England’s university tuition fees are working – to prove it, look at Wales

I’ve just seen a poster from the NASUWT teaching union at a stall they have taken at this year’s Welsh Tory conference in Cardiff (where I am today). It suggests that the poor have it easier getting to university in Wales than in England because of the wicked ‘Westminster Coalition Government.’

This is an utterly dishonest poster. The poor, in Wales, have it worse – precisely because they rejected the redistributive policy of tuition fees. The poster espouses the facile logic that Ed Miliband has regurgitated today – that tuition fees somehow make the poor less likely to apply.

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The experience of another Celtic nation, Ireland, disproves that – they abolished fees in 1996 and a study found (PDF) that this just subsidised the middle class while doing nothing for the poor. This is precisely what Miliband would do cutting fees down to £6,000 when the cost of an Oxford degree is