The SNP’s positive discrimination plan is too little, too late for Scottish students

Will no one think of the middle classes? It’s not the most stirring call to arms. When Scottish Labour MSP Michael Marra complained that ‘the doors are closed’ at universities to ‘Scottish pupils from ordinary families and an average school’, Nicola Sturgeon quipped that she ‘used to be regularly criticised for the fact that too few young people from deprived communities were going to university’, but now she was ‘being criticised for the fact that too many of them are going to university’.

As ever with Sturgeon, the rhetoric is facile and the reality much more prosaic. That more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are getting into university is no bad thing, but nor is it a symbol of an egalitarian Scotland. Marra was speaking about Edinburgh university, which accepted no students from the least disadvantaged backgrounds to study law last year. More than half of the 1,205 successful applicants were from deprived areas, underperforming schools or came from a disadvantaged background.