TONY BLAIR'S government is hellbent on imposing a frontal attack on higher education which Thatcher and the Tories shrank from implementing.
Hiding behind the recommendations of the Dearing Report, Education Secretary David Blunkett wants to impose tuition fees of £1,000 a year on university students, marking New Labour's final, decisive break with the concept of free education funded from taxation.
The government is using a selection of breathtakingly cynical arguments to justify a policy that Labour would have sprung to denounce at almost any time in the 1980s, even while the new government poses as a champion of "education, education, education"
The envy and resentment of older, unskilled workers is being invoked to whip up a mood of hostility to graduates who according to Blunkett and co "benefit" personally from their university education, stepping easily into senior and well-paid jobs: the implication is that they should jolly well pay for the privilege. Of course ministers blandly ignore the growing numbers of graduates who have no jobs or who are forced into low-paid work.
But of course if Labour were to adopt a steeply progressive taxation policy, and raise taxes on those earning most, those graduates who do particularly well would automatically contribute far more over their working lives than a miserable £3,000: and the policy would generate extra cash NOW, not five years' time.
An alternative line is for Labour to argue that there is an increasing need for funded from taxation.
If Blunkett argues now that university graduates should be charged fees as individuals because they "benefit" from their degrees, how long will it be before he or some other Blairite hack argues that A level or GCSE students, too, potentially benefit from these qualifications and should pay tuition fees?
How long before the same principles are applied to the NHS, arguing that patients "benefit" from operations and should pay as individuals for each item of hospital treatment or even claiming that imposing charges would give more patients the "opportunity" to attend hospital?
As we can see in the NHS, where Labour have connived at the Tory policy of privatising the long-term care of the elderly and publicly flirted with the idea of new charges (alongside new efforts to persuade profit-seeking firms to build hospitals), once the notion of collective provision of vital services is abandoned, Labour is on the slippery slope to a priva tised, increasingly polarised society.
And once the policy of funding basic public services from progressive taxation is repudiated, those who will lose out most heavily will be those already at the bottom of the heap.
There are signs that a growing number of Labour back-benchers are uneasy at Blunkett's latest disastrous policy. They must be called upon to speak out, and to join with teaching unions, students and the wider workers' movement to fight in defence of free education.