SARAH VINE: My radical plan to save universities

On the surface of it, Labour's decision to break another promise and put up university tuition fees feels like a smack in the chops for educational aspiration: just like the mean-spirited, ideological and poorly thought-out decision to charge VAT on private school fees.

In Opposition, this government – and in particular Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner – made grandiose pledges about 'free education for all throughout your life', no doubt mindful of appealing to voters aged 18-24 who, bless 'em, still fall for this socialist claptrap.

To be rowing back so quickly on that vow is an embarrassment, even a betrayal. It doesn't really matter that the fee increase, at least for the first year, is relatively modest at £285, up from £9,250.

That's still enough to worry students and their families – and, over the course of a three or four-year degree, as fees rise with inflation, it will all start to feel expensive pretty quickly for them.

The real problem is that it's a sticking plaster, and not even a decent one at that; more one of those that makes your skin go all weird and anaemic and wrinkly.

Because if this government really cared about fixing the higher education system (and possessed any moral courage, which they clearly do not), they would be taking a far more radical approach.

Truth is, the proliferation of university degrees is one of the worst frauds ever perpetrated by any government over the past 50 years.

When Tony Blair told the Labour Party conference in 1999, 'today, I set a target of 50 per cent of young adults going into higher education in the next century', he set in train a process that has undermined the integrity of British universities, precipitated a catastrophic skills shortage – and conned generations of young people into saddling themselves with crippling debt for no benefit whatsoever.

It was Blair's government, after all, that introduced tuition fees back in 1998. To begin with, they were just £1,000 per year; top-up fees of £3,000 were introduced in 2004 and then capped at £9,000 in 2012 and again at £9,250 five years later.

But the real crime was not financial, it was cultural.

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Thanks to Blair's 'aspirational' vision, every kid today now thinks they need to go to 'uni' (awful term) or they are worthless. Whereas before it was perfectly OK for a child not to be sufficiently academic for university, now they are made to feel like a failure if they can't – or simply don't want to – go down that path.

In turn, universities have expanded massively on the back of this notion of 'democratised learning' (another irksome Blairite term) in huge, greedy land grabs. This had led to resources being stretched, teaching standards falling – and young people wasting their time on a catastrophic scale.

To help beef up the bottom line, the number of international students has also exploded. Tuition fees for foreign undergraduates range from around £11,000 to £38,000 per year, with an average of around £22,000.

Last year alone, net migration of non-EU students stood at nearly a quarter of a million and that's not counting family and/or dependants they often choose to bring along with them.

Often these students and their families outstay their visas, worsening the pressure on resources from illegal immigration.

The previous government introduced visa restrictions on relatives for non-research students (which Labour will no doubt reverse) so that 250,000 figure is actually down from 328,000 the year before.

The response from universities has been a general panic – hence this concession from the government.

But it won't fix the problem. All that will happen is that more and more not terribly intellectual students will pay ever-rising sums to do flimsy, near-useless degrees while taking out huge loans for which the Government charges an outrageous 6 per cent. There are credit card companies with better deals.

And it gets worse. Because of this obsession with 'uni', thousands of young people who might otherwise have begun vocational training courses have ended up at sub-standard establishments in the back end of nowhere.

They have failed to benefit from any really useful education, while worsening the country's shortage of skilled workers – from plumbers to nurses – which we're having to fill with immigrants instead.

Ask yourself: why are British bricklayers rarer than hen's teeth? Because they're too busy studying street dance at Beersville College.

Instead of doing something useful and productive with their lives, they're left clutching worthless pieces of paper while being tens of thousands of pounds in debt. And all for what? So Left-wing politicians can witter on about social mobility. What a con.

'All must have prizes?' No. If you give everyone prizes, then the prize becomes worthless. Which is exactly where we've ended up with our universities today.

The solution? Simple: raise the bar. Return Britain's universities to what they once were: genuine, lofty, slightly eccentric centres of excellence, where only the brightest of the brightest can study and where, crucially, a person's presence is not determined by class or quotas or box-ticking, but by one thing alone . . . ability.

Decimate the number of institutions and not only will you make a degree worth having again, Labour will finally be able to keep one of their old promises – and scrap university tuition fees for real.

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If you haven't had a chance to watch it yet, I can heartily recommend Kate Winslet's turn as the American Second World War photographer Lee Miller in Lee. Not only does she deliver a compelling performance in the film, it's a reminder – as we prepare for Remembrance Sunday – of the horrors that generation witnessed and of what they endured for the sake of future generations.

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Force them to sell up to meet inheritance tax bills and all that will be lost. But perhaps that's been Labour's plan all along. Or, as Joni Mitchell might have paraphrased it, pave paradise and put up a council block. 

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After all, he was swift to banish Diane Abbott last year when she was accused of playing down suggestions of racism against Jewish people.

Butler's crime is just as bad, if not worse. What's he waiting for?

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