First the Tories opposed the congestion charge, now they want to abolish university top-up fees. Welcome to Britain’s latest socialist party.

The success of congestion charging is obvious, so let me explain why the Tories are absurd to oppose tuition fees. First, universities are broke. Their student:staff ratios have risen to 17 where recently they were only 10, and they are collectively in debt by hundreds of millions of pounds. Some may have to close or merge. The universities need an injection of £10 billion simply to maintain their infrastructure, and since the taxpayer cannot provide that, the Government is proposing to charge students £3,000 a year. Not only are the fees morally appropriate (most of the benefits of a degree accrue to the graduates themselves) but they are also being applied sensitively: students will be required to remit the money only once they earn a reasonable income.

There is another powerful reason why students should pay fees — academic autonomy. The best universities in the world are the American Ivy League institutions such as Harvard or Yale. They are excellent not only because, by charging full fees, they are prosperous, but also because, by being independent, they are not bound by government targets. Nor do they self-censor.

Academics are today’s unacknowledged legislators, and since many important ideas such as Friedman’s or Chomsky’s challenge the state, they have more often emerged out of the Ivy League rather than out of Europe’s universities, where professors fear for their funding.

To a good conservative, the freeing of universities from state control, and the sparing of the taxpayer should be instinctive, so why are the Tories now sinking into louche popularism? They often do this when under pressure: William Hague portrayed the last general election as our final chance to save the pound because he supposed we proles could not distinguish between an election and a referendum.

Comrade IDS and his marxist cadres now want to offer us free university places and free, but gridlocked, roads because they think we’ll jump at a bribe with our own money. But we’re not that stupid. First, we hate the mixed message — the Tories are the party of the market, right? — and secondly, we already anticipate that we’re each going to have to pay more for our services. The EU is softening us up for health charges, pensions contributions will soon be rising, and university fees are inevitable — even the Germans, those least market-orientated of folk, are now contemplating university fees.

The Tories’ problem, Labour having stolen their free-market clothes, is that they have failed to generate a credible set of policies. So they condemned university fees on the same day that Clare Short cited them as a reason for her resignation, thus consigning their party to the company of the loony Left, Liberal Democrats, Celtic nationalists and the NUS.

Markets do fail. No one who knows how we in the West abuse globalisation to tilt trade against the Third World can doubt that good government has a useful role to play in alleviating the excesses of capitalists. But the Tories are not making that intellectual case, they’re just posturing. What’s worse, they are doing it in front of an academic audience that has already accepted the case for fees.

When Oxford rejected the idea of granting Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree in 1985 it was, at least, acknowledging the importance of her ideas. But today, as the Tories slip into socialistic goo, we can only give thanks for Tony Blair’s defence of market values within the public services.

The author is vice-chancellor of Buckingham University