Tuition Fees

"But he suffers [Ed Balls] from the bane of all left-leaning intellectuals. As I have remarked elsewhere, these guys never 'get' aspiration. They would deny it of course, but they see the middle class - apart from the intellectual part of it - as an unnatural constituency...they would think that a person worried about their tax rates was essentially selfish, and therefore by implication morally a little lost." p484

I admit I have more than a little sympathy with the Ed Ball's school of thought. It is not that I don't 'get' aspiration.  I am aspirational. However, as somebody who came from a working class background with none of the advantages of educated parents or friends to guide me, I saw what a lottery life was. Aspiration was all very well, but in the face of enormous cultural pressures and even opposition, my friends looked, almost entirely to the state for our opportunities and, in providing good schools and free universities they gave us the chance to pursue our ambitions. The aspiration to build a better life needs to be nurtured with opportunity. It should not be a lottery and barriers to opportunity need to be removed. Opportunity brings with it the weight of a social agenda. You are being backed by the state. It provides individuals with a legal and material framework to succeed in their goals and, in exchange, those individuals should recognise their debt and pay appropriate levels of taxation.

The problem is, that aspiration in one generation can quickly become privilege in the next generation. The private school, the foreign holidays and the enormous opportunities that money can buy. Is there anything worse than the self-made man who pontifcates about how he did it all by himself and other people should try doing the same. Often these people don't seem to recognise their own immense achivement. They are often exceptional people and have achieved what would be extraordinary in any walk of life but more so given their own circumstances. Luck, of course, can also play a big part in anyone's life, but rarely in the story of the self-made man. Nor is luck recognised by the most privileged groups in our society.  The luck of being born rich and in a country where their inherited privileges are protected by the state should place a heavy social responsibility upon that person.

Blair wanted his legacy to be a new tradition that would create a permanently electable Labour Party. But can you build anything by pandering to the market driven aspirations of people only interested in material wealth and by extension self-indulgence. It may have been where "the people were heading" (p485), but that doesn't mean you couldn't have tried to change their direction. This was not leadership but following the crowd. This lack of ambition is best illustrated by his rebuff of Ball's suggestion that tuition fees be repaid with a progressive graduate tax dependent on income. Blair argues, "I didn't like this at all. It broke the essential link between what a student got and what they gave back." When did paying tax turn into a retail transaction where you only pay for the goods you consume? Can you really claim to be a progressive politician or party if you don't believe in a progressive tax system?
  
We have to be more ambitious than this. As the banking crisis has shown, we can't afford to simply pander to the self-interested anymore.