Tarquin's and Jemima's Euro-freebies

You'll have noticed that petulance yesterday hit 9 on the Coogan Scale at the Commons rejection of an amendment that linked the Erasmus scheme to the WA Bill. Soyboys and snowflakes across the land swooned in grief as the great middle-class freebie was left at the future discretion of the government. Let's take a quick look.

The following table was published by the EU back in November -

Erasmus has a budget of about €16.45bn for the 2014-2020 programme period, of which the UK currently pays around 11% or €1.81bn. From the EU's table above, we get just 3% of Erasmus awards, worth around €0.49bn. We're therefore currently paying around €1.32bn to give the children of other nations a nice freebie - and it's clear that both France and Germany are the nations that benefit most.

Erasmus is the sort of scheme that most benefits kids from ABC1 homes, university top-streamers, those with comfortable parental incomes, kids who can easily master a second European language, with parents with the time and inclination to drop their offspring and their huge rucks at airports, collect them again as required and fill their accounts with spending money. Gap year kids. The privileged offspring of our privileged metropolitan elites.

You might consider this to be both criminal waste and squander and a not very fair use uf UK tax resources. Certainly we should encourage and assist our young people to travel and learn in Europe. We should also ensure we give UK taxpayers value, and we should ensure that young people from all backgrounds, including apprentices and those at tech and vocational schools as well as universities, can fairly and equitably access any grants.

So I'd encourage the government to steel itself to resist the sharp elbows of the middle classes, the petulant whining at the red end of the Coogan Scale and to introduce proposals for participation on fair terms.

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