The grim, grim news from England flows unabated. The rule of the modern robber baron is unchallenged. This morning, for the first time in many years, I listened to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme to hear the news of John Browne’s education review.

In a saner world, it would be unthinkable that someone like John Browne be tasked with deciding on matters of education. The former chief executive of BP, one of the world’s most rapacious corporations, accused of safety cuts which led inter alia to the ‘Deepwater Horizon’ catastrophe – there is no question but that he has nothing of value to contribute to the debate. (See Paul Krugman’s essay explaining why businessmen tend to make bad contributions to public policy.) And thus he was appointed.

The result: University fees to float according to market forces, with a sliding tax on institutions charging over £6,000 a year. And it sounds like graduates will pay commercial interest rates, rather than the loans tracking inflation as at present.

Provision of education should be separate from the logic of the market. This is not meant to be a self-evident principle: but it does describe a world in which the greater number of human beings can flourish. (A microscopically small example of this: selecting a copyeditor or proofreader according to market forces produces levels of error unacceptable in academic publication.)

Education remains formally speaking ‘accessible’ to all. But those who are not super-rich will now have to accept even more massive debt to get it.

For a rational debtor, every act is done with an eye to what the bank will think. We pause before taking risks; we plan our lives according to repayment schedules. Freedom requires being able to take risks, being able to think of the narrative of one’s life without second-guessing authority. That freedom is being reserved, to an ever greater degree, to the children of the very rich.

The history of free education in England is not a long one: it was introduced by the Labour party as part of the great socialist reforms after the Second World War. This was not an arbitrary or magnanimous act by the Labour party politicians. They were driven to it by the forces at work in society: the population hungered to create a country which was clearly differentiated from the greed and cruelty of the fascist powers. Whether present generations, their futures mortgaged, can mobilise to rescue this vision, is the question of today.