The idea that those who can should pay for their university education has taken more than a quarter of a century to become full government policy. Even now, in the week in which Lord Browne reports, people hate it. It is the first issue that I can remember where I came up against the ability of the well-off to defend themselves. In 1984, Sir Keith Joseph, then Secretary of State for Education, sprang the idea that parental contributions to their children’s university fees should increase, with the better-off paying more than the poorer. I was in my first few months of editing The Spectator, and the paper argued that this was a reasonable idea which should lead, in time, to universities being more independent of government. Auberon Waugh, then our weekly columnist, thought differently. ‘Perhaps I should declare an interest,’ he wrote. ‘Next year, Sir Keith’s reforms will cost me £4,000. This will make me conspicuously worse off than I was under socialism. It is no good pretending that it is the principle of the thing which interests me. It is the direct assault on my personal comforts, what the lower classes have been trained to call their living standards: it is nothing less than the spectre of wine in boxes which makes me bay for the blood of this class traitor.’ Waugh allowed that Sir Keith might be motivated by ‘a simple and honourable hatred of students and youngsters generally’, but that ‘his joke has misfired’: ‘Its effects do not fall on these loathsome students and youngsters, but on their honourable, decent, hard-working parents.’ Tory backbenchers took the same view, if not in the same words, and Sir Keith backed down.
Disagreeing with his editor, Bron Waugh said: ‘Charles Moore wrote…about “the anger of Mr Waugh’s class”…The truth is that he has rather longer to wait.’ Twenty-six years on, and the waiting is over. Our children are of university age. And of course, Waugh was right. I read that fees might go up to £12,000 a year, and I think gloomily about wine in boxes. But might things be a bit different this time? In 1984, parental contributions were still formally part of the system, which was odd, given that the age of majority had been 18 since the 1970s and students were therefore, in law, adults. Today, the cost of the fees falls on the students themselves, so they take out loans. In theory at least, the parents escape. I still think that independence from government is worth paying a lot for, and if students are paying a more real price for their universities, they will not tolerate bad ones. It will cause people to question the false assumption behind all public debate on universities, which is that it is automatically a good thing to go to one. This will benefit the intellectual life of the country and the competence of the work force. But Bron Waugh’s warning still nags in my mind. ‘The only important conflict in politics,’ he wrote in the same piece, ‘is between the politicians who want to sit on top of us and those who find the weight too heavy.’ There must be a danger that the coalition, abusing concepts of ‘fairness’, decides that higher-rate taxpayers should pay not only for their university education but for everyone else’s. What masquerades as independence could end up as redistribution. It is true that people on £26,000 a year should not be paying for people earning £44,000 a year. But it is also true that, once the people on £44,000 a year believe that they are being sat on by politicians, their revenge will be very terrible.
Because I am an adviser to the Canterbury Gift (a swanky phrase meaning that I support the cathedral’s current appeal), I recently visited the Dean, Robert Willis, who kindly showed me round. We began in the Deanery. Seventy years ago on Sunday, a rogue bomb, dropped by a German plane during the Battle of Britain, fell on the Deanery during lunch. The Dean just had time to rush his guests into the cellar before it hit. It blew in the front door. The Dean, Dr Hewlett Johnson, whose portrait hangs in the drawing-room, was famously brave, and very popular with the people of Canterbury for his defiance of the bombers. Yet Hewlett Johnson, known as ‘the Red Dean’, was such a devout communist that he supported the Nazi-Soviet pact, and therefore, at the point when the bomb fell, believed himself to be in alliance with Hitler against the decadent democracies. The Red Dean remained chairman of the governors of the King’s School throughout, sitting with General Montgomery. I wonder what they talked about.
I gather that the explosion in the number of urban foxes has given rise to urban hunting. Men who know their business now work the parks of south London with their terriers and even the odd basset hound. Others go lamping on London school playing fields. None, so far, has been arrested or harassed. Nor should they be: they recruit local youths who would otherwise be worse employed, and perform a social service by their cull. It is a small but significant working-class contribution to the Big Society.
We are still greatly enjoying Sunday nights in with Downton Abbey. Last Sunday’s dead Turk in the wrong bedroom was superb melodrama. But my learned occasional correspondent Professor John Vincent has sown a doubt about authenticity in my mind. He points out that ‘primogeniture does not apply to daughters. Thus, the demise of the sons [cousins of the main line] in the Titanic would not lead to the eldest daughter [of the earl] getting the jackpot. This rather makes the central argument of the plot [which is that beautiful, unkind Lady Mary is the sole heiress if the entail is broken] wobbly.’ Can some expert please assure me that this is untrue — or at least that it is plausible that the eldest girl could cop the lot?
Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, in the Guardian: ‘With the ruthlessness of a blitzkrieg the coalition is threatening the stability of an entire system for cultural provision that has been built up by successive Conservative and Labour governments.’ If only!
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