Why does the SNP support a policy of reducing English university fees to \u00a36k? \u00a0Solidarity, perhaps? \u00a0High principle, maybe? \u00a0Well, there's generous of you, if you think that.<\/p>\n
More like it's the certainty\u00a0of more cash flowing up\u00a0the Barnet formula<\/a> pipeline as the THE<\/a> explained last week.<\/p>\n Reducing the fee level from \u00a39k to \u00a36k means more tax-payer cash going to English universities \u2013 about \u00a32.7bn of it each year (assuming that all the shortfall is made up, which may well be optimistic). \u00a0Under Barnet, this means that ~\u00a3270m additional money would flow to Edinburgh for the Scottish government to spend on whatever it likes. \u00a0There is absolutely no guarantee that any of it would flow into higher education.<\/p>\n The THE piece ends:<\/p>\n Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute,\u00a0...\u00a0argued that the SNP\u2019s decision should not overshadow the fact that the protection of free tuition in Scotland had been accompanied by student support being\u00a0switched from grants to loans. \u00a0This meant that Scotland was the only part of the UK where the poorest students took on more debt than their richer peers, Mr Hillman said.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now that's really\u00a0progressive politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why does the SNP support a policy of reducing English university fees to \u00a36k? \u00a0Solidarity, perhaps? \u00a0High principle, maybe? \u00a0Well, there's generous of you, if you think that. More like it's the certainty\u00a0of more cash flowing up\u00a0the Barnet formula pipeline...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}