Elaine Bagshaw's response to Nick's tuition fee email

Elaine Bagshaw a former Chair of Liberal Youth posted her response to Nick Clegg's email on Facebook. I felt it deserved a wider audience and therefore with her permission I am publishing that response below.

My response to Nick's tuition fee email

Dear Cowley Street staffer/poor intern that's been given this job,

Thanks for your email. I note it's the exact same one you sent to MPs last night, that many had already seen and reacted to. The fact that you haven't acknowledged a single point about debt and trust and the hundreds of others that have been made by people since we all saw that email, shows how little you now respect the membership of this party. If you want an "open dialogue", start by opening your ears and listening.

You keep referring to this dire financial mess argument. The problem here is that we had a fully costed and affordable manifesto - I know, I helped formulate the thing in FPC, in which a 6 year plan to scrap tuition fees was included AND costed. I have to ask whether you will now be using this as an excuse to drop all of our other pledges? Have you started a review of our manifesto and the policies in the coalition agreement, to see if we can afford them? Have you started a process internally to make sure we never produce a manifesto that, in hindsight, contains pledges we simply can't afford? No, didn't think so.

You may not have made any detailed decision but you and Vince both publicly endorsed the broad themes in the proposal. Vince did so on Tuesday morning before the ink on the Browne report was even dry. It is not an open dialogue when you have already decided privately and said publicly what you are going to do.

There are some good points in the Browne report, the extension of support to part-time students is an excellent move, but all it proposes is to tinker with the system. I agree that major reform of the system is needed, but Browne simply isn't it. It was a narrow review that hasn't tackled many of the major issues in HE, and hasn't looked widely enough at the alternatives.

But the biggest issue here is trust. I have been a proud member of this party since I joined at Uni because we are not like Labour and the Tories. It was us who could during the expenses scandal could hold our heads high and say that not a single on of our MPs had flipped their homes or overclaimed on a mortgage. Now, we sit in the same ditch as every other politician and political party that said one thing to get votes and did another once in power. I believed that over the next five years we could get a lot out of the coalition, and that we wouldn't be wiped out at the next election. Now, I'm not so convinced. You and Vince over the past two days have shown yourselves to be just like every other power grabbing politician, and frankly you have treated the membership with disdain. I supported you in the last leadership election, but if happened again today I wouldn't be able to. I am seriously reconsidering whether to stand for any publicly elected position whilst you are leader of my party.

You have let thousands of party members and voters down. You may be enjoying government now but it is us who will have to pick up the pieces of this party when you are gone. The legacy you are leaving us is not one I will be proud of.

Yours,

Elaine

NUS Podcast on Implications of Browne

You may not regonise the other chap in the (greatly used of late) picture of me signing the NUS pledge. Well he is NUS Scotland President Liam Burns.

Anyway he has sent me a link to a Podcast where NUS staff discuss the potential implications on students, graduates, and universities.

The participants are Aaron Porter (National President), Vic Langer (Head of Political Strategy), David Malcolm (Head of Social Policy) and Graeme Wise (head of Political Strategy), Katie Dalton (President Wales) and Ciarnan Helforty (President NUS-USI).

In Which I Disagree With Nick a Lot

Over on Lib Dem Voice there is a letter which Nick Clegg has sent to all MPs on the subject of Tuition Fees. In it he writes:

Like you, I am painfully aware of the pledge we all made to voters on tuition fees ahead of the General Election. Departing from that pledge will be one of the most difficult decisions of my political career. It means doing something that no one likes to do in politics – acknowledging that the assumptions we made at election time simply don’t work out in practice. With the benefit of hindsight, I signed a pledge at a time when we could not have anticipated the full scale of the financial situation the country faces now and the absence of plausible alternatives for students to the arrangements we are now advocating.

Actually NO Nick I don't agree with you. The Browne report is looking at removing the cap on tuition fees. This means that only the wealthiest of our young people, those from a privileged back ground will be able to go to our finest institutions of learning. This is not the fairness for students that we stood for.

As well as promising not to increase tuition fees we did say we would seek a fairer alternative. One thing we suggested in the past to do it was a penny on income tax. Income is a fairer way of paying for University education than tuition fees (which now will be paid back at commercial rates of interest). It is also fairer that a graduate tax, expecially as some graduates will be working alongside people in the same payscale who will not have a degree, though the graduate will be paying 9% more.

The Browne report is not seeking a fairer alternative laissez faire pricing of education does ensure that our brightest get a fair deal. The rich already pay to ensure their young go to the best schools, to get the best results, to go to the best universities. To then ensure that we also price smartest A Level students from the state sector out of the course of their choice, which meets their abilities, is not liberal and is not democratic.

Those who manage to get to Oxford or Cambridge from the state sector already do so at a great disadvantage. To place them at a further disadvantage as the Browne Report allows, is not why I stood for election. This is battle I have been fighting since the Thatcher Government of my undergraduate days moved to bring in loans rather than making the maintenance grant a fair and workable system. The campaign for fair student finance is one that runs through my political veins as deeply and any Lib Dem policy thread, if not deeper.

I signed the NUS Pledge as did every Lib Dem MP. I am standing by my promise to the students of Linlithgow and East Falkirk and I will continue to ensure that Liberal Democrat MPs do the
same.

The Browne report far exceeds what was envisioned when the coalition deal was signed. A lifting of the cap on tuition fees was one thing, a removal of it all together is not what we envisioned. The goalposts have moved and with it the game. Our Lib Dem MPs should take this on board and do the right thing and vote against allowing the removal of the cap. This is how we show we mean to give a Fairer Deal for Students.

There is now a Facebook Group called Lib Dems Against Scraping the Cap, in which I have joined other PPCs, AMs and others.