 Last week Labour published their general election manifesto, a centrepiece of which was the elimination of tuition fees and the re-instruction of student maintenance grants. I'm going to outline eight reasons why getting rid of tuition fees is a fantastic idea, and it doesn't just serve the interests of individuals, but society more generally. Number one, young people have never had it so bad. A few years ago we found out that the wages of those aged 18 to 24 have now fallen back to levels last seen in 1988, probably when many of their parents were leaving university. And while many people have suffered from falling wages since 2008, it's been particularly bad for those in their 20s. With that age group seeing a decline of 12% between 2008 and 2012, an hourly pay, and it's gone down more since then. Even when we look at the legally required minimum wage, it changes by age, with it being higher people over 25 to under 25, the same holds for people over and under 21 and over and under 18. For apprentices, the minimum wage is £3.50, making a mockery of David Cameron's offer that young people either earn or learn, because what kind of choice is it when you can either go to university and get £44,000 worth of debt or go and learn a trade and live in poverty, earning £3.50 an hour, less than £150 a week? Number two, now you're going to find this very hard to believe because it's absurd, but it's also true. The tripling of tuition fees in 2010 means that the taxpayers actually paying more than when they were just £3,000. But how is that possible, you ask? Well, 45% of debt won't be repaid, all but nullifying any gains from increasing student debt, and it's clear the system is moving towards the £48.6 level of non-repayment, at which point fees of £9,000 do indeed cost the taxpayer more than fees of £3,000. So who loses in this situation? Well, students that graduate and pay back those loans, they lose out, but the taxpayer does as well. This is the most idiotic piece of public policy that Britain has probably produced in my lifetime. David Cameron, Nick Clegg, David Willits hang your heads in shame. These people should not be in public life, they should be in stocks. But first and foremost, we need to get rid of the policy altogether, because it's not just individuals who lose out, it's the taxpayer too. Number three, society and the economy both benefit from as many people as possible being able to access tertiary education. We know that countries with the most graduates also tend to exhibit the highest levels of productivity in innovation, and if we look at places like Germany and Scandinavia where tuition fees don't exist, we see not just higher levels of productivity, but also lower levels of poverty and income inequality. Surely it makes sense to follow the path of these countries rather than somewhere like the United States. What's more, business benefits from an educated workforce. They profit from it. It helps them grow and expand and compete. Why should individuals foot the bill of an asset which private enterprise benefits from? Why should the gains of an educated workforce accrue to the private sector while the risks and the costs are socialized onto workers? Number four is the inability to start business and barely anybody mentions this, but think about it. You're an energetic, ambitious young graduate. Are you going to start a business or are you going to take a risk if you've got £50,000 worth of debt? Of course you're not. The worst thing to stop entrepreneurs starting businesses employing more people and paying more taxes is to burden them with all this debt. Let's get rid of it. Number five is reduced spending power. Think about it. The average graduate is going to leave with between £40,000 to £50,000 worth of debt, but also the interest accrued on that. That means they'll be paying off these loans for decades, meaning that there's demand taken out of the economy where money could have been spent on businesses or on homes or on goods and services. They're instead going to loan sharks. Rather than that money being used for productive purposes, helping the economy grow more generally, it's going to parasites, quite frankly. That's not good for anybody. It's not good for final demand. It's not good for jobs. It's not good for wages. Let's stop it. Number six is repayment inequality. And again, this is something actually which is very rarely mentioned. If you have two graduates who've both got the same degree from the same university, both worked hard, but one walks straight into a top-paying job and one is unemployed or on low pay for five or 10 years, the one who walks into the better job and is earning more money will have less interest on their loan than the other one who's been unlucky or just hasn't had the connections which the other one has had. Does that make any sense? Does that sound particularly fair? No, it doesn't. It penalizes graduates who earn the least, charging them the most amount of interest. Could that be more idiotic? Number seven, tuition fees hurt social mobility. And if we want to help that, we've got to get rid of them. Now that may be at odds with what the idiots and governments say, but it's absolutely true. How do I know that? Well, the figures tell us. Students who receive free school meals are longtime indicator of poverty, are less than half as likely to enter higher education than the more affluent peers. With the gap between those offered university places now, the widest it's ever been recorded with a differential of 16.7%. And in 2013, the Commission's report for higher education, the Fair Access Challenge, pointed out that between 2002 and 2011, the percentage of state educated students at Russell Group universities actually fell. That report famously stated that the odds of a child at a state secondary school eligible for free school meals in year 11 being admitted to Oxbridge by the age of 19 were almost 2,000 to one against. And the odds of a privately educated child going to Oxbridge? Well, they were just 20 to one. Number eight, universalism works. We know that countries more universal welfare provision or state intervention don't just see lower levels of income inequality, lower levels of poverty, but they also command far wider consent for state intervention from all classes. And guess why? Well, it's because middle class people will defend the gains of working class people if they themselves enjoy the same provisions. So what does that mean for the left? It means we need to dispense with the new labour idea of means testing, of a patrician attitude to the poor, replacing it with one of solidarity rather than charity, because it doesn't just help reduce and even eliminate poverty, it gives us the social base, the consensus for social democratic politics. While it's true that Labour were in government in 1998 when tuition fees were introduced and in 2004 when they were increased for the first time, on both occasions Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonald defied the wishes of their leadership and, as with so many other issues, have been proven right by history. If you want an explanation as to why Labour lost 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010, policies like tuition fees are the perfect place to start. Simply put, working in lower middle class people didn't feel the Labour Party had their back as they moved further away from universalism and closer to means testing, forgetting about universalism and emphasising patrician attitudes of charity. Getting rid of this is a brilliant way to break with the past and for labour to offer a different kind of economy. Tuition fees, as with so many other parts of Britain's economy, its broken labour market, its rigged taxation system needs to be completely transformed. So let's get rid of tuition fees and let's offer everybody a different kind of education because it's not just holding back individuals, it's holding back all of us.