My first year at uni, there was still a grant if you could prove you needed it. But everyone else got loans.

In my halls at uni, 90% of the the kids with rich parents got grants. I had to get a loan.

Sadly, here's what happens IRL when a good idea like this gets implemented /1 https://twitter.com/DanielPhilips1/status/1328392179329474561

So the state (rightly) has to decide, in some way, what makes a kid rich and a kid poor.

You'd think that's straight forward in theory. But it turns out that poverty is like that (almost certainly apocryphal) French judicial definition of porn:

"You know it when you see it."

But of course you can't build a grant/loan system based on "know it when you see it". You need written rules. To keep things fair. In theory.

But you know who LOVE rules?

Accountants.

You know who HAVE accountants?

People with money.

So you come up with a definition of poverty. Yay.

Enter stage left, Scrooge McDuck. His nephews want to go to uni. Scrooge doesn't want to pay. So he turns to the accountants HE ALREADY PAYS and says:

"Make my nephews look poor."

And that's suddenly what happens. Now the nephews don't LIVE with Scrooge anymore. Not on paper. They live with their mother. Who, IT MAGICALLY TURNS OUT has no assets to her name and her only income is 10k a year from a part time job in a dress shop.

Which (oh hey) Scrooge owns

So they tighten the rules and the definition of poverty. Bingo. Loophole closed.

Except what was a loophole for Scrooge's accountants, WASN'T a loophole for (say) a genuine breadline single parent with a cleaning job.

Now buried in the new rules somewhere is an exemption for that genuine case. But finding it requires:

1) Time
2) Education

Which are LUXURIES to poor families, or

3) Money to pay an accountant.

OH HEY! Remember who has an accountant?!

Yeah.

And so the cycle starts again...

And that is how as the child of two working class parents, working multiple jobs, I got barely any support.

While I was in halls with kids on full grants and loans, who drove a new car every year and boasted that they'd invested their loans.

Because mommy/daddy had accountants.

And i think that's also the experience that pretty much cemented two thoughts in my head:

1) The rich will ALWAYS find a way to get access to something intended to help the poor. So don't put barriers in front of the poor.

2) Governance can change lives. For better or worse.

And this is also why I'm a massive backer of the principle of universal income, btw.

Because pro-tip:

The generic arseholes who you don't WANT getting your tax money are already getting it. That won't change. But now you get to help the people we DO want to help, too.

And by helping THOSE people. By lifting those people UP, we'll create jobs, new economies, new art and a whole bunch of other things that benefit society a HELLUVAH lot more than trust fund kids stashing their accountant-acquired cheap loans in high yield stocks ever did.

People talk about things like free education or universal income as if they are overly idealistic. As if they're fluffy goody-good ideas.

You know what? Fuck that. No.

I believe in those things because I think humanity is generally the worst version of itself.

And so we have to model the best outcomes we can on the principle that people will abuse, in some way, the systems we put in place to stop them abusing them.

So we need to build governance systems that minimise the potential for that, and universalise where we can.