Student fees debate

This has to be the best piece concerning the actual substance of the Browne Report I've read. It's over a month old now, but as far as I'm aware the vote in the Commons on Thursday conformed to all the major points covered.

What shines through particularly clearly is the critique of the market fundamentalism that lies at the core of the report's - and the coalition's - thinking. Can we look forward to other important policy areas being totally driven by the spending preferences of 17 year-olds? Which is not to criticise 17 year-olds - a housing policy entirely driven by the spending preferences of the 50+ age group would be just as scary (as well as being not too far away from what we actually have at the moment).

I know I should be used to it by now, given that market mechanisms of the type proposed by Browne seem to be central to almost all policy change that has occurred since about 1980, but I'm constantly amazed by the vacuity of the (usually unspoken) assumptions about human nature and social action that lie behind them. As Collini points out, the outcomes of 'reforms' such as these seem almost inevitably to strengthen and entrench existing financial, political and social hierarchies. One of the prime reasons they do so is that people emphatically are not perfectly informed rational consumers, individually or collectively. This is is why, despite the best efforts of Thatcher, Major and Blair, we still have decision-making processes in most areas of social and political life that do not rely totally on the 'free' market. Why higher education should be chosen to test the idea that important social institutions can be successfully run almost entirely by the invisible hand is beyond me.