Scrapping the EMA is a defeat for a compassionate Britain.

Another set of prejudices pandered to.

When the EMA was scrapped it was accompanied by a significant amount of language that I personally find horrifying. The volume of people whining that the people who received it didn’t need it, and that all the people on it were just buying games for their xbox, it was clearly a “waste of tax payer’s money”, they should get a part-time job and that most students would still go to college anyway. Accompanied by the now cliché “Labour spent all the money” lines.

When I read these kinds of comments it strongly reminds me of the Victorian “Deserving vs Undeserving poor” ideas, these morals resulted in the workhouses. People felt that someone should really really need to have the handout if they were to receive it, so they expected the disadvantaged to beg and plead and do the worst jobs in society to get even a loaf of bread. Of course, I am by no means comparing the scrapping of the EMA to a workhouse but the language being used is the same.

Most complaints about EMA are to do with the means-testing, and many do have a point here, there are real examples where students who have received EMA are far from even realising that they’re receiving that much at all. The household income method doesn’t really work when you get examples of rich families buying their son/daughter a flat somewhere so that they’re entitled to EMA because they’re not living with their parents. There are many other examples which, whilst not as extreme, are nevertheless still irritating.

But does this justify scrapping the scheme altogether? Absolutely not; EMA was a very young scheme and no doubt had problems, tweaking it to provide a more logical framework would have sufficed. (This being said means-testing has not been outright proven to actually save the tax payer any money, the money that goes into means-testing itself often outweighs what is saved by it.)

The thing is that the introduction of EMA had visible, and very positive, effects; college numbers increased, school retention rates increased and there are countless examples of students being given an extra set of choices to be able to go to the college that they wanted to go to not simply the local one. Even the Conservatives are aware of this, which is why they are so eager to point out their “replacement scheme” even if it is wholly inadequate.

I’m not going to go into arguments about the national economy, or indeed the deficit, in this piece as that is another story. But there is no reason that anyone has given me that can justify the complete abolishment of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, they are the same reasons people give for abolishing Jobseekers Allowance and the NHS, and I fear that if the government continue to follow this line of reasoning that the entire fabric of a compassionate society will be demolished.