Abraham Lincoln said that you can A fod all the people some of the
time, some of the people all the time, but not all of the people all the time. In the squalid last week of January, Tony Blair's government, aided by Lord Hutton, acted in defiance of this basic law of politics.
In the process they showed their utterly brutal right-wing face, the pathetic spinelessness of most Labour MPs and the Blairites' determination to push their own neoliberal, privatising, agenda to the end.
As the world now knows, the Labour backbench rebellion on tuition fees collapsed on Tuesday 27 January, when Nick Brown, the rebels' "chief whip' turned turtle and with a small group of similar pro-Gordon Brown friends, ensuring a government majority of just five - which would have been four if Labour MP David Taylor hadn't voted in both lobbies.
The mechanism by which this was done was bizarre - it boiled down to Charles Clarke giving an 'assurance' that in a year or so after the imposition of the new fees system, there will be a review of whether it is keeping students from poor backgrounds out of prestigious university courses.
Even a five-year old could see this 'assurance was worthless. When variable fees were introduced in Australia, they were capped at a maximum level, a cap that was subsequently abolished.
Anyone who has thought about the matter for five minutes can see that the same will happen here. According to the government's own figures, variables fees up to the £3000 maximum will bring in about £l.5 billion, against the £1l billion deficit which universities face.
This means that for absolute certain, in a few years time universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College and the LSE will be charging €15,000 a year - £45,000 in fees alone for an undergraduate course.
Even for less prestigious universities, the £3000 figure will be revised upwards, allegedly to keep pace with inflation. The net consequence of all this is that the class bias of higher education will be brutally reinforced, keeping poorer students away from elite colleges, and - faced with the prospect of huge post-graduate debts - out of higher education altogether.
All but the dimmest Labour MP must understand this. They must also know the government is pushing hard for universities to maximise commercial sponsorship, bending academic research even more to the priorities of multinational corporations, on the model of that well-known institution in the Fens, Cambridge Microsoft University Inc.
Nick Brown, former agriculture minister and GMB northern region organiser, was tipped the wink to capsize the opposition by his boss Gordon Brown.
The Browns calculate that by 'saving' Tony Blair, they have revealed who really has the power and the ability to lead - just as Boris Yeltsin's saving of Mikhail Gorbachov during the 1990 attempted coup, was the prelude to replacing him.
Whether the Browns are right or not, who knows? What we do know is they allowed a hugely unpopular measure to go through parliament based on petty bureaucratic calculation. This unedifying spectacle was witnessed by a nation hugely opposed to these variable fees, where only very rich families for whom everything is cheap, can afford to be indifferent.
f Blair, Clarke and the Browns defied all
logic, Lord Justice Hutton the next day
defied belief in exonerating the government, and finding only the BBC and Dr David Kelly were at fault.
In producing such a one-dimensional whitewash, Lord Justice Hutton has flabbergasted not only the chattering classes, but also the mass of public opinion.
On the day after publication, the BBC's Question Time held an interactive poll to which 23,000 people replied; 82% said the report was a whitewash. Channel Four News held a poll to which 32,000 people replied, and 90% said the poll was a whitewash.
At a purely bureaucratic and parliamentary level, Alistair Campbell's tactic of diverting claims that the government 'sexed up' its dodgy dossier into an attack on the BBC, has - with the excellent help His Lordship - brilliantly succeeded.
In fact it succeeded so well, that it has transcended its immediate objective and contributed to longer term objectives of Late