The Scottish Government refuses to acknowledge the way student debt hits young working class people hardest. Even the NUS Scotland virtually ignores the issue. Our leading expert cries shame.
Scottish Government’s greatest financial asset is… student loans
When student loans have become the Scottish government’s biggest financial asset and one in six Scots of working age owes outstanding loan money to Holyrood it’s time to have a serious look – especially when the SG pledged in 2007 to eliminate student debt. Scotland’s leading expert on student finance investigates.
Privatising Scottish water: the issue gets even murkier
The Scottish Government has been trying to push its so-called plans to hand ownership and control of business water usage to a private English company into the long grass. Time to come crystal clear and transparent on what its real plans are.
Human rights and ethical exceptionalism
Nicola Sturgeon has positioned the Scottish Government as the stoutest defender of the Human Rights Act. But the SNP’s position is not as clear-cut as that, argues penal reformer Lucy Hunter Blackburn.
Scottish Government muddies water on privatisation
How the quiet privatisation of some water services not only brings the Scottish Government up against many of its own supporters, but cuts across some of the most powerful rhetoric it has used over the past two years, not least in relation to threats of privatisation in the NHS.
Landslide, wipeout: FPTP distorts the picture
Talk of an SNP landslide and a Labour wipeout in Scotland on May 7 simply underlines the distorting effects of the first-past-the-post voting system in Westminster elections.
No fees? No pain?
For many people, it is obvious that Scotland must have a fair system for funding students. Since the abolition of the graduate endowment in 2007, the government has pressed home that we should be proud to have a system based on “ability to learn, not ability to pay.” The alternative story is not so strong on rhetoric: it is more about attention to numbers.