Christina spoke in the debate on 3 June:

“It was a good day for Scotland, a good day for Scottish education, a good day for Scottish students and a good day for the principle of egality when the SNP Scottish Government finally abolished tuition fees in Scotland by getting rid of the graduate endowment tuition fee. That was some eight years after the Lib Dems had said that the removal of tuition fees was non-negotiable, just before they negotiated it.

“I will take a second or two to quote Jim Wallace, speaking in the chamber on 17 June 1999. At the time, he was the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats. He is now a member of the Westminster Government, so his comments were pertinent then and still have resonance now. Mr Wallace said:

“The Labour Government at Westminster opted for means-tested student loans and means-tested tuition fees. My party accepted that maintenance grants should be turned into loans, but the Liberal Democrats opposed the introduction of tuition fees—means tested or flat rate. That remains our position.”—[Official Report, 17 June 1999; c 592.]

The Lib Dem manifesto for the recent election contained a commitment that stated, very simply:

“We will scrap unfair university tuition fees”.

“In what I am about to say, I do not ignore Margaret Smith’s passionate confirmation in her speech that the Liberal Democrats in the Scottish Parliament support free education. However, the question is what the Liberal Democrats consider to be an unfair university tuition fee. Do they think that there might be fair university tuition fees? If so, are they prepared to impose them?

“At the end of April, on a visit to Oxford Brookes University, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said that he would abolish tuition fees but, during his party’s conference in September last year, he made clear that he had already decided to dump that pledge as part of his “savage cuts”. It has sometimes been said that the Liberal Democrat is the only animal in the world that can sit on the fence and keep an ear to the ground on both sides. I think that that is unfair and would like to believe that there is a firm commitment somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of the Clegg bunker.

“I wonder whether the position of the Advocate General, Baron Wallace of Tankerness, remains the same as it was in the good old days when he was Jim Wallace MSP. Do the Lib Dems still oppose tuition fees, as he suggested they did when we were all young—or maybe when some of us were young—or do they now oppose only unfair tuition fees? Do they believe that there might be fair tuition fees somewhere? Is it the Clegg of the campaign or the Clegg of the conference? Might we see Baron Wallace fix another fudge like the graduate endowment? That is the UK Government’s tail. The dog, of course, is the Conservative party.

“David Mundell is part of a Government that will raise the top-up fees at English universities because that will be Government policy and because the loyal Opposition at Westminster is the shower that introduced tuition fees in the first place. Increasing top-up fees is a Labour policy from before the election. The Conservatives will push through the increase in university fees with the support of the Labour Party and the Lib Dems will abstain so that they can say, “It wisnae me, guv. A big boy done it and ran away.”

“We know that increased tuition fees will not result in increased funds for the institutions; we know that they are a means of reducing public investment in education; and we know that they will just result in lower public investment in English universities. They might have a knock-on effect for the Scottish budget, as the NUS and others fear. Universities in England are about to be on the end of yet another funding squeeze and another hard round of cuts…

“Fortunately, we have a different set of circumstances here in Scotland. While the Labour Government in London in the shape of Peter Mandelson was cutting £398 million from the English universities’ budget for the current financial year, the SNP Government was increasing the Scottish universities’ budget by £40 million. In 2008, Universities UK produced research called “Devolution and higher education: impact and future trends”, which showed that, in 2006, Scottish universities had a funding advantage over English universities of some £454 per student per year. The fact that that gap will now have widened is evidence that the SNP Government has served Scotland well. I wish for England’s sake that it had a Government as committed to high-quality provision.

“We cannot be complacent, though. We are already in a tight financial situation and the news from south of the border suggests that it will not be getting better any time soon. I do not believe that any party in the Parliament will be able to guarantee any future budget without reservation. Access to education should be based on the ability to learn and not on the ability to pay. I am delighted to be in a country that still has free education, but we have a hard task ahead of us to ensure that it remains. I am clear that we should ensure that the principle of free education remains in Scotland.”

Read the full debate at http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/officialReports/meetingsParliament/or-10/sor0603-01.htm