Rescinding home student status for EU students: middle-class problem or class war against immigrants?

In the debate about home student status for EU students, I’m unashamedly biased. I moved to the UK in 2010 as an EU student and benefitted from the international experience, the ability to study my chosen subjects at one of the best universities in the world and the chance to make new and fast friends in a different country. I joined the Labour Party and stayed in the UK, something I’m sure many who know me from Twitter deeply regret.

I would not have been able to afford international fees, not by a long stretch. Higher education in the UK is more expensive than in other European states already. Many, like my own country, Poland, have free tuition written into the constitution.

The idea of increasing our fees by up to 1,000% (to £24,750-£34,678 at my old uni) is baffling. These are US-style prices for tuition that, in the present political climate, would be beyond what even the most radical Tory think-tankers would call politically feasible.

And yet the government is reportedly considering the abolition of home fee status for EU students from 2020/21, according to Buzzfeed. This would immediately raise fees for new EU students to unattainable levels, effectively cutting off universities from a significant source of income and UK businesses from a key supply of skilled workers.

This policy is anti-migrant, narrowly nationalistic and goes against Labour’s internationalist values. It is part of a significant othering of EU migrants in which some even in Labour have been complicit, across factions.

It also goes against the Tories’ purported ‘pro-business’ stance. Business needs skilled migration, including migrant talent trained at UK universities, to succeed. This marks another step in the transformation of the Conservative Party from the party of business to the party of populistic nationalism. And Labour, particularly the Shadow Education Secretary and the Shadow Chancellor, should hammer the government’s relationship with business. From a tactical perspective, this is a useful wedge issue.

Universities minister Chris Skidmore has described this story as an unconfirmed leak of a cabinet document, not agreed policy. However, the mood of the Commons following an urgent question raised by Angela Rayner earlier this week suggested that there is indeed broad Tory agreement for such a move. It was couched in progressive terms – ‘we won’t discriminate against other international students’ and similar arguments.

This obscures the fact that only the richest international students from outside the EU can currently study in the UK. It is not progressive to make things much worse for more people, just so that nobody is excluded – it is progressive to extend benefits.

Abolishing tuition fees is a totemic policy that Labour has used to capture the youth vote. At its heart, it is a challenge to the ongoing neoliberal commodification of education, which casts people as mere tools to be fashioned according to economic whim.

It does not allow for the fact that unconventional education, including humanities, can add value in unanticipated ways – that is the strength of individual liberation. And, fundamentally, profit should not be the goal of self-betterment. Abolished fees combined with support for lower income students is the correct long-term solution. We shouldn’t be ashamed that a Labour government will, probably, need to tax more for this – but that is an argument for another time.

Let’s aim to do what Germany does, a state famous for high-quality vocational, higher and technical education. Free to all, including international students, and with tuition fees abolished, because the better educated the workforce, the greater the long term gain for all. Protect and extend is an important motto that should be at the heart of our policies with respect to free movement and migration.