Lee said “Education is important to society as a whole, not just to the individual. To remove public funding for the study of subjects such as English, history and philosophy would be to deny their public value and the enrichment they provide to our culture through the stimulation of creativity and original thought, and to define a subject as only of any inherent worth if it has an obvious financial value.”
“Passing the costs on to students through increased tuition fees would put a great many people off going to university, particularly those where no one else in their family has been before. There is no way that I, a family university first-timer with a single parent, on a then full grant, for example, would have contemplated going to University under the current rules. I would have thought it was what wealthy people did, and was nothing to do with me. Many would increasingly be unable to afford to value education for it’s own sake, putting the arts, humanities and social sciences out of reach and forcing decisions increasingly based on anticipated financial return. A civilised society values knowledge in of itself. It’s as if we are attempting to socially engineer these troublesome thinkers and questioning creatives out of existence.”
Stewart began stand-up at the age of 20 in 1988, winning the Hackney Empire new act of the year award in 1990. In the 90’s he contributed to various BBC Radio comedy shows, including Fist of Fun and On The Hour, with Steve Coogan and Chris Morris, performed as a stand-up almost nightly on the London circuit, and co-created four series for BBC2 with Richard Herring.
Watch a YouTube video of Stewart Lee talking about fees as well as more information on the National Demo at www.demo2010.org