Tuition Fees

[poliphilo]

My take on the financial crisis is we should be going after the people who caused it- which is mainly the bankers. The government's idea is that they should go after the people who had least to do with it- like the students (who were children when the bad stuff was happening) and the disabled- and anybody else who is unlikely to put up much of a fight.

They were wrong about the students not putting up much of a fight.

In the run up to the election the Lib Dem leadership pledged to oppose an increase in tuition fees.  They made a big deal of it. Now in government they're supporting the increase. There are all sorts of real-politikal ways of obfuscating the issue, but the fact is a promise was made and a promise has been broken. Nick Clegg and Vince Cable  will go down in history (if history bothers to remember them) as weasels. Most of us who voted for them voted for them on the grounds that of the fly-blown goods on offer they were the ones who looked least like Tories. Ha!

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I will mull it over but I suspect that most actions that penalise the bankers would adversely affect the rest of us. For instance, the banks could not be allowed to fail en masse because our savings would have gone bust with them. Also, we can't mess about disallowing bonuses because banks see them as key to attracting good staff, and to interfere with that would be to implement a wages policy, which I remember from the 1970s was tricky to implement. And if we push the banks too hard they will relocate to other countries, and all the 50% income tax those bankers are paying will be lost to the British exchequer, as will the corporate tax.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that the state owns a large proportion of the banks. Once they start to flourish, the government can sell those shares back on the open stock market, and get back the investment we made in them. Therefore as shareholders, we all have an interest in the banks doing extremely well, and we don't want to beat them to a pulp.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

You are probably right. The banks underpin the whole system. Punish the banks and the system wobbles.

So perhaps it's the system we need to change. Mind you, I have no more idea what that means in real terms than I did when I was 18.