Author Archives: Julian Astle

The Independent View: A Lib-Con coalition? Don’t hold your breath

By Julian Astle | Fri 19th March 2010 - 9:20 am

In the past week, the Conservatives have been talking up their chances of doing a deal with the Liberal Democrats if the forthcoming general election fails to deliver them a working majority. Conservative shadow business secretary Ken Clarke has even suggested that “Nick Clegg is a conservative”. David Cameron meanwhile regularly describes himself as a “liberal Conservative” and has claimed that on a range of policy issues, “there’s barely a cigarette paper between us”.

But in a new report from CentreForum, the liberal think tank, we argue that the two parties’ similarities …

Posted in Op-eds and The Independent View | Tagged centreforum, david cameron, ken clarke and nick clegg | 5 Comments

The Independent View: Why the Lib Dems should end their opposition to tuition fees

By Julian Astle | Tue 2nd December 2008 - 11:15 am

The Liberal Democrats stand alone among the three main political parties in promising to abolish university tuition fees. They do so in the hope that making tuition ‘free’ will draw more students from low income families into the higher education (HE) system.

This superficially attractive proposition ignores two important facts, however.

First, there is no such thing as free tuition – someone, somewhere has to pay, and under the Liberal Democrat plan that ‘someone’ is the taxpayer. And since most taxpayers are non-graduates with relatively low lifetime earnings, the policy involves a significant redistribution of resources from poor to rich.

Second, the abolition of fees will do almost nothing to get more poor students into university as the Liberal Democrats claim. Why? Because the gap between the HE participation rates of rich and poor students was not created by the introduction of tuition fees. Indeed research suggests that the gap actually narrowed slightly in the years after fees were introduced in 1998.

Posted in Op-eds, Party policy and internal matters and The Independent View | 84 Comments