University tuition fees are a tax. It’s time to admit it

Regardless of how many brains David Willetts has got, it’s not surprising that tuition fees are a mess. They’re a mess because they are a tax, and intended to do the sort of job for which taxes were invented, yet are also pretending not to be one. It’s like needing a dog but buying a cat, and then expecting it to catch a stick. It’s madness.

This pretence exists because a Conservative-led government did not want to be the progenitors of a stonking great new tax. Least of all one targeted at precisely the sort of graduate professionals who Conservatives so badly need to vote Conservative, in order for there to go on being any Conservatives at all. Taxing graduates for being graduates feels statey and Milibandy and downright foreign. It even feels less Conservative than taxing everybody else on their behalf, which is irrational, but true nonetheless.

Although taxing graduates is what we’re now doing anyway.