The News has been full of stories today about the extent of personal debt in Britain. In one report from Manchester on News 24 there was an interview with a former Headteacher who has now been funded by the Financial Services Authority to go into schools and give lessons in Personal Finance. That is good perhaps the kids could then explain it to their parents. What is unlikely is that as part of these lessons the role of the Government in encouraging the level of burgeoning personal debt will be explained - not least as the result of the scrapping of Student Grants, and their replacement by loans, and the introduction of top-up fees.

Its now reported that the average student leaves University with a debt of around £13,000. That is likely to be an understatement, and as fees rise the figure is likely to ecalate sharply. The Government now proposing to increase the school leaving age to 18, meaning an extra 2 years for the average young person that they will not be earning wages. It seems pointless to keep kids in school, many of whom don't want to be there until they are 16 let alone 18, but for those that do there should be proper grants available. As grants have been removed from most University students the prospect of decent grants for school and College students is negligible.

But, in an economy that has for the last few years been kept afloat by debt - both personal and public - educating the masses into going into large amounts of debts from an early age as it now does with students is undoubtedly no accident. In the post war period many workers were able to acquire some assets and Capital of their own. As British Capitalism now finds itself unable to compete on the world market against countries like India and China, and with the potential of rising costs to be found for an ageing population, it needs to take back those assets, to turn workers not just into wage-slaves, but into debt-slaves so that they can be forced to continue working well into old-age. Already some people in the younger generation are expected to still being paying off their mortgages after normal retirement age (I use "normal" in its "usual", "ordinary" sense here meaning the age most people retire at, not the age some people retire at.)

There is an extent though that people have to take some responsibility in these matters. Few people seem even to know how much interest they are paying on credit cards for instance. From the reports today a lot of the debt built up, particularly on credit cards, was not for necessities, but for luxuries - their term not mine. Of course, in a consumer society with high pressure advertising - the Channel 4 Programme "The Corporation" which was on some months ago was excellent in showing the psychological techniques used by big comapnies - the idea that everybody has to have everything, and have it now, that we all have to be like the so called celebrities is not surprsing. But to some extent those pressures have always existed, indeed when the choice was having to spend money just to live it was unavoidable - still Mr. Micawber's advice written from Dickens' pen is applicable now as then.

And there are other aspects too. In Health we demand not the policy of Blair that we should have the "Choice" to go to a Hospital the other end of the country that is a specialist, or better than our local hospital, but that ALL hospitals should be excellent. We should demand the same for our schools and our Universities. In many parts of the world undergraduates do not go away from home, but go to their local University. If all Universities are excellent that becomes an easy choice - both of my sons went to local Universities, lived at home, worked in the Summer and instead of having debts, managed to save several thousand pounds while they were at University. From recent statistics it does appear that is becoming more common, certainly many of my sons friends did the same.

But that is just as well. A couple of years ago a study found that Humanities Students would never earn enough extra in their working lives as a result of their degree to cover the cost, and loss of earnings in obtaining it. That looks likely to be the case for most students now. Of course, education should be about more than whether or not it enables you to earn more money, but that higher education also benefits society, and students and their families should not be the ones paying that cost, it should be society as a whole, in particular those that benefit most - the capitalist class.