Bloated unis are a lesson in stupidity

I RECENTLY had to beat off attacks from the feminist sisterhood after using the adjective ‘squawking’. They ruled that it could only apply to women (it doesn’t) and was therefore automatically an expression of anti-woman feeling (it wasn’t).

So I am puzzled by the strange Tory rage about Jeremy Corbyn allegedly muttering ‘stupid woman’ under his breath (something Lord Hague was also once accused of doing).

Why exactly would a Tory think this rather mild expression was such a frightful thing to say? Politically correct people can, and do, classify everything and anything as misogyny. But do Tories do this? It seems so. Was this the moment the Tory Party became officially PC? IT IS now almost 30 years since this country made one of its gravest mistakes – the expansion of universities.

The vast cost of this folly has now found its way on to the Government books, after long years when the Treasury tried to pretend that student debt – much of which will never be paid off – wasn’t a national liability.

And within days of this outbreak of truth, unchallengeable research confirmed what every properly educated person has known for many years, that the ‘degrees’ awarded by the new expanded universities are inflated paper. Even deluded foreign admirers of Britain will have spotted this.

What the Major and Blair governments did when they expanded universities was to raise the school leaving age to 22, so hiding much of the terrible youth unemployment in this country. And then they compelled the young victims of this fraud to take out huge debts to pay for their often-wasted years at oftenmiserable colleges.

Who will have the courage to admit that this was a terrible mistake, and close it down? How many more poor school-leavers will end their college years clutching certificates they can barely read, qualified only for flipping burgers, while the foolish comprehensive schools, which failed to teach them what they really need to know, continue to decay and decline?