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University fees. Oh dear, what a sensitive subject. I've just watched Question Time's "Next Generation" edition and the biggest applause came for a question on scrapping tuition fees, and today I had my last Academic Board here in which we were treated to a presentation on the National Student Satisfaction Survey initial results.

I'm reminded that Stephen Tall takes an apparently very un-Lib Dem position on tuition fees and that we are currently thinking about the party's future policy on Higher Education funding. But, horror of horrors, I think I'm beginning to agree. I suppose I ought to be careful about what I say here. I am one of the elected staff governors of my institution, and at some point in my four year term I dare say we're going to have to take a position on the future of university fees in order to feed into the process of deciding what happens next when the £3,000 annual cap on fees is debated around 2010.

Next academic year, as the elected governor, I am hoping to host a series of events for staff and students to help inform any decision I might have to participate in on this and some other pressing issues, such as the pressures universities face to bring in corporate "partners" (privatise to most people I suspect) in various areas of operation. So for now, these thoughts are just musings on what might be one line of reasoning.

Back to the National Student Satisfaction Survey. We were presented with a very pretty colourful document showing a table with red blobs for where the university scored in the lower quartile of student responses nationally and green ones where we scored in the top quartile, and yellows for he in-between areas. There's a huge project going on nationally to collect and interpret these data and eventually the "results" will be on the UCAS website supposedly to help prospective students decide where to go.

I have to say they seem pretty subjective - for a start universities themselves can't control in what groups, and some of them seem pretty counter-intuitivie, particular subjects may be placed. And then the raw figures do not seem to reflect the numbers of students on a course. So you could have a hundred courses with three students on each, where one student completed the survey and gave you a bad mark and you'd end up with a hundred rows of "red" squares and one course with a thousand students on where 700 completed the survey and gave you top marks and you'd end up with a mostly red page.

And I suddenly realized where in my varied career I had seen such a chart before. It looked just like the old Stock Exchange FTSE-100 SEAQ/Ceefax prices screen with reds for falling shares and in that case blue for rising prices. And it got me thinking...someone is expending an awful lot of effort to translate student perceptions into some pseudo-objective rating for an institution or subject that is intended to give a guide on which basis people will choose what institution or course to go to.

But because there's no real market in fees - practically nobody has decided to charge less than the £3,070 "maximum" fee (mainly because it is nothing like enough to make up for the 60% real terms drop in state funding over the past couple of decades) - this perceptual information cannot translate into prospective students' value judgment about where to spend their money. This effectively compulsory tax on learning cannot put a price on any particular course or institution or any number of factors why someone might want to study somewhere.

There seems to be an assumption, from my observations of conversations of other governors and senior management of universities, that the fees cap will need to be completely abandoned when the next decision date comes along in 2010. And they're right, to an extent. This muddle cannot continue. It is serving nobody. We either have to bite the bullet and fully fund free higher education, in which case you either give all institutions the same unit funding and those in which excellence comes at a price will descend to mediocrity, or we have to open up the market so universities charge their full costs in fees and make their own decisions about who to assist to afford their prices, to whom to offer discounts and for what subjects and so on.

This latter will be painful - we do not have a culture of people saving up front for college as they do in the US for example, or the incentive that though they may be not well off, they can make it onto their desired course if they achieve the grade to stand out and get a scholarship. And of course in my ideal world of land taxes paying for a citizens income there would be something to save for college, even for the least well off families. But we cannot lurch from one government decision to another every few years. This next decision in 2010 needs to be the last. It needs to set out a longer term target - either to return to full funding or to aim for a totally open market, over the course of, say, a decade, so that youngsters only just entering education now, and their families, know what to expect by the time they get to deciding on university courses.

I started to write this on Thursday evening. As I come to complete it, this story is just breaking in the Guardian. QED?

Technorati Tags: higher education, tuition fees, radicalism

This month it will be ten years since I made a decision that would change my life. I joined a political party for the first time. Naturally it was the Liberal Democrats. Why naturally? Well I had been brought up in a Scottish non-conformist family all of whom had always, at least as far as I can remember of family discussions, voted Liberal. At least in my grandparents' day the Conservatives in Scotland were the party of the Kirk and the middle classes and Labour the party that the Papist working class were told to vote for by their bishops. So both sets of grandparents, Gospel Hall Brethren, had voted for that nice Mr Grimond.

Having been educated privately, however, mostly as a result of being predominantly either ex-patriate or just plain itinerant in my childhood, we were drilled not to vote Labour, because they would, obviously, close our beloved schools. And I certainly couldn't vote Tory in 1987 or 1992 in Birmingham, Edgbaston for that wicked old bat Jill Knight, sponsor of section 28 and staunch supporter of abandoning free eye and dental checks - an issue which was probably and somewhat surprisingly the first in my voting life which moved me to write to my MP (setting aside my eleven year old self writing to a lady called Shirley who was education secretary to complain about the punishments meted out - like not being allowed tuck - at the private prep school I attended!).

I instinctively wanted less government interference in our lives and choices. It's maybe hard to imagine for someone not affected by such seemingly arbitrary rules, but for someone growing up gay to feel that you're very being is somehow illegal, second class, it can be a powerful motivator (I'll never really understand gay Tories to be honest).

But that's not to say that my support for the Lib Dems was just a protest against the others. The issue that I remember most that clinched my vote though was a peculiarly wonkish one - PR. It had seemed to me during my teens that the sort of majorities enjoyed by the Tories under Thatcher were bad for politics and bad for the country. I had a sense that it didn't really matter what the policy agenda of different parties was so long as they didn't have an inbuilt monopoly on power and that dissenting voices had a fair shout in government. I had always been keen on devolution for Scotland also - I was always less convinced about the Principality for some reason! And this too seemed like Liberal policies. And personality wise, I just liked Paddy, as my parents had liked both the Davids, though especially David Steel, and my grandparents had liked Jo.

The demise of the ship-building industry that had given one grandfather his livelihood and the destruction of the coal (and steel) industry that had given the other his appalled me, as did the virtual civil war that caused, but I'm not entirely sure that I connected it with "government" so much as a general decline in heavy industry as other world industrial powers came on-stream - the era of Kobe Steel and Korean supertankers. I worked on the stock exchange through most of the period of the big privatizations and though I somehow instinctively liked the idea of widening asset ownership, I could see in the way that people cheated the system (at least in spirit) to get share allotments and then sell them for a quick buck that this great asset give-away was not necessarily the way to achieve that. Nor were taxes a huge issue. The poll tax had made me angry, but otherwise, whilst it was nice that they were falling, somehow I knew that death and taxes were inevitable and that they could go up or down all they liked and you'd still end up paying them.

Ultimately, even had I thought about voting for anyone else, the sleaze stories of the Major government repelled me and I could not quite trust Labour, riven as it had been through my formative years with the Militant battle. I had felt encouraged when the "Gang of Four" left Labour, believing that this was a chance to reinvigorate three party politics and break the duopoly of Labour-Tory dominance. I could probably have voted for a party led by John Smith, but never got the opportunity. It seemed to me however that New Labour had an innate artificiality about it. And this was reinforced when, during the 1997 election, I wrote to Millbank asking them about specific commitments on gay equality and was told there were none - manifesto commitments that is.

 I'm sure the celebration that followed Tony Blair's entry to Number 10 was genuine, if you were a Labour supporter, even at that point a broad left Labour supporter who may have hoped that "The Project" was a mechanism for getting into power that would be relaxed afterwards, but for me it seemed like insufferable arrogance. And so it was that in the September of 1997, I took a leap into the unknown and decided to put my money where my vote was and join the Liberal Democrats. I felt I didn't want to do anything else at first than be an armchair member, so I decided to make my subs the equivalent of a "recommended annual" subscription every month naively thinking that this would prevent me having to actually do anything, or at least allow me smugly to refuse to do anything! Eighteen months later - fifteen of which I had not engaged in any party activity locally - I was a City Councillor! And from a relative political bystander, it was suddenly a huge part of my life.

Next: Ten years; left, right but always liberal.

All this brouhaha about the Olympics, torches, boycotts and so on has not passed me by. I hear all sorts of stuff from the "athletes' side" about how the Olympics is not political, about how people have trained all their lives to get to this supreme test of their skills and abilities against others from every nation on earth. I have some sympathy with that. I was once quite a competitive fencer. I used to love the competitions (second in the West Midlands under 16s foil if you're interested and can believe it!) and I can only imagine the excitement and satisfaction of having made it to the very top on the planet in your discipline.

But saying that the Olympics is not political seems to me nowadays like saying it's non-commercial and strictly amateur - at least the latter has been the case within my life time. But, as we all saw on 7th July 2005 (when there wasn't other news on that day), the choice of venue is intensely political, certainly in the sense that politicians are deeply involved in it. It can (and has already in the case of London) make people fortunes, that others pay for.

I admit to having had misgivings when Beijing was awarded the games - I don't like the fact that Formula One has a race there, though in a sense that's less of an issue because F1 is an unashamedly commercial, big money, oligarchic event that pays but lip service to the troubles of "little people" and with no loftier ideals such as the Olympic movement professes. But I, along with many others it seems, did hope that having such a high profile international event, together with their growing commercial and economic presence in the world, would focus minds in China on reform. Until I think it was last year sometime that someone high up in the Chinese government said something to the effect that China would never be a liberal democracy ("over my dead body" by implication). I accept that moving such a huge population to full democracy would take time, but this was a "never, never, never" type of statement.

Ever since I have thought that "we" should somehow object to the whole shebang and the credence it gives to the veneer of acceptability. I know that in 1980 the Moscow regime was pretty similar to Beijing's and that the boycott then was a specific protest about the invasion of Afghanistan (oh how we can now ruefully laugh about that!) and it did no good whatever so far as I can remember - though even then, China joined the boycott. So as an organized thing, I'm not sure a "national" boycott will do any good this time either. However, as in 1980, there are other symbolic objections we in the democratic world can make. Athletes could attend and take part under the flag of the Olympic movement rather than their national flags and anthems for example.

But it is pure fantasy to say that the Olympics are non-political - they never have been in reality, even long before they became a festival for junk food vendors and sweat shop employers to tout their tawdry wares and part of a professional athlete's career progression. The Soviet Union - and other countries within their sphere of influence - didn't take part from 1928 till 1952. African nations withdrew in protest at South Africa and Rhodesia being allowed to take part in the seventies. If it really were apolitical, why does the torch even go anywhere near Downing Street - surely if it's all above politics it should be a royal occasion.

Personally, if any athlete choses voluntarily, having gained a place in the team, not to attend, putting lives in Darfur, Tibet or, so far little mentioned despite last year's riots and crackdown, Burma before their personal attainment, they'll have my full support and they ought not to be punished or denigrated for making that sacrifice.

Why?

Is the internet not the twentieth century's greatest example of "voluntary co-operation"? At least the late twnetieth century anyway. Why do we need "governance". It can be a beautiful thing. Like the lack of planning policy that went into Edinburgh's New Town?

Yes, there are examples, pretty egregious ones at that, of countries where human rights are not respected anyway further attacking peoples' rights for speaking out on the internet, or restricting their access, but one of the beauties (if we exclude the gazillions of spam email messages and viruses) is that it has provided an infrastructure that has been used time and again by clever people - for good and bad - to get round attempts to limit what they can do.

But if we try to tame the internet, and to extend some kind of official governance to it, aren't we officially entrenching the idea that it's there to be governed, for governments to interfere in?

My theory is that this forum is more about our governments. They are shit scared that the potential for the internet to bring about person to person interconnectivity, allowing people to organize in groups other than the geographical territories they manage, will bring about their irrelevance.

Should we also be worried about the corporate "colonization" of the internet that has gathered pace over the past five years or so? Well, yes and no. Actually, for most traditional corporations using the internet it's not about pushing the small guy out, but competing with them like they never have had to previously in a medium in which the little guy, more flexible and quicker to change, has a head start on. Pound for pound spent on it I'm sure small businesses are "better" at the internet and getting better all the time. And the internet could be the best way of levelling the playing field, democratising capitalism.

It is surely the very fact that the internet is not governed by nation states - that it is still a "land" of pioneering sprits pushing the boundaries - of trade, of communication, of knowledge transfer - that gives it its strength. And that's what scares those who would rule us.

Leave it alone! It has more power to break those regimes that abuse us than any supranational body that's incapable of preventing some of its member governments doing just what they please anyway.

I see the rather sneering, simpering Douglas Murray is on Question Time again tonight. By my reckoning that makes it at least three times this calendar year - once in late April, in the schools Question Time in summer and now. Is he shagging someone on Dimblebore's research staff or something? If "neo-cons" are, as a group, significant enough to warrant representation on such a program, surely there must be more of them than just him?