Blog: Put a note in your diary against today’s date.

Because today, the United Kingdon finally lost its way altogether.

Lord Browne’s plan to open up the University sector to free market economics says one thing only about the state of modern Britain: We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The former boss of BP says universities should be able to charge students what they want for their education, though they will face charges when their annual fees top £6,000, and that competition will drive up standards. Graduates won’t start paying back their fees until they are earning at least £21,000 and they will only be charged a basic rate of interest.

How reasonable.

Or at least that’s what the good lord would have you believe.

But that’s before you consider the obscenity of every graduate leaving university saddled with £30,000 of debt.

Or the simple indecency of university becoming once again a privilege reserved for the wealthy — because ordinary hard-working families simply cannot afford to bankroll this level of debt.

Or worse still, the assumption which underlies Lord Browne’s whole report that the only purpose of university is to turn out high-flying graduates who will earn big money. There’s no thought that university has a social element, that it teaches our youngsters independence, self-esteem, self-worth and the like. That it introduces them to a wider community, broadens their horizons and helps them develop into more rounded people.

No. In Lord Browne’s world students go to university simply because they are greedy and want to earn as much as possible for themselves in the future. It is the bleakest view of humanity imaginable.

The coalition will say they cannot afford to keep funding unlimited numbers of students because of the legacy of debt left by the last Labour Government.

So their answer is to saddle our brightest and best youngsters with a mountain of debt all of their own.

It is the politics of the madhouse. Let’s solve debt by creating more debt.

But it also smacks of political opportunism, though that will perhaps only become more clear when Mr Cameron, Mr Osborne and the rest of the multi-millionaires currently running the country have to explain why they can still afford to send their children to university but you and I cannot.

By Jon Simcock