The Government is only reducing student fee interest rates because of the threat posed by Labour

Any government retreat will have nothing to do with decency, and everything to do with the electoral pressure imposed by the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn’s lavish promise to scrap fees entirely

Do you ever get the feeling that this country is finished? That this is something deeper and worse than those nervous breakdowns which scramble the brains of post-imperial powers as they try to adjust to reduced global status? That Britain is irreversibly screwed?

It may be a coincidence of timing, but a trio of stories coalesce to paint a triptych of a democracy so dismally divorced from its supposed values that melodramatic despair is the reflex response.

On Monday, when the Government finally announces its university funding review, the odds are that it will soften the horror. It might freeze tuition fees at the present and horrendous £9,250 per annum. It is expected to reduce the top interest rate on student debt.

Even if it does the latter, the question is why in the name of sanity it allowed annual interest on loans to reach 6.1 per cent? How could it consider it other than extortion to charge a graduate more than 12 times the current Bank of England base rate, and double the present inflation rate? Regardless of how many debtors will ever pay that rate, or anything at all, what message did it think it was projecting by applying the financial mores of the payday lender to higher education?

Any government retreat will have nothing to do with decency, and everything to do with the electoral pressure imposed by the popularity of Labour’s lavish promise to scrap the fees entirely. This is how what we dignify as our system of democracy works, and why it is sometimes hard to quell the suspicion that benign dictatorship would be the better option. When there are no votes or too few to matter at stake, the Government doesn’t just turn a blind eye to injustice. It actively deepens and perpetuates it.While it may be about to nuance its approach to student debt, this Government continues to ignore a putrid pair of scandals with little or no electoral implications.

The state of British prisons is worse than one thought. Let that sink in. We already knew that chronic underfunding and acute understaffing had converted the penal system into some kind of crazed Dickensian social experiment in battery farming human beings. It now emerges, by way of an Observer analysis, that two thirds of nicks are treating inmates in unacceptable ways, while 40 per cent are officially regarded as unsafe. Only seven per cent  eight out of 118  are rated “good” in all four relevant criteria.

Prisoners cannot vote, of course, and if they could there are not enough of them to matter in a general election. The sad thing is that the number of voters who give a damn is no less statistically irrelevant. If it weren’t, this grotesque denial of the most basic human rights wouldn’t be tolerated.

share