Tory Universities minister David Willetts has flippantly dismissed student debt—caused by his own government’s budget cuts—as “just a lifetime of payments.”
The shocking remark, which is typical of the uncaring attitude of the ruling elite to the ordinary British people, was made by Mr Willets in remarks to the press this week.
“Some see student loans as debt around their necks,” Mr Willets said. “They should think of the money as a tax rather than debt,” he added.
Instead, he urged students to think of the £70,000 they could end up owing, taking in living expenses and interest on their loans, as a “flow of payments over a lifetime.”
Earlier, Mr Willets’s government announced that England’s university budgets would be cut by £449 million, a move which reduced the number of student places by an estimated 6,000.
Furthermore, teaching budgets were reduced by £215 million, a cut in real terms of 1.6% on 2009-10 levels.
Research funding was also frozen, and the buildings budget was cut by 15%.
In total, the “savings” were around £900 million. The cuts have meant that as from next year, England will be the most expensive place in world in which to study at a public university.
Incredibly, the amount “saved” by forcing UK students into crippling debt, is a fraction of the cost which Mr Willets’s government has spent bombing Libya.
According to the most reliable estimates (and they are estimates, because the Tory-Lib-Dem coalition has refused to release the final figures), the war in Libya cost the UK taxpayer some £1,25 billion.
This is £300 million more than the university education budget cuts.
Students who are considering voting for any of the Westminster parties should consider the reality that the Tories, Labour and Lib-Dems have all proven that they prefer to pay for wars rather than educating British youngsters.
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The thing that people tend to forget is that the amount that is borrowed by students has trebled to around £9000, but the threshold at which this money will have to be paid back to the taxpayer, will prober never be reached by a majority of these Students, simply because the jobs are not there anymore and I don’t see them being there for the foreseeable future, so in effect, the taxpayer will be left with this burden.
Universities are now, no more than time-gap fillers to keep unemployment figures down.
If you ask any of these students if they’d consider voting in their own interests, 99% of them will say ‘extreme right’ without the slightest idea of what that really means. Then they’ll say ‘I’m not racist’. It’s not surprising; they are very young, and have been lied to all their lives.
So the best of our young people, crippled by debt, have to postpone until even later in their lives the chance of marriage, children and a home of their own. I suppose we can always make up the loss of population by importing high quality replacements from Africa.
All this brings home how completely wrong this country has got the whole issue of higher education. I saw a letter in the Telegraph the other day from the proprietor of a very old firm of cabinet makers in Norfolk complaining that whereas his firm used to employ up to twenty apprentices, now they find it impossible to attract any; the last apprentice to be trained by his works was a Lithuanian. The only college providing such training in East Anglia has closed the course. This is not the fault of our young people – they are now all pressurised into going to university and the possibilities of a rewarding career in highly skilled manual crafts are discounted.
Bring back apprenticeships, bring back local colleges, close poorly performing universities.
I shall probably get shot down in flames for saying this, but as a former teacher, I think that there are already too many young people going to University studying worthless degrees which will not be the slightest use to them in the outside world. Two of my friend’s sons have been to Uni, & one is now working in an unskilled capacity in a factory, & the other is managing the veggie dept. in a Tescos.
What has happened is that the degrees, because there are so many passes, have become themselves worthless to employers.
The country need more skilled artisans & employers need to bring back apprenticeships.
I would also say, from experience that many children are uneducable after the age of 15. They fritter their time away at school, when really they should be able to get out into the world to do apprenticeships, & jobs with training attached, which would then remove the ‘need’ for immigrants. Boys used to go to sea at 15, after all.
It should soften them up for a mortgage, credit cards, vehicular hire purchase, store cards, unsecured personal loans et al. They will become the microcosm to our bankrupt civilisation’s macrocosm. The Rothschilds pioneered our debt slavery while our present international super-capitalist masters perfected it. With our government borrowing even more fiat money to repay interest on pretend debts, our people are attacked physically, emotionally, financially, intellectually and genetically. We require serious, life-threatening surgery to save our dying patient.