Stark choices to be made on fees London Briefing Chris Johns

Could Gordon Brown be prime minister by next Monday? Nobody seriously expects Tony Blair to be unseated by the outcome of either the Hutton report (into the death of David Kelly) or the result of the great debate over university funding. But both issues come to a head at the end of this week and it is possible, just, that Mr Blair could be forced to resign. As a matter of practical politics there would then have to be an election for leader of the Labour Party but few people would bet against the Chancellor in such a contest.

The inquiry into the death of Ministry of Defence scientist Dr Kelly is out of Mr Blair's hands. But the issue of "top-up fees" is not. And he has come out fighting. In a Monday night face-to-face debate with a live audience, comprising students, single parents and other interested parties, Mr Blair showed us the best and worst of this government.

The way in which British students are funded through university just keeps on getting more and more complex. It was quite clear that the only person who understands both the existing and proposed systems is the prime minister.

His audience - and I suspect the rest of the country - is hostile towards the new scheme partly because they can't make head or tail of it. This is a particular example of a more general complaint: the level of complexity introduced into the ways in which the government spends its money has rendered much of the system incomprehensible to most ordinary people.

From "pension credits" to "foundation hospitals" to "baby bonds", I defy anybody to supply precise definitions and explanations of how all of these schemes are supposed to work. Mr Blair would be well advised to deconstruct much of this edifice and to keep things a lot more simple.

Where Mr Blair showed us some of his genius was his repeated throwing back to the audience the question "where do you want the money to come from?" Everybody now understands that Britain's higher education system is suffering from crumbling infrastructure, a brain drain of the best academics to the US, falling standards and all of the knock-on effects to the wider economy.

Everybody accepts that more money is desperately required. Blair put his antagonists on the defensive with his question and forced them to argue that the cash should come from extra taxation, not from the students themselves. This showed that they were not politicians - any well-trained member of the House of Commons knows that the way to handle this issue is to condemn top-up fees for students but also to argue for lower taxes. The inconsistency of this argument bothers our political elites not one jot.

But the cat is now out of the bag. Blair has revealed to ordinary people the stark choices that must be made. Somebody has got to pay for the rebuilding of British universities. The prime minister clearly believes that the ordinary taxpayer is already paying his fair share; university students already get more per capita funding than do primary or secondary school children.

His new system of funding will put much of the extra burden onto students themselves - but only after they graduate and only if they earn decent salaries. But none of this will come into place until after the next general election. Quite properly, Mr Blair has presented the arguments in a clear fashion and plans to put the choice before the people.

Yesterday, the OECD published its annual survey of the British economy. It was probably the most upbeat assessment of the UK from an official body that I have ever seen. In the short term, the OECD is very optimistic about the UK's ability to benefit from the global upswing. The medium-term objective must be "to raise growth prospects even further".

One of the key challenges facing that task is "to improve the quality of public services in a cost-effective way in such priority areas as health and education".

In modern economies, everything is connected to everything else. Britain's continued economic success will be determined by lots of things. But if we get education wrong, our current economic renaissance will prove very short-lived. The OECD points out that our standard of living is still marginally behind that of Italy's and way behind that of the rest of the English-speaking world. Even Australia has much higher per capita income than we do. Things will stay this way unless Tony Blair - or whoever is prime minister - is allowed to pursue even the mildest of radical policies.