It is well known that, from next year, tuition fees will rise to a maximum of £9,000 per year.
It is well known that, from next year, tuition fees will rise to a maximum of £9,000 per year. What is less well known is that the loan rates, for most students, will also rise enormously. At present, the rate is 1 per cent over base rate. In future, for those students who hit the higher income threshold of £41,000 a year, it will be RPI plus 3 per cent (i.e., at present RPI, 8 per cent). This is a very high rate indeed (and with severe penalties for early repayment), so high that it is hard to understand why anyone would pay it, since the money could be borrowed more cheaply in other ways. The idea of this rate is that it should be a levy on the better-off to pay for the lower rates (RPI only) offered to those students who end up earning less than £21,000. But of course this works only if students do actually take out the loan. Why should they? Until now, the loan system, though much complained of, has been cheap. If it is to become a government-organised debt trap, that is wrong, and a political disaster.
In Oxford recently, I took part in a colloquium at St Antony’s College about what, if anything, should be forbidden by law or custom from being said about religion. The other panellists were A.C. Grayling, and Usama Hassan, a brave scientist and Muslim who has had death threats because of his publicly stated belief that evolution is compatible with Islam. What a weird culture we live in, I thought, where for some of our citizens it is actually more dangerous to debate evolution today than it was for T.H. Huxley, also in Oxford, in 1860. But on this occasion, it was not Dr Hassan who had trouble from protestors, but Professor Grayling. We speakers had to be smuggled in by a back route while security guards held the mob at bay. The protest was not about Professor Grayling’s famed atheism, but against his plan to set up an independent New College for the Humanities, with himself as its first Master. What the demonstrators hated was the fact that the New College will demand large fees. The notion has got about that, because education is important, it should not be charged for, or privately provided. If the same principle were applied to food, we should quickly starve. As Prof. Grayling waxed eloquent on freedom of speech, a few of the mob broke through the cordon and banged on the windows of our lecture hall, waving derisive tenners in his direction. As the only participant receiving no threats at all, I began to feel miserably unimportant, and so launched irrelevantly into a defence of foxhunting, hoping (unsuccessfully) to get a rise out of someone.
But if we in Britain tend to see Muslim attitudes to God as intolerant, we should recognise that our native views about the treatment of animals are getting more and more fanatical. I have no strong opinion about whether wild animals should be part of circus acts, but I am absolutely sure that it is not the main moral issue of our time. Yet last week the House of Commons debated the subject with the hysterical anger that in Pakistan is reserved for alleged insults to the Koran. So, as a corrective blasphemy, I strongly recommend a new book called How to Watch a Bull-fight by Tristan Wood (Merlin Unwin Books). It is packed with information and photographs about how bullfighting is actually conducted, including the dos and don’ts of the kill. I had not realised until I read it that in recent years the spectacle has become, like the British criminal justice system, more merciful. It has not – obviously — abolished capital punishment, but in 1992 the indulto (reprieve) entered Spain’s taurine regulations for the first time. If either the matador or a majority of the spectators thinks the bull is so splendid that it should be spared as a ‘seed bull’ to protect the casta (spirit) of its breed, then this may be done. Mr Wood’s overall argument for the corrida, now in its last season in Catalonia because of an access of anti-Spanish zeal, is that three million cattle are slaughtered in Britain every year, ingloriously and covertly, whereas the Spanish bull can go to its death proudly and publicly, with ‘the opportunity to have its name written into taurine history’.
But back to Professor Grayling’s New College of the Humanities. Although the idea is a good one, the new institution will surely suffer if it is too closely linked with its Master’s famed polemicism. I have an ecumenical suggestion. It is a little known but true fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury is a university. I am not referring to Dr Rowan Williams’s famously wide range of learning. I mean that the Archbishop is a university, ex officio, thanks to a medieval papal decision, nationalised by Henry VIII at the Reformation, that he should have the power to award degrees. This was part of the Pope’s power over all universities, and was a remedy for when people who were important to the Church could not — because of plague, or whatever — get to Oxford or Cambridge to be educated. At present, the role is underused (though Lambeth Degrees, which are mostly honorary, are granted). But now the government is looking for other ‘providers’ of ‘the student experience’. Couldn’t Professor Grayling and Dr Williams go into business together, in aid of the wide, liberal learning in which both of them believe?
You cannot blame people, I suppose, for blocking their drives with electric security gates, but they are a bad sign. The gates make one feel that a neighbourhood does not exist. They are now commonplace in England. We live 50 miles from London, and there are virtually no security gates in our village, but I notice that you only have to go about five miles nearer to the capital for them to become frequent, and 20 miles for them to be everywhere. Is there any way of stopping their spread (apart from reducing crime, which will not happen)? Only, I suppose, by convincing their owners that they have a most depressing effect on property prices.
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