The absurd in response to the difficult

Matthew Pitt writes in the blog that advertises itself as being 'evidence-based' Left Foot Forward about the proposals for tuition fees.

In his article, he claims that the Conservative website 'Tuition Fees - The Facts' is 'distorting' the position - yet in his article he claims that it will take 510 years to repay the £27,000 that he claims will be incurred as a result of the proposals for reforming the tuition payments. 

It appears that he has completely forgotten/ignored that (1) there is a proposed cap of £6,000 unless the individual university demonstrates sufficient merit in terms of providing additional funding and widening access for poorer students. 

It appears that he has completely forgotten/ignored that (2) any debt remaining outstanding after 30 years will be written off - in other words the student who doesn't earn enough to repay the debt over 30 years will be forgiven what remains (even if it is the entire sum) after 30 years.

Now I don't know about you, but complaining about repaying debt over half a millennia or even over a lifetime and referring to life expectancy, when if you look at the policy and see that the repayments will only ever occur over 30 years (which is in itself a very long period - longer than the standard mortgage term of 25 years) rather undermines the claim to base your view on evidence.

Labour introduced variable tuition fees in England in 2004 - they only got their way with the support of Scottish Labour MPs (whose own constituents were unaffected by the proposals - so highlighting one of the anomalies created by Labour in our constitutional settlement).  Now they appear to oppose them in their entirety - see Sadiq Khan's letter on the subject this month.  What the critics of the Browne report and what Labour appear to have forgotten is that with the increase in the number of students attending university, the ability of the public purse to bear the cost of that attendance is limited.

I know, they claim that closing the tax loopholes will solve the ills and fund it all - but the reality is that even if you confiscated all income over, say, £100,000, the amounts you would actually raise would be very limited - and in doing so you would be forgetting one of the lessons of tax history that when the rates were reduced to 60% and then to 40%, the top 10% of earners actually increased the amount they paid to the Revenue in direct taxes with each reduction.

The difficult question that Labour needs to answer, with credible proposals (rather than the fanciful ones dreamed up by Richard Murphy and the TUC), is how do we get Government expenditure under control and how do we fund an ever increasing number of students attending university?  When in Government, Labour did the opposite of what they appear to now propose - if indeed Ed Miliband (on yesterday's PMQs) and Sadiq Khan's letter do reflect what they actually believe. 

On tuition fees, the position adopted by Labour now is absurd; the position of the Liberal Democrats in opposition was also absurd; the position adopted by the Coaltion is that which Labour would have adopted had they been in Government - and sometimes the difficult position is the one to adopt; even in the teeth of vocal and sometimes violent demonstrations.