I was on holiday recently and found myself sharing a few drinks with my 19-year-old son and a group of friends he’d made. They were a nice bunch of youngsters, mostly privately educated, at an exciting stage of life. One of them I found particularly impressive – a young mixed-race lad called Elliott.
We had plenty in common: we both came from Nottingham and had been to local comprehensive schools. Our parents had solid working-class jobs – my mother worked at the John Player cigarette factory in the city and my father was a coal miner – Elliott’s mother works for Royal Mail, while his father is a painter and decorator.
He was a young man with the world apparently at his feet; highly intelligent, with three A grades at A-level, he was eloquent and had oodles of charm. But while the other young people were all eagerly discussing their university plans, he stayed silent.“I’m not going,” he told me. “I’ve got a job selling cars.”
I found this distressing. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with working in sales, but I knew it wouldn’t stretch this bright young man intellectually. And, apart from the personal tragedy, youngsters from Elliott’s background – my background – need all the positive role models they can get.
I asked him why he had turned his back on education. His reply was a damning indictment: he couldn’t justify racking up debts of over £50,000.
I understood where he was coming from. I was born in the back bedroom of my grandmother’s council house, lived in a condemned slum for the first few years of my life, and spent my childhood in an national coal board house in a pit village. When I was his age £50 was like a lottery win, never mind £50,000. The idea of owing anyone serious money would have terrified me.
But I was very lucky. I left school without sitting any examinations and went down the pit, though I didn’t stick at it because I was scared of the dark. There then followed a succession of jobs: apprentice mechanic, pork pie factory production line worker, door-to-door salesman, fireman … you name it, I failed at it, while I pursued my then-hobbies of binge drinking and football hooliganism (I was known by my mates as “Animal”, though for my revolting eating habits not my fighting prowess). Inevitably, I enhanced my CV with a criminal conviction for fraud, and after my father walked out on us, I drifted for a while, aimless and rootless, ending up sleeping rough on the streets and in Salvation Army hostels.
It was only when I turned 21, as my wonderful mother fought the cancer that would kill her at 40, that I realised that education was the key to life.
The Gary Bell of the 1980s had a huge advantage over young Elliott. When I enrolled in a further education college and sat my O- and A-levels, and then went to Bristol University to study law at the age of 25 (in Thatcher’s Britain), there were no tuition fees and – thanks to Harold Macmillan’s Education Act of 1962 – my local education authority gave me a full maintenance grant to cover my living expenses. Without that, there is absolutely no chance I would have gone into higher education. I graduated in 1987 with no debts whatsoever.
Now aged 55, after nearly 30 years at the Bar, I am a QC specialising in criminal defence. I’d like to think that other young people from deprived backgrounds like mine might follow in my footsteps. But they won’t, for one major reason; because education isn’t free any more.
The lion’s share of the blame for that, to its eternal shame, should fall squarely on the shoulders of the Labour party. Student tuition fees of £1,000 per annum were introduced by Tony Blair’s government in 1998, and the maintenance grant was replaced by a student loan. Fees were then increased to £3,000 a year by Blair in 2004, prompting Ken Livingstone to accuse the then government of “whipping away a ladder of opportunity which they themselves had climbed”.
The ladder has now been not just whipped away but burned, thanks to the coalition government’s decision to treble fees to £9,000 a year.
Even with a degree, there still remains a plethora of obstacles for youngsters from deprived backgrounds to overcome to succeed in life, but without one their prospects diminish to nothing.
I’m sure if a young Tony Blair (Fettes college and St John’s College, Oxford), Nick Clegg (Westminster school and Robinson College, Cambridge) and former Tory universities minister David Willetts (King Edward’s school and Christ Church, Oxford) had been on my recent holiday they would have been excitedly talking about going off to university.
As for Elliott? Well, they might have bought a car from him.
• Gary Bell is a QC, presenter of The Legalizer on BBC1 and author of Animal QC, published by Monday Books
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