Idealism, not ideology

This week's student news agenda is once again overwhelmingly dominated by foul omens of impending cuts and increasingly expensive degrees. The Comprehensive Spending Review announced by chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne last week mandates, among other things, a 40 per cent cut in the teaching budget for Britain's universities. Lord Browne's report on higher education funding, also published last week, said much what most expected it would: you should be paying more for your degree.

These measures have, unsurprisingly, proved massively unpopular with almost everyone. But few oppose them so virulently as Britain's students. Protests have been mounted, and more are planned. At a protest in Edinburgh last weekend, students marched to the chant of “no ifs, no buts, no education cuts”. Much venom has been poured on the coalition government – particularly the Liberal Democrats, who have shamelessly abandoned the promises they made to students – as Labour keep studiously quiet about how much of the groundwork for these cuts was laid during their tenure in Downing Street.

But the problem facing this debate is that it has become too mired in ideology. The discourse surrounding the coalition cuts programme is too heavily weighted on partisan politics and crude sloganism; even in Scotland, where the 'democratic intellect' principle explored by Iain Macwhirter in these pages today predates our modern political system by a hundred years.

The spending reductions are lambasted as 'old-fashioned Conservatism', with a self-righteously knowing glance the way of Thatcher. But this characterisation is a flawed one; these are not 'Conservative cuts', just as they are not 'Labour cuts' or 'Liberal Democrat cuts'. Any one of the three main parties would have made these cuts were they to have won the election, coalition or no coalition. Attacking the cuts by chalking them up to ideology rather than to a collective malaise at Westminster undermines the opposition by making it easy for the policy's defenders to dismiss you and your argument as partisan hackery.

Fundamentally, this is not an ideological issue. It's a moral and practical matter. Using the deficit-reduction axe to hobble higher education is wrong. Attempting to make higher education more exclusive by pricing poorer applicants out of the market is wrong. Increasing the burden of debt on graduates so that they will bear it for decades is wrong. Energised students standing up for themselves is a gratifying sight, but we must make sure not just that our voices are heard – but also that they are listened to.