Let’s give the Scots and the Welsh a taste of their own medicine on tuition fees

As of 2012, the sons and daughters of people who live in Wales and Scotland  will end up paying between £18,000 and £27,000 less than the children of English residents for an average three-year course at a proper university.

An English student (whose parents’ taxes are already being used to enable the Welsh and Scots to live above their meagre means) attending a Welsh or Scottish university will pay the full whack.

Can anyone – anyone at all – explain to me why this isn’t ludicrously, disgustingly, grotesquely unfair? 

My last job for the BBC at Westminster before entering the wonderful, whacky world of the interweb was to help cover the Scottish and Welsh devolution referenda in 1997. As you can imagine, this made for nail-biting television, as we interviewed a seemingly endless series of possibly the dreariest, smuggest, most self-important tossers on the face of the planet.

The only excuse for these events was the newly-elected Labour government’s need pay off  the Celtic fringe for having secured “Call me Tony” a stonking great majority – and, of course, it provided a wonderful opportunity to create yet another useless layer of government to soak up the enormous surplus of dreary, smug, self-important, left-wing tossers floating about in the chamber-pots of Welsh and Scottish politics.

Of the 60% of Scots who could be dragged out of the pub or lured away from the telly long enough to vote, 74.3% voted for home rule, and 63.5% voted for tax-raising powers. (It was  far closer in Wales.)

At the last general election, the Scots elected exactly one Conservative MP. Evidently, they’re never going to get over the fact that Mrs. Thatcher had the temerity to shut down some of their subsidy-guzzling heavy industry and ask them to sober up and stand on their own two feet for a change.

Now, I realize that this current government is coming up with some whacky new scheme to slightly reduce the subsidy we pay the tartan twerps (each one of whom has £1,644 more public money spent on them each year than their southern neighbours, whose taxes are paying for all this largesse), and I know that today’s Tories are too drippingly wet to actually take revenge on the Scots for having – through the politicians they sent us and their unbelievably stupid, greedy bankers – destroyed England’s finances, but I have a proposal for injecting a soupçon of fairness into what is self-evidently a repellently inequitable arrangement.

It may be, of course, that we’re all relaxed about hard-working, financially stretched, middle-class English people being forced to hand over a large chunk of their income every year to what a less charitable commentator might describe as a bunch of lazy, whining, ungrateful, violent, communist dipsomaniacs as a sort of reward for hating our guts. But I doubt it. 40% of English people now feel the annual Celtic subsidy is unfair – I presume the other 60% is made up of Labour and Lib-Dem voters, public sector workers (same thing really), benefits recipients and the terminally bewildered.   

My proposal is this: when a Welsh or Scottish student gains a place at an English university (thanks no doubt to the huge number of “disadvantage” points not growing up in England earns them – the equivalent, one presumes, of three oranges on a fruit machine), they will be charged a premium equivalent to the difference between what they would pay to attend a university in their own country (i.e. either £0 or £3000) and what an English student would have to pay for the same privilege. 

So, that’s a premium of between £6000 and £9000 on Scottish students over and above the standard English tuition charges, and a premium of between £3000 and £6000 for the Welsh. For a three year course, the total would be up to £52,000 for the Scots and up to £36,000 for the Welsh. 

In other words, we’d be treating Welsh and Scottish (oh, sod it – Scotch!) lads and lassies as foreign students, just as they treat the English as foreign students. 

The main benefit of this (apart from introducing an element of natural justice) would be that, as many Scotch students would elect to receive free higher education in their homeland rather than having to pay through the nose to attend a university down south, a lot of English university places would be freed up for young people who actually live in England.

Anyone care to disagree?