Just noticing Nick Clegg's defence in the Commons of his party's acquiescence over tuition fees.
On justifying the turn around from April (when he called a potential rise to £7,000 "a disaster"), Nicky boy trotted out the old cliche:
"We have stuck to our ambition to make sure that going to university is done in a progressive way so that those people who are presently discouraged from going to university – bright people from poor backgrounds, discouraged by the system we inherited from her [Harman's] government – are able to do so. That is why our policy is more progressive than hers."
Without wishing to suggest that Labour had a particularly good policy on HE, if I hear one more over educated rich boy say that they're working towards making sure "bright people from poor backgrounds" can go to university, whilst intellectual lightweights like Clegg himself can stroll in without a thought I might scream. Like the fight for women's equality, where women often had to be better than their male counterparts to get or hold down the same job, poor students have to be 50% cleverer than the average before anyone cares. In an intellect-for-intellect match up, legions of dizzy fuckwits from the middle and upper classes are sitting in seminar rooms and lecture theatres around the country, whilst people who are their intellectual equals or even superiors (but not by *quite* enough) are struggling to work out what they're going to do at 18 now all the jobs have dried up.
If we're serious about separating the fate of young people from the economic success (or failure) of their parents, then completely ordinary minds from poor backgrounds should be getting a university education too, so that maybe one day they can be Deputy Prime Minister.
