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> This was a pretty low bar, though. For example one of the memorable parts of the first debate was that during his closing statement he namechecked the audience members (name, location and issue) who asked the candidates questions. The media liked this. Needless to say, all the candidates did the same in the second debate :D

It always shocked me that this was what the media jumped on, and seemed to matter most to people. Really shows how appallingly low the standard of political debate and reporting has become.

(Personally, I'd be much happier with someone who didn't spend time on such obvious PR guff, and was a good and incorruptible administrator of a country.)

Yeah it's weird. I don't actually remember TV debates being a big thing before that election, did we just start it for 2010?

Yeah, televised election debates weren't a thing in the UK until 2010.

I still don’t know why we have them. It seems to make elections even more about personalities and individuals than politics.

It’s amazing how many people when presented with a list of policies will vote one way, but when presented with a list of names and parties will vote the other.

There's a bit more to the story than that.

British universities were pushing hard for the raised tuition fees at the time, a legacy of Labour's drive to drastically increase the numbers of people going. They claimed that they were going broke and needed the possibility of charging more to decrease class sizes and scale up their operations. They also claimed that very few universities would actually raise prices to the new cap, that in most cases the new prices would be hardly different.

The coalition, both Tories and Lib Dems, were completely suckered by this claim. They came to see raising the price cap as an unpleasant compromise, needed in order to ensure education remained high quality at the very highest end (russell group etc). What actually happened next showed that the claims of universities were a lie: every university immediately raised their prices to the max and faced with a tidal wave of new money, the academics that had been claiming they needed it to benefit students immediately went on "strike", except it was the sort of strike where they continued to turn up and do research (the fun bits), but refused to mark students exams. In other words they held students hostage at the start of their careers. I remember because I was there at the time.

Because the university sector has pathetically weak management this tactic worked very well, and within months the "strike" was ended by the simple expedient of allocating nearly all the new money to wage increases for lecturers and other academic staff. The new money was swallowed whole by the existing system, the big promised expansion never happened.

The ironic thing is that universities are heavily biased towards Labour/Lib Dem voting, with university towns being much more orange than typical, even though it was the Tories who gave them all massive pay rises and Clegg who notionally opposed it.

> They also claimed that very few universities would actually raise prices to the new cap

Yeah I remember this too - the commonly-held belief was that only the top Universities (Oxbridge, Durham, LSE and UCL, plus Edinburgh/St Andrews for English students) who would max it out, and that the rest might just allow themselves a little bit more to balance the books. Looking back it seems pretty obvious that it wouldn't go down like this - who wouldn't want to give themselves more money?

I didn't recall all the details of the aftermath though (the strike + the capitulation) though, that was a pretty interesting turn. I guess it was after 2011 when I moved abroad.

> faced with a tidal wave of new money, the academics that had been claiming they needed it to benefit students immediately went on "strike"

> the "strike" was ended by the simple expedient of allocating nearly all the new money to wage increases for lecturers

This makes it sound like the money from tuition fee rises went to the academics as pay. It didn't: they've now had real terms pay cuts for over a decade (here's one estimate [1]), as well as their pensions becoming worse.

The tripling of the price cap occurred in 2010; there was a strike in 2013 because university staff had had a real-terms pay cut of 13% in the 4 years from 2008-2013 [2].

It would also be more accurate to say that universities and vice-chancellors (rather than "academics") pushed for a raise in fees.

[1]: https://twitter.com/PWGTennant/status/1579061761013329921

[2]: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/6846/Strikes-remain-on-at-uni...

"The tripling of the price cap occurred in 2010; there was a strike in 2013 because university staff had had a real-terms pay cut of 13% in the 4 years from 2008-2013 [2]."

You're right, I'm mis-remembering the ordering of events. The strike I'm talking about was in 2006 and pre-dated the tripling of the fee cap. They got a ~15% increase for everyone in the entire sector, including non-academic staff. Then they started to plead poverty and demanding a rise in the price cap, even as the great recession was ravaging the economy.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/jun/06/lecturerspay.high...

I do seem to have recalled correctly that they claimed at the time very few universities would actually raise prices.

Your university source picks the time period for their "pay cut in real terms" starting immediately after they got a big pay rise phased in over two years. I learned at the time that the way unions calculate things like cost of living and "real terms" isn't always what you'd expect, though this was coming up on 20 years ago so I forgot the exact details of what they were doing. At least back then it wasn't just inflation. I do remember being pretty disgusted at their strike tactics and especially at the fact that universities continued to pay them, even as they refused to do their jobs.

> Then they started to plead poverty and demanding a rise in the price cap

It would be fair to say that academics demanded increases to their salaries (to limit how far they fell below inflation), but not that they demanded tuition fees be increased to achieve this.

See this policy briefing from the UCU on "Tuition fees in higher education" from May 2010 [1]: whilst bodies representing the universities supported increases in fees, the position of the UCU union (representing the academics, rather than the universities) was that tuition fees should be abolished and replaced by a Business Education Tax:

> University and College Union has consistently opposed the payment of tuition fees. Rather than charge students for their education, UCU would charge large employers who benefit from the plentiful supply of graduates through a new Business Education Tax (BET).

It's really not the case that lecturers wanted to stuff their pockets by price-gouging their students.

[1]: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/4626/Tuition-fees-in-higher-e...

Student numbers definitely have expanded over time: https://www.ft.com/content/8f3ab80a-ec2b-427d-80ae-38ad27ad4...

.. although that's to a great extent international students, because their fees aren't capped at all. Higher education is one of the UK's successful export industries.

The strike seems to have been, as always, changes to pensions and preventing pay cuts: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/oct/07/university...

> Ha, a generation of English students will thoroughly enjoy this.

They might well do, but it was their parents that didn't stop them and say 'perhaps you ought to get a job, do an apprenticeship, or basically anything other than a BA in Madonna Studies and 70k in debt by the time you're 21'.

This is another political legacy of Blair trying to get every kid through university and has resulted in pointless degrees and an increasing percentage of the population in debt. And can't afford to get on the house ladder.

That last bit is 90% due to the insane 10x increases in house prices over the last few decades.

Well, they're perfectly sane from the point of view of supply and demand. Boomers have pulled up the housing ladder behind them by blocking anything from being built.

You're deliberately using frivolous, made-up degree to try to dismiss the point. No matter, let's pretend someone doesn't have a "BA in Madonna Studies" and they have a degree you might respect more, like a BEng in Civil Engineering. Do you think they should have 70k in student loan debt that (with the UK's famously awful salaries) they'll be paying for over a decade? Of course they shouldn't. Hell, even less well-off European countries like Czech Republic manage to offer tuition-free higher education under the age of 25 - I don't see why non-Scots UK students shouldn't at least have more affordable tuition.

I'd also add that in the UK student loan debt is orthogonal to the problem of young people being unable to get onto the housing ladder. Remember that Scottish students do not incur the same level of student debt (on account of the government paying tuition) and they have similar troubles buying property. Salaries and house prices control this, student loans barely figure into it.

What part of going to university aged 18 to get a junk degree, just because that's what's expected, and tens of thousands of pounds of debt by the time you're 21 is absurd, is wrong? In the UK in 2022, if you're not inclined to do a STEM or professional degree, you're probably better off going into a trade or apprenticeship.

> I'd also add that in the UK student loan debt is orthogonal to the problem of young people being unable to get onto the housing ladder.

Perhaps you'd like to tell that to one of my kids that has to factor all their outgoings (including university debt) into their calculations which tells them exactly whether they can afford to take on mortgage?

Civil Engineering is a junk degree!? I was going to say Architecture but I thought CivEng was playing it safe. Wow. Ok so can I take another punt - Mechanical Engineering? Is that worthy?

I'm really puzzled by your second part, so you have kids who have sufficient deposit saved up, and a high-enough salary to qualify for a suitably-sized mortgage ... but the difference between their current rent and the would-be mortgage repayments is high enough that specifically their student debt repayments are stopping them?

That's an incredibly unique problem. I mean, as someone who is probably within a few years of your kids' age, the overwhelming problems in our age groups are the deposit and the price itself beyond beyond what a bank would lend based on salary. Everyone I know who is struggling to get onto the ladder is facing these two problems. I was lucky with where I bought and more importantly when I bought (on the eve of a 3x price boom) otherwise I might have hit the same issues.