Dear David Cameron
Yesterday saw the largest peaceful demonstration by British students in generations. Over 50,000 converged on London to protest at your government’s lack of support for higher education.
Predictably, a minority caused violent damage and disorder.
Predictably, you and your colleagues leapt on this tiny minority and used their actions to deflect from the fact that the peaceful majority were protesting against your government’s grossly unfair policies.
Today you said, ‘”We won’t go back. Look, even if we wanted to, we shouldn’t go back to the idea that university is free.”
No one ever said university was free. It may have been free for you, sweetheart, as you look out from inside your wealthy, cushioned bubble, but it was not free for me.
I am 35. I paid off my student loans around the same time I became a mother – three years ago.
I have been working since I was 14. I worked all through university and when I did my full-time MA (which I paid for) I also worked full-time in order to support myself through it.
But I am one of the lucky ones. When I graduated, there were jobs. Not well-paid jobs (my first salary was £12,000 a year) but jobs all the same.
The problem is, Mr Cameron, that not everyone who goes to university will walk into a highly paid job at the end of it. They simply won’t be able to command the salary you need not to be crippled by the kind of debts you are forcing onto students now. But that’s not all. Graduates are among the hardest hit in this recession – they simply can’t get jobs that don’t exist, can they?
And the problem is, Mr Cameron, that middle class parents like myself – like I say, I am one of the lucky ones – now can’t save up for their own kids’ university fees because you abolished child trust funds.
Nice work, Mr. Cameron. How proud you must be.
So it seems, Mr. Cameron, that I, a girl from a working class background who has worked hard all her life, who made her parents proud by being the first in her family to go to university; it seems that I, now a hard-working middle class girl who has spent her career working in the public sector you seem so intent on destroying – it seems that this girl’s children may not be able to go to university after all.
I didn’t expect university to be free for my children, Mr. Cameron. I did, however, expect it to be within their reach.
I am so, so proud of those kids who turned out yesterday in their thousands – the ones who made their peaceful voices heard. You may try and deflect from the protest of the majority, you may try and dodge the inherent unfairness of your actions, but, Mr. Cameron, you are wrong.
You won’t go back? Well, my dear prime minister, I’d take issue with that.
You have already gone back. You have turned back the clock to a time when education was for the privileged few, only accessible to those whose parents were wealthy.
Shame on you, Mr. Cameron. Shame on you.
well they have got their foot in the door as government leaders now. so do we have really have a choice after voting them in. our college closed a lot of lessons due to not enough students enrolled on them.
Hmmm, except that I didn’t actually vote them in, and nor are they a majority government, so the claim that they have a ‘mandate for change’ from the people (as if oft said by David Cameron) is total bobbins. As for your college, I’m not really sure of the point you’re making. There is undeniable and proven demand for HE courses right across the country; the proposed policies of Cameron and co. will lead to students being denied the opportunity to get a degree because they simply can’t afford it. This reduced demand, coupled with major spending cuts to universities, will lead to departmental or even whole university closures. But hey, that’s OK, because ‘we’ voted them in.