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Penalising success

Alice Bachini observes that many want to penalize success. Nothing unusual there!

I don’t exactly know what the Centre For Analysis Of Social Exclusion is, but it doesn’t sound good to me. So its suggestion that our crumbling state-funded universities should be allowed to charge students top-up fees might seem at first very sensible and welcome.

However, what this frighteningly-named body actually wants is for state-educated pupils to be exempt from those fees. In other words, it wants people who fund not only their own children’s education but also those of other people’s children, through their taxes, to continue doing so at university level, only much much more heavily. To the tune of up to ten and a half thousand smackers a year, in fact. Because this is “fair”. Of course.

“Parents of students from independent schools have signalled their ability to pay for education and research shows that these students earn significantly more in the labour market,”Abigail McKnight, a research fellow at the Economic and Social Research Council’s centre, said at the weekend.

Quite so. Independent schools produce pupils better equipped to do well in life and earn more money. Success breeds success… and it seems that to many this is an outrage: how dare they! They must be made to pay!

So, the redistribution of wealth, in advance of the event of actually earning it, on the basis that one’s parent’s did so first; what do we call that idea, I wonder?

I doubt that these proposals will get through, but the fact that they can get taken even slightly seriously for a second demonstrates, in my view, both the latent socialism in New Labour institutions, and the acceptability of socialism in Education circles. Well, socialism isn’t going to help British universities one little bit. Until they get free from the state and allowed to charge money where they want, their towers will keep crumbling and they will continue to leak their best people across the Atlantic.

Oh bother, I should start saving up for those Harvard fees right now.

Alice Bachini

5 comments to Penalising success

  • What an excellent response to what is basically a wicked proposal. Does the left’s hatred for those who relieve the state of the burden of educating their children and healing their family know no bounds?

  • Philip Chaston

    On the other hand, it does breach the rule of universal benefit that underpins the philosophy of the welfare state. If the government moved towards the removal of the universal benefits that many middle-class homes enjoy, then a constituency would develop for market-based solutions to social risks currently monopolised by the state.

  • I think the appetite for market solutions is already sizeable.

    By allowing a lurch to the left in the hope that it would provoke a backlash further than to the right originally is to put a lot of people through a lot of misery for no certain reason. They might easily settle just for the present situation rather than go for the market, towards which they are now moving.

    I suppose it would be a bit like supporting a nationalisation in the hope that it will provoke public support for multiple privatisations – risky and probably ineffective.

  • zack mollusc

    If you don’t like it, go elsewhere. How awful for the people who receive the big salaries to pay for the less fortunate who do the work. Go. Go to America and laugh as the Uk grinds to a halt without you. You can never be replaced.

  • Molly

    What the HELL are you talking about, mollusc? Big salaries? Have you been to Alice’s site? I don’t think she has a big salary and I sure as shit don’t. I live in a tiny bedsit but I sure agree with Alice.

    Why should I have to go to the USA like some sort of refugee because some bastard wants my money here in the UK? I tried to run a handmade jewelery business but the f-ing VATman closed me down because giving my money to ‘less fortunate’ shites is more important that letting someone do something productive. What a nerve you have that me or anyone else should piss off because we hate being fucked over by people who just see productive people as cash cows. Fuck you.