But consider the problems with dumbing down the education system. It's not as if the people recruiting new graduates into the professions and complaining that they immediately have to send them for remedial training these days are making it up. There's nothing in it for universities to complain that new students arriving to study the sciences don't have enough maths to complete their first year any more.

Absolutely, but they're a tiny force compared to the parents who all want to send their children to top universities and will vote for any government measure that claims to guarantee that. If a party proposed outlawing university entry requirements, the vast majority of parents would vote for it in a heartbeat and begin making plans to send their kids to Oxbridge or wherever. They don't understand that such a thing would cause those universities to no longer be top universities - at least from a career prospects point of view.

And that's my point: for successive governments to want "everyone to be seen to succeed," the electorate needs to be complicit in that. They have to see such things as success. If they didn't see University as inherently better than the alternatives - the result of thinking that more education is always good, and that formal institutions like universities are the only way to get more education - then they wouldn't consider a policy of increasing university intake to be valuable.

The only victims in this will be the children

The victims in this aren't the children: the victims are everyone. We all suffer from the system being broken. Some more directly than others - being unable to find competent workers is probably less upsetting than being pushed into enduring 3-4 years of timewasting - but everyone to some extent. And yes, that includes the politicians who, at the end of the day, want to buy quality products and to work with competent people, just like the rest of us.

Unfortunately, the corrolation between vote-seeking behaviour and doing what the people collectively want isn't very strong in the current system. Here in the UK, we've been to war for a decade, a war that everyone saw coming and that brought literally millions onto the streets in protest, a war based on false evidence given by political leaders who have suffered little if any adverse consequences personally and who show no remorse for their actions.

Hold on, there. We're talking about whether the government does what the people want or not; if it manipulates them into wanting something in particular, that's a separate issue, so the false evidence point isn't relevant here; many groups manipulate the public, not just the government. And "millions of protestors" do not make for a collective stance on an issue: the largest single anti-war protest was 1 million people in February 2003 - 2% of the population - but a month later YouGov were reporting that 50% of their survey group supported the war. Public opinion was at best divided - it was certainly not united behind one course of action while the government took another.

Anyway, one contentious counterexample does not a correlation make. Can you show a substantial trend of the government acting against majority polling figures across many issues?

Of course, it's also against the law to sing "Happy Birthday" to your child in public, drive at 75mph on a completely clear motorway on Christmas morning, or smoke a joint in the privacy of your own home.

Sure. But so what? They're not enforcing those laws. It's not ideal that they're on the books, but changing the books is expensive and it's better to spend the resources on making changes that are actually connected to the rest of the system. Considering purely what's statutory is taking things out of context.