Stop the Cuts - National Demonstration

Interesting analysis from the Guardian (in an article about Grayling's Bloomsbury experiment):

I blame the Liberal Democrats. Their impact on every coalition policy has been dire, but nowhere more than in abolishing university fees while still pretending they exist. By converting the student cost of a university education into a postponed surtax, and loading the immediate cost on to the Treasury, the coalition relieves thousands of families who could well afford fees from doing so. Why should any parent meet their offspring's future tax liability at age 18?

Yet by implying that fees still exist, the Lib Dems must have deterred thousands of poorer students from applying to university. The policy is as cruel as it is mendacious. To alleviate the mendacity, the Lib Dems have insisted that the government and universities offer extensive bursaries to relieve the nonexistent "fees". Even the president of the national union of students admitted on radio that bursaries were not needed to pay fees but to ease "the perception" of future poverty. This is even if those who are poor need not pay back the fees. The bursaries must be the weirdest tax relief in history, benefiting a class of English person defined not by their own income but by that of their parents long ago.

Nor is this all. Fee abolition will now impose a heavy burden on the Treasury, rising from £25bn to £70bn in three years' time. The student loan company, which carries this debt under government guarantee, forecasts that a full third of it will be unrecoverable. As a result, individual universities have been banned from taking extra students, a nonsense in a recession. The nation finds itself paying a higher bill for fewer students, purely so as to relieve the rich of paying fees. Intake is curbed, with a bias against humanities and "softer" subjects that tend to favour poorer students. The bias is elitist.

The article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/09/ac-grayling-caricatured-british-university-fuming