As a local MP, and MP for the only UK wide political Party that remains resolutely opposed to the privatisation of higher education, I want to take this opportunity to send a message of support.

Before I was elected I promised you that I’d vote against tuition fees. I kept that promise.

I warned that lifting the cap would see many students priced out of a university education. That was bad enough - now the student loan book is being sold off. A move that risks further discouraging students from going on to higher education and imposing an increased financial burden on graduates.

That’s why I am one of the leading MPs behind a motion to stop the sale and why I will continue to campaign for higher education to be a fully funded public service.

We could scrap tuition fees and meet the costs with a business education tax instead - an increase in corporation tax for the top 4% of companies who make more than 1.5 million a year. A tax like this would also establish the principle that higher education is of long term economic value to our country and that it's something worth investing in.

That value is currently being undermined across the board, including by introducing competition between HE institutions and allowing for profit companies to move aggressively into the sector. Experience from the US suggests very clearly that this will lead to a decline in academic standards.

I am very proud that Brighton and Hove is home to two fantastic universities but the marketisation and commercialisation of higher education poses a serious risk to future generations of students hoping to attend these institutions.

It also poses a threat to the idea that universities have a role to play in contributing to the common good. University should be, and has been, a place where young people have learned to think critically, to question assumptions, to see the world and themselves in new ways, to grow. In helping students to develop in this way, universities have served public purposes. They have belonged, by definition, to the public realm.

Recent policy makers have set out, quite deliberately, to change all this: to remove universities from the public domain and transfer them to the market domain. The university is to become a kind of supermarket or shopping mall satisfying individual wants. The very words ‘public good’ have disappeared completely.

So it’s great to hear that students at Brighton University are fighting back. Are saying that higher education is more than just a commodity. Are warning that the selling of the student loan book is one more step on a slippery slope that’s taking us to a place we don’t want to be. You have my support and my promise that I’ll keep on taking up the fight in Parliament on your behalf.