R U K(idding)?

I hope student readers from the rest of the UK realise how lucky they are. Just think, if your parents had brought you into the world a few years later than they did and you were due to come to the University of Edinburgh next September, you’d be looking to fork out £36,000 for your degree - even more if you wanted to do an MChem, MPhys, Medicine, Vet Med or any of other, longer programmes. If you're here right now, you’re getting an education deemed to be worth almost £40,000 for just a fraction of that price.

In case you haven’t heard, the University of Edinburgh decided last Monday to charge £9,000 per year for those students who normally live in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, in response to the deregulation of tuition fees by Scottish education secretary Mike Russell, thereby making a degree at Edinburgh the most expensive in Europe for these students. Immediately thereafter, the university issued a press statement through Professor Mary Bownes (Vice Principal for 'Eternal' Engagement, if you believe some publications), praising the wonderful bursary scheme which was the result of the decision. The £9,000 fee was just an afterthought, according to the statement: it’s all Holyrood’s fault, apparently, because they cut the funding. Holyrood, meanwhile, blames Westminster for forcing them to put up fees. The bully made them do it.

Some of this buck-passing and blame-dodging is legitimate, but much of it is not. The University Court could have made a stand against higher tuition fees, but they chose not to. And while the bursary scheme is genuinely very good, it is being funded by students' fees. To avoid squeezing out Scottish students, the Scottish Government either had to raise the fee cap or introduce quotas, but they by no means had to set them as high as £9,000. Equally, they refused to allow variable fees, which will introduce a market for education to the Scottish sector. That was their choice, and they should take responsibility for it. At EUSA, we'll be making surethey do when the issue is debated in Parliament in November.

Many of the roads taken here really do lead to Westminster. All three main parties there have now played key parts in ensuring that students bear the brunt of the responsibility for funding their education. Only Westminster sits on the necessary tax-raising powers to ensure that education is funded from the public purse, and it is the current universities minister David Willetts who is forcing students to pay more for less. That’s why Scottish student unions should support a national demonstration in London against the White Paper. It is the biggest attack on students as a demographic that the UK has ever seen, and if we can beat it at the source the rest of the fees regime might start to unravel.