Shame on Messrs Cable and Clegg for colluding in the dismantling of the higher education system in this country.

There used to be a social group known as the ‘lower middle class’ – hard-working, thrifty and aspirational people who valued education and, while being neither well-off nor poor, managed to send their sons and daughters to university. These are the people who have been most betrayed.

In times when any jobs are hard to come by, students no longer have free access to the easy vacation employment they once enjoyed.

Parents will increasingly have to make up the shortfall in their offspring’s income, which not all will be able easily to do.

To have to make sacrifices during the student years and then to see the graduate burdened with a bill greater than many a mortgage will be enough to make many families think twice about the whole process.

The “live now, pay later” attitude displayed by Mr Cable in particular when he asserts that students will in some way be better off because they have to pay nothing up front is redolent of a sleazy post-war bomb-site car salesman– you can drive it off the forecourt today, sir, and there’s nothing to pay.......yet. How stupid does he think students are? Anyone can see that a near tripling of a charge is no “progressive” bargain.

The Conservatives should not escape blame either: their policies have always tended this way.

We expected no better from them, but that Messrs Clegg and Cable, who wafted into power promising a new kind of politics, should renege on a pledge so easily, so quickly and so glibly should never be forgotten by the many younger people who looked to them and their party for some leadership.

All we are offered are crocodile tears and a cringe-inducing handwringing homily about the mess they found when they got into power.

Anyone could have told them they were inheriting a mess. The real trouble is that they made promises, sorry “pledges”, without really thinking they would ever be put to the trouble of having to honour them. No wonder they dare not come to Oxford.

No wonder they skulk away from open debate.

Martin Roberts, Stone Close, Botley, Oxford