your money!
We should pay for our own education – and our parents should have paid for theirs
Right now the NUS is congratulating itself on a job well done. Despite the rain it got ten thousand students out on the street, fights didn’t break out, there were enough placards to go around and the biggest cock up was when the President, Liam Burns, was egged and suffered a stage invasion by those who don’t like the NUS’s ‘moderate’ position. I’ll get to that in a minute.
But you see, I agree with tuition fees. Not a pure, unregulated system like America, but hear me out. The reason is that I can’t see why people, who very often haven’t had the education I have and the benefits that come with it, should be expected to subsidise my elite education. University education is elitist, that’s the point of it. To education the best, to be the best. I am the chief beneficiary of my degree. Me. It’s only fair I should be expected to pay for cost of it.
Most of the tax paying public agree with me. It’s why the only ones to get upset at the latest rise, are us, people younger than us, and all our parents squirming as they remember being paid to go to university and then spending their time there mostly in the union bar.
The Demo2012 march and the NUS have completely missed the point. Our generation is the most hard done by generation of recent years. Our parents have given us a situation worse than the one they inherited but continue to follow policies that act like they’re the hard done by ones. Youth unemployment is at 21.9%, and has been rising since 2004. House prices have risen above inflation for over thirty years pushing back the age at which people can afford to buy a house.
We are adding to our national debt each year and have done for 26 of the past 32 years. This is money our parents’ have chosen not to spend themselves, but to borrow so that their children can pay it instead. This meant that last year we spent £42.5 billion on ‘Debt Management’. That’s more than the government spent on all education. That’s primary, secondary and universities combined. With £10 billion to spare. You could more than double the education budget if we didn’t have to pay back our debts. We are the first generation topay for our own education plus interest.
On top of all of this we are also expected to spend our lifetimes paying for the generous pension schemes that parents’ and grandparents’ generations have enjoyed. The current UK government liability for pensions is £5 Trillion. This has to be paid by somebody, and that somebody is any future UK tax payer. Old age pension payments this year were £85 billion.
We are also expected to pay for thegovernment’s PFI scheme, which is a form of ‘off balance sheet’ borrowing used to fund projects such as new schools currently standing at more than £35 billion. That’s right, it is official government policy to make students pay for their own new school plus interest, typically at 8%.
This all makes me very angry and it should make you angry too. Unfortunately there’s no one to shout it because the NUS is full of communists who all want us to sit around campfires for a living and “Tax the rich”. If you want serious thought on the future of Britain’s youth, I’d go to a daycare centre before I went anywhere near the NUS. This is the same organisation that egged its own President for being too moderate. If you want to see how ‘moderate’ this guy is, I suggest you read one of his Independent blog posts, though you may have to avoid being sick over the bad grammar and clichés.
Redistribute wealth if you want to, but not from kids.
