Want to get rid of ‘rip-off’ degrees, Rishi? Try abolishing tuition fees

‘Studying is like a process of social stratification, to mark you out as the kind of person with that kind of degree.’ Photograph: skynesher/Getty Images

It was a long time before I understood the phrase “he’ll piss on you and tell you it’s raining” – really understood it, at a gut level. It took 13 years and 10 weeks, to be precise, of successive feckless Conservatives messing everything up and telling us how messed up everything is.

So, having introduced the 2012 tuition-fee regime that leaves students with a life-changing amount of debt, and demoralised and underfunded the sector so that the poverty-paid lecturers at its backbone are always on strike, the party has declared war on “rip‑off” degrees. Young people, Rishi Sunak contends, are being sold a false dream, without the prospect of a decent job at the end of it. Well, yes, Rishi, that is called “life in the UK”.