Last Wednesday British students finally rediscovered their political voice. In the protest march on Westminster, the silence which has so far formed the backdrop to the most damaging cuts in a generation was broken. The message was sent to the Con-Dem government that civilized society will not go quietly into the night.

The Tory media may have focused their attention on the anarchistic actions of a "minority" of protesters outside Conservative headquarters, but the real revolutionaries are David Cameron and Nick Clegg, supported by their submissive cabinet. In every aspect of government policy, years of progressive consensus is being overturned by vicious small state attitudes and petty mindedness, cloaked in a pseudo-philosophical rhetoric lifted straight from small town America.

In every aspect of government policy, years of progressive consensus is being overturned by vicious small state attitudes and petty mindedness.

It was fitting that students should take up the fight, since university fees represent the apogee of the coalition's approach. In raising the fees cap to £9,000 a year to fill the gap left by a withdrawal of government funding, the proposals shift the cost of education from the state to the student. In so doing they fully abandon the principle (which our political masters had the benefit of enjoying) that the education of the cleverest young people in society is a fundamental "good" for which the state should meet the cost, not least for the future economic and social benefits that education will provide.

Instead, attending university is being turned into just another "product", which consumers (students) have no right to other than is measured by the size of their (in fact, almost always their parents') wallets. This commercialization of higher education is not an expedient to meet a short term debt problem (a transaction tax on the banks could easily sort that out), but an elemental philosophical shift in British politics.

For many families in Britain having a son or daughter attend university not only represents the crowning success of years of hard graft, but also the only chance to escape generations of low paid work or underachievement. This opportunity is being cynically removed and a clear line drawn between the right to secondary education (which should cater for all the basic needs of the masses), and tertiary education (which of course must be preserved for the elites).

Vince Cable and David Willets disingenuously claim that their reforms will financially penalise universities adopting the £9,000 rate by forcing them to do better in admitting poorer students. They also claim that by creating a "market" for higher education in allowing flexible fees, universities will attempt to undercut each other in order to attract young people for their courses.

In fact, this argument was used by New Labour when they introduced tuition fees in the first place. But instead of competing with one another, universities uniformly adopted the highest chargeable rate. At best these proposals will see the best universities (such as those in the Russell Group) charge the higher rate, while a second tier of inferior institutions are forced to pick up those less well off. After seing their government funding disappear, those in the lower leagues will have to drive down costs. Courses will go, access to academics vanish and students will graduate with diplomas worth less than the paper they are printed on. As for access to the "elite" institutions, Oxford has been flogging that dead horse for years with the spectacular result that half of its entrants come from private schools.

This is all assuming less established universities aren't forced to close as thousands of poorer students are put off higher education by the mammoth debt they will incur. But students can take comfort from the fact they are not the only ones on the receiving end of the coalition's toxic agenda. From justice to welfare - where the government will require the poorest to prove they are useful economic units, not just fellow human beings, by submitting to slave labour - the neo-liberal axe is falling.

It is all the more gratifying, then, that last Wednesday the fight back against this assualt on our social fabric began. Forget the howling about a few broken windows in Millbank Tower, far more unpleasant were the comments from Oxford Tories on Facebook calling for the imprisonment of their fellow students. Almost as nauseating was the whooping and cheering from the Conservative backbenchers as the CSR (billed by the coalition as a sad but necessary response to the nation's finances) was read out.

For in prioritising long discredited ideological mores over the needs of the most vulnerable in society, the government has fostered a sense of solidarity among its targets. This was not the plan. Calculating that by focusing their neoliberal agenda on those least likely to fight back at the ballot box (students and the poor), the coalition believed that they could sneak through cuts without alienating (perhaps even gaining the qualified support of) the country.

What better way to prove them wrong than by taking to our streets and shouting that we won't stand for it. And if a few windows get smashed along the way, well - many a noble movement has started in the back of a police van.