Whereas I agree with the headline of what the students are protesting about, I believe essentially they are protesting against the wrong policy – it’s not the new policy which is flawed, but the policies which were instigated some 20 years ago which have led us to where we are today.

With current numbers of 18 year olds pushed into attending ‘university’ being in excess of 50%, the taxpayer frankly can’t afford the £20,000 per student cost. So rather than making students pay themselves – by whatever means successive governments have dreamed up – the policy of sending all and sundry to do four year degree courses in all and sundry should be reversed. There should only be one barrier to higher education – talent; that barrier should be set sufficiently high that only those who will most benefit from that education get to have it, for if everybody gets to go, then there is no barrier of talent, only a barrier of finance.

When I first went to college – Birmingham Conservatoire, the music college faculty of the City of Birmingham Polytechnic, in 1988 the entire number of students throughout all four years in my department – the composition department – was 10. By the time I left the Conservatoire in 1997 (by which time I’d become a part time lecturer), the entire first year intake of student composers numbered 45. Some of them were talented, but a significant number of them, frankly, I’m surprised they managed to pass their GSCE music. One of those whose work was particularly awful I noted nine years later hadn’t improved.

Also when I first went to college, there was a clear distinction between different kinds of higher education institutions and what purpose they served – universities were where the best went to spend three or four years intensively learning from an academic perspective, polytechnics were where the best spent three or four years learning from a vocational perspective, and colleges of further and higher education were where everybody else – with no slight intended upon them – spent one or two years learning how to do specific jobs, and then went and did those jobs.

But the then Prime Minister John Major had the idea that to create a classless society, he’d make everybody pay a contribution towards their higher education, and abolish the distinction between university and polytechnic. So at a stroke, hundreds of institutions across the land, previously known as prime destinations for specific courses, instantly became saddled with the stigma of being ‘new universities’, many of them having to make up silly names (and in the City of Birmingham Polytechnic / Birmingham Polytechnic / University of Central England in Birmingham / University of Central England / Birmingham City University’s case, keep making up silly names) in order to differentiate themselves from the other institutions in the same cities. That policy was extended further even now so that any old college gets to call itself a university, meaning the highly respected in its own field Birmingham College of Food, Tourism, and Creative Studies (a college of higher education) renamed itself to be University College Birmingham, clearly setting itself alongside such as University College Dublin, University College London, and University College Wales. And in the meanwhile some original universities have become less seats of learning and more seats of commerce, with education taking a firm back seat against getting in the conference business and ripping off international students.

Of course, in order to have more students in higher education (and thus not signing on the dole), you need to have more courses. And so, Golf Course Management became a university degree, as did Hair Studies. ‘Hair Studies’ is my usual example when I talk about this – I don’t mean to diminish the artform of a catwalk hair stylist who is at the top of their profession commanding in excess of £500 just to tidy somebody’s split ends, but for most people going in to hairdressing, saddling themselves with a £20k debt to get a hairdressing degree to get a £15k/year job in Chlo’sKutz  is not ‘an investment in their future’.

Society really isn’t improved by 70% of its young people going away to do degrees solely motivated by how much money they’ll be able to earn at the other end – heck, it was people being solely motivated by how much money they’ll earn at the other end which has got us into the current global financial mess in the first place! Society is improved by 70% of its young people not ‘accepting their lot in life’, but going and spending a short amount of time learning how to do something they’ll enjoy, and then going and getting paid for doing it (and thus becoming taxpayers by the age of 20), and the other 30%, the cream of the bunch, going away and getting paid – by us – to learn how to be nuclear physicists, doctors, concert pianists, mathematicians, jewellery designers, actors, and historians etc.

And those 30% who have that talent should have the opportunity to do that whatever their financial circumstances.

“A quarter of people living in England’s countryside will be over 65 by 2020, a campaign group has said. The National Housing Federation said figures estimate a 40% rise in older residents over the next 10 years. The federation, which represents England’s housing associations, said the number of over 65s living in rural England is expected to be 3.23m by 2020, compared with 2.32m in 2008″.

For me, there are two issues here. The first one is the one of the social contract which makes Society what it is; one of the problems the increasing number of rural over-65s increases is that of care for them. If there is too high a proportion of old people to young people (for want of more appropriate – but more cumbersome – language), then it makes it so much more difficult, and costly, to provide suitable care; at its most basic level, fewer younger people in the village means fewer younger people able to simply pop to the shop on behalf of their elderly neighbour who doesn’t find it so easy to get out of the house for themselves any more.

This is of course sad, but the thing is – and here I’m conscious of sounding quite uncomfortably tory – the social contract of society is a two way contract; if Society contracts to look after the elderly who’ve paid in to the National Insurance system for 50 years etc, do not ‘the elderly’ have a correspondent responsibility to facilitate being looked after? Is it really so unreasonable to suggest that somebody who has a high level of caring needs moves from their four bedroom house on the edge of a village in the middle of nowhere (with three buses a week) to somewhere a bit more, y’know, central?

And then there’s the second issue – the dirty little secret of the countryside.

“The rising cost of housing in rural areas is driving out younger people as houses are, on average, £40,000 more expensive than those in towns and cities – even though wages are far lower, it said. At the same time, better-off older people are retiring to their dream country home”.

We’ve been hearing for years how awful it is that young people who are born and grow up in rural villages end up leaving when they come to need a home of their own, because they can’t afford to now buy a house there due to rising countryside property values; this is made out to be the fault of rich urban dwellers buying second homes, and Government Intervention Is Called For.

What always seems to be overlooked is that if rich people are buying all the houses in the countryside, who is selling them to them? Is it not the people already living in the countryside? Fair enough, you sell your house, you try to get the best price for it – but ‘the countryside’ can’t collectively sell itself out to the highest bidder & at the same time collectively complain about pricing its own children out of the market to remain there. Similarly, ‘the countryside’ cannot enjoy the peace and quiet that disconnexion from the urban rat race provides, and at the same time complain about the inconvenience which comes from that disconnexion.