Top-up fees rebellion grows

Labour's mass mutiny over university top-up fees grew even bigger today, defying all appeals from Tony Blair and putting his premiership under ever greater threat.

The number of critics signing the Commons motion demanding a rethink was tonight set to top the 160 mark. That left the Prime Minister and the party whips with a huge and dangerous mountain to climb to turn around the revolt before the vote towards the end of next month.

Mr Blair marched into the weekly meeting of Labour backbench MPs to appeal for support. He warned that without reform of public services, with education high on the list, his Government would fail.

His plea won only lukewarm applause. It was followed by a string of critics calling for the key protest issue - the right for universities to charge different tuition fees according to their status and the courses on offer - to be dropped. They renewed their complaint that the scheme would create a two-tier system.

Later Mr Blair, under pressure at Prime Minister's Questions in the Commons, side-stepped challenges as to whether he would treat the decision, win or lose, as a vote of confidence. But friends and enemies alike agreed that defeat on what he has branded a flagship proposal would make a mockery of his reforms and of his premiership.

As he defended the plan, saying it was wrong to load the burden of extra university funding on the taxpayer, students were making their own noisy protest outside, including the burning of an effigy of Education Secretary Charles Clarke. The National Union of Students was expecting about 500 undergraduates to join the lobby in Parliament Square and said they would meet their MPs to press home their opposition.

The number of opponents signing the Commons motion on Monday stood at 136, all but a handful Labour MPs. Yesterday the number had risen to 147 and Mr Blair appeared before the media to vow there would be no retreat.

This morning the number had climbed still further to 157, with yet more poised to join in. With the Tories and Liberal Democrats solidly against the plan, even if half the number of rebels could be persuaded to change their mind the Government's 164 Commons majority would be in deep peril.

Mr Blair and Mr Clarke will hold a series of face-to-face

meetings with those whom the whips judge can be swayed. The Prime Minister said yesterday he was confident he would win.

But the decision to press on was a high-risk gamble on the hope that enough MPs would swing back into line rather than deliver a massive coup to Tory leader Michael Howard.

Mr Clarke, questioned on Radio 4's Today programme, said the £3,000 ceiling on fees universities are permitted to charge would be held for at least the next five-year parliament.

He said the Government was prepared to look at other concessions, including an increase in maintenance grants for the less well-off. But he insisted there could be no surrender on variable fees.

Later MPs were told they would be offered a series of meetings with Mr Clarke to explain why a graduate tax, favoured by many, is unacceptable to ministers and to look at worries over the growing burden of student debt.

Mr Blair's message that the reform must proceed was boosted by a public display of support from Chancellor Gordon Brown, who maintained it would funnel much-needed cash to the universities as well as give a chance of increasing the number of students.

The scale of the trouble the Government faces in a turbulent session of Parliament to come was marked by a defeat in the Lords last night over the Queen's Speech proposal to do away with the remaining hereditary peers and office of Lord Chancellor.