You report on the debts facing graduates who have taken out loans to cover tuition fees (“Getting to grips with a £32,220 student debt…”, Personal finance, last week). A recent Institute for Fiscal Studies report puts the average debt at over £50,000.
Jeremy Corbyn has committed a future Labour government to scrapping tuition fees, arguing that the state should pay for all students on the grounds that university education is a “common good” because of the contributions graduates make to the nation.
But abolition would create a different unfairness because graduates’ average earnings are higher than non-graduates, and so they gain a “private benefit”. That there is a common good and a private benefit suggests the cost should be shared. Fees at the current level of £9,250 cover the entire cost of tuition for most arts and social sciences and 85% of the costs of laboratory subjects, thus putting emphasis on the private benefit. But abolition would change the balance towards a common good view.
Reducing fees to half the costs of tuition would be much fairer and would reduce any deterrent effect (particularly for students from poorer families). A debt on graduation of £20,000 to £25,000 would seem less of a mountain.
Dr Kenneth Edwards
Cambridge
Name and shame those statues
Catherine Bennett (“The once mighty are falling…”, Comment, last week) discussed the problem of revised social attitudes towards statues and whether offending ones should be removed. The answer might be that they remain in place, but as tastes change the inscription could be supplemented by one which could “name and shame”, or reaffirm, the character of the individual concerned, in line with public opinion.
Len Gray
Shipley
West Yorkshire
The cure for gender imbalance
Your article “Councils need 12,000 more women to close gender gap” (News, last week) focused on ways to achieve quantitative equality in local government, but neglected the need to improve qualitative equality.
Many local government norms and ideals are still oriented towards men. Hertfordshire’s county hall, where I serve, has a door marked “lady members cloakroom” – wording from a bygone age, tand a reminder that female councillors have been seen as an exception rather than a norm. Our minuting practice attributes the remarks of a female chair to a chairman. It is also custom in meetings to say, “Thank you, chairman” when invited to speak, a gender-loaded phrase which harks back to a time when women were waiting for an invitation from men to feed into the political debate through suffrage. If we are serious about breaking down barriers to encourage more women into politics, we have to think bigger than simply swelling their ranks to match those of men. Prevailing norms that hinder recruitment, selection, election and progression of aspiring female politicians need addressing. We need the most inclusive working environment possible for councillors of all genders and none, to match the modern, flexible, instructive and rewarding work that being a local representative entails.
Charlotte Hogg
Liberal Democrat councillor
St Albans
Milton’s well-trodden path
We are told that Milton made a little-known journey to Italy and this surprising fact has “emerged” (“When Milton met Galileo: the collision of cultures that helped shape Paradise Lost”, News, last week). However, there was nothing not already well known to Milton scholars, and probably not to anyone who has read Milton, particularly when he described his visit in his Areopagitica: “There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought.” So, familiar, rather than surprising. I look forward to other revelations, such as, “Tennyson smuggled money to revolutionaries in Spain” or, “Browning eloped with a disabled woman”.
Brent Elliott
Harrow
Trouble on the top deck
Thomas Heatherwick’s “expensive, inefficient and faulty” London bus (Profile, last week) features an unpleasantly cramped upper deck, with low headroom and mean little windows. The buses it replaced had a spacious upper deck with tall windows, which made travelling a pleasure. Heatherwick and his wealthy followers probably never need to travel by bus, but for ordinary Londoners he has diminished our daily lives.
John Wilson
London NW3
Rees-Mogg is no Bannon
Lenin claimed that “worse is better”, meaning that the more unpopular governments make themselves, the more likely is revolution. On that basis, the defenestration of Steve Bannon (“An increasingly isolated Trump cuts a pathetic and discredited figure”, Editorial, last week) is bad news for those of us who oppose neo-liberal, authoritarian trends, since he undoubtedly encouraged the worst aspects of the Trump administration. In contrast, if the Tories choose Jacob Rees-Mogg as their leader, that would be brilliant.
Jeremy Cushing
Exeter
