Inside the campaign to tax the poor

Here we go again - the Scottish establishment is back demanding that students pay the price for how universities have been run in recent decades. The one thing they won’t seem to countenance is putting their hands in their own pockets.

There is a very substantially funded campaign in Scotland which is supported by a lot of very powerful people. This campaign is now 20 years old but you only see it sometimes when it thinks it can raise its head above the parapet. They can't let you know it's a campaign because it isn't very popular and is politically toxic.

But it never dies, because it is part of the fundamental ideology of Scotland's establishment. Their institutions, the systems on which they depend, must be protected. But they will not pay for it, and they don't want to create a precedent in which they do. Because that might then mean that they would be expected also to pay to protect systems for other people. Poor people.

What they really need is some system for making those poorer people pay for wealthy people institutions in a way that doesn't create a precedent for the richer people to have to pay for poor people services. Somehow they need to separate and ring-fence the funding for their institutions but away from their own pockets.

Hence tuition fees to be paid by young Scots to fund the universities where the establishment networks, gets honorary degrees and titles, burnishes their CVs, perhaps even an associate lectureship. They didn't pay for their education because when they were young, old wealthy people paid for it. Now they're the old wealthy people they want the deal broken.

That's it. That's the long and short of it. There are many, many ways to fund public services including universities and many other public services don't start from the assumption that they must be protected no matter the cost. But those are all for 'poor people' (like you and me), not insiders (like them).

How do I know this campaign so well? Because I was sort of part of it for ten years when I was Head of Public Affairs for Universities Scotland, the body which represents university principals. Actually, quite a few of the university principals when I was there opposed tuition fees on principle, but again and it would keep cropping up for conversation.

There was and is no political context in which tuition fees could be introduced in Scotland. Labour mostly abolished them via the Cubie Commission and then when the SNP took power they abolished what was left. Both parties wanted student and young graduate votes and both were holding a gun to each other's heads on resiling from the deal.

That was it. That was all the politics. Add in variously the SSP, the Greens and the Lib Dems and this was and is a done deal. Yet the same networks have never stopped trying – the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the conservative-coded think tanks, the business leaders, people who get appointed to University Courts.

Let me just start by framing this properly. When you charge a compulsory fee on a core public service (education, prescriptions) it isn't a fee, it's a tax. You can't access that core public service without paying it. It's not optional, it's imposed by government – it's a tax.

So if we're introducing taxes on people who have benefitted from higher education, let's discuss that. Let's start talking about a graduate tax. For all graduates, including those so keen to talk about fees. (Not so keen now?)

It would raise a lot of revenue, because a lot of people who graduated 30 years ago are earning a lot of money. All the universities have lists of alumni; the process of identifying the tax base would only be done once and then new graduates would be added. It's perfectly practical.

The argument is that the public should not be paying for an education that benefits individuals financially, or at least not all of them. But do you have any idea how much public money lots of these people get in 'Continuing Professional Development' (like £77,000 on a course for a senior public sector executive at Harvard Business School)? Those MBAs aren't to make public services better, they're to boost the careers of insiders. Make them pay!

And it's not just education which gives you material benefit, so does healthcare. If students are going to gain financially from an education (perhaps, eventually...) and be made to pay because they can afford it, what about people who earn over £75k who benefit financially from cancer treatment by not being dead? Make them pay!

“Everyone in the country gains materially from collective investment into public services”

We can do this for hours. Everyone in the country gains materially from collective investment into public services. We all gain from universities producing the doctors, teachers, lawyers and engineers our society and our economy needs. We all gain from investment in roads. The wealthy gain from Scottish Enterprise and its subsidies to their wealth. Make them pay! Make them all pay!

So let's have a think about this then. Can we devise a system that makes 'them' all pay for 'all' the gain 'they' get from public investment? Like, you know, all of us? And all of it? It would need to be a system that takes money from us and distributes it to pay for all this stuff. To keep everyone on board we could make it fair by making the amount of money we take proportionate to the ability of each individual to pay it.

Now we just need a name. What are we going to call it? Universal Service Fees? Mandatory Civilisation Levy? The Comprehensive Payment Fund For The Betterment of Our Lives? Too long? Well since we take this money and give it all back in services, it's sort of like borrowing, isn't it? There's a medieval French word for borrowing which is nice and concise. We could do something with that. Taxer...

But who pays tax? People with a lot of money. So who is behind the tuition fee campaign? Wouldn't be the same people would it? They already took all the houses from young people. I would guess the correlation between 'people calling for tuition fees' and 'those who have a lucrative property portfolio' is pretty high. So they've already got young people paying them all those rents. The kids didn't complain too much – let's see if we can make them carry our tax burden too.

The absolutely stupidest thing of all is that it doesn't work. Fees don't work. The longer England has had fees, the worse and worse the financial situation is for English universities. They're all in crisis. I can't find a references now but these fees are heavily subsidised (to pay interest to the private equity companies who loan the money) and a very large proportion aren't ever collected. Taxing poorer people isn't efficient.

There is little good outcome other than that it didn't harm overall participation in England – but it did make it less likely for poorer people to come to university. The average student debt in England is £50k which is an enormous tax burden. The total tuition fee debt in England is now £100 billion. This has had very real implications right across the economy. Students are increasingly unhappy about it (as you'd imagine), and that's with England having pretty well the highest fees in the world. (All sources here.)

Nothing about any of this stacks up for anyone but the sliver of the Scottish establishment who want this to happen. Fees don't save universities and they don't benefit the economy or the individual. They don't improve learning and they encourage universities to be profligate in spending money on marketing, advertising and flashy new buildings.

We're talking about this because Dundee University is about to make one in five of its staff redundant – but can find £200k to appoint a new ''Transformational Manager'. That's not humour on my part, that's actually happening.

And when it comes down to it, a lot of this is really about bailing out universities who bet everything on a never-ending stream of lucrative overseas students which was never, ever going to be never-ending. Why should the young pay for the failures of the old? Again?

I would just about accept a graduate tax. If you are going to hypothecate taxes for specific purposes then tuition fees are immoral and a graduate tax is the way to do it. But it isn't necessary. We just need to reform the governance of profligate universities and their globe-conquering delusions, tax the wealthy fairly and create a democratic education sector which doesn't get into this mess.

The alternative is that I will be making both my pitchfork and my burning torch available to anyone under 30 who is marching on the New Club in Edinburgh. Actually, I'll probably join them.