As many readers will know, I am a defender of student fees. As a socialist, I support universal public services. “Free higher education” was not such a service because it excluded more than half the population. Universities were (and are) available not according to need or demand, as other public services are, but according to “ability to benefit”, defined by the possession of credentials that the children of the affluent are best placed to acquire. Compelling the excluded to pay, through their taxes, for privileged students to reproduce their cultural capital and access elite jobs was, to my mind, wrong.
But Jeremy Corbyn’s promise to abolish fees galvanised young voters. As a result, it is inconceivable that fees can survive in their present form, as Andrew Adonis, a New Labour adviser and minister largely responsible for introducing them, now acknowledges. Nor should they: the Tories, with their insistence that students should be “paying customers” seeking “value for money”, turned fees into a vehicle for the marketisation of universities.
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