‘Sir’ Nick Clegg? A true sign of how Britain’s elite rewards failure

Owen Jones in The Guardian







The establishment is a safety net for the shameful and the shameless. Once you’re in, you’re in: and even if you played a prominent role in plunging your country into crisis, and inflicting injustice on your fellow citizens, there are still baubles to be had.

Former chancellor George Osborne got his own newspaper, and ex-deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is reportedly to be made a knight of the realm. It has become fashionable in certain liberal circles to rehabilitate both as courageous warriors against the calamity of Brexit. But here are surely two architects of our crisis-stricken nation.

Nick Clegg to be knighted in New Year honours, say reports



Let’s start with Clegg. For those wonks who sifted through his speeches before he led his Lib Dem party into the coalition in 2010, there was ample evidence that Clegg would prove an amenable ally to a slash-and-burn Conservative government. Three years before Osborne began wielding his scalpel, Clegg promised to “define a liberal alternative to the discredited politics of big government”. Months before the banks plunged Britain into national calamity, he railed against “nationalised education, nationalised health, and nationalised welfare”.

But in order to get elected, the Lib Dems made cast-iron pledges to scrap tuition fees, and had students queuing around the block on polling day. “Students can make the difference in countless seats in this election,” said Clegg, which they did; and hiking fees to £7,000 (let alone £9,000) would be a “disaster” because “you can’t build a future on debt”. The Lib Dem’s flagship political broadcast was titled “Say goodbye to broken promises”, in which Clegg bemoaned the dishonesty of the political elite.
Clegg said after the election that he had no choice but to go back on his word: a national economic disaster loomed, national interest trumps party politics, amassing power and all its trappings through brazen dishonesty was actually an act of sacrifice! As former Liberal leader David Steel put it, Clegg could have met Gordon Brown first “instead of leaving talks with Labour to his acolytes later”, and used the prospect of a Lib-Lab coalition to extract “far better from the Tories”. But he didn’t.

Clegg claimed that new information about Britain’s economic plight from Bank of England governor Mervyn King was critical to his U-turn. But King himself said he had told Clegg nothing the Lib Dem leader didn’t already know.

So here is the truth. Clegg formed an austerity coalition because his socially liberal anti-state worldview was fundamentally in accordance with that of Tory leader David Cameron. “If we keep doing this we won’t find anything to bloody disagree on in the bloody TV debate!” as he was accidentally recorded cooing to Cameron in 2011.

So everything that then happened is on him, as much as anyone else. The longest squeeze in wages for generations; the ideologically driven privatisation of the NHS; a bedroom tax that disproportionately compelled disabled people to pay for the housing crisis; the humiliating and degrading work assessments forced on disabled people in a failed attempt to balance the nation’s books on their shoulders; the surging homelessness.


A man who uses human misery as a chess piece should, in a decent country, lose their privileged position in public life


But this is nothing compared with the indulgence of George Osborne, just because a dinner party friend has given him a newspaper to play out a vengeful grudge against Theresa May based far more on personal affront than political principle, like a toy catapult handed to a spiteful toddler. The bedroom tax, the £12bn pledged in social security cuts; the benefit cap; the systematic demonisation of benefit claimants. As Nick Clegg – once the voters had thrown him out of government – said himself, Osborne’s behaviour was “very unattractive, very cynical”; for him, welfare “was just a bottomless pit of savings, and it didn’t really matter what the human consequences were”, it was just a means to boost his party’s popularity.

This is grotesque behaviour, like a child who takes a magnifying glass to ants. A man who uses human misery as a political chess piece should, in a decent country, lose their privileged position in public life.

“Ah, but Osborne and Clegg oppose Brexit!” is a common comment. But no one who ever utters this has been a victim of the bedroom tax. Yes, this Tory Brexit is a national disaster. But the details of Britain’s relationship with a trading bloc is a secondary issue for those who spend their waking hours worrying over paying their food and energy bills.

In any case, if you want to understand why Brexit happened, look no further than these two individuals. Is it any wonder that, in a referendum on the status quo, so many opted for the Big Red Button?

These individuals are far from alone in being protected by the establishment, of course. Tony Blair is one of the most unpopular individuals, let alone politicians, in the country; but the man who helped lay Iraq to waste and works for torturing and murderous dictatorships is treated by much of the media as an oracle of wisdom.

If we are to have an honours system that is more than a sordid backslapping exercise, there are far more deserving recipients than Clegg, such as Maria Brabiner, a Mancunian bedroom tax victim who fought back. Surely those who struggle against injustice should be honoured, not those who impose it.

But let me offer some praise. Both Osborne and Clegg were in many ways also architects of the Corbyn project. They played critical roles in creating the army of the disillusioned who flocked to join the Labour party, and then in their millions voted against a bankrupt status quo. Thanks to them the self-serving, mutual appreciation society – otherwise known as the British establishment – may soon find its time is running out.

At last, a politician has been arrested

Mark Steel in The Independent

At last, a politician has been arrested.

The one they’ve taken in is Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, because of all the lousy things you can remember politicians doing in recent years, have any been as filthy as what she did this week, standing in a field with a placard?

Some MPs, such as Stephen Byers and others, were filmed promising to use their status to offer access to ministers, if you paid them between £3,000 and £5,000 a day. That could be seen, if you were picky about morals, as abusing your position slightly, but he only needed a mild caution, because at least he didn’t bring the good name of Parliament into disrepute by standing in front of a tree protesting about fracking.

If Caroline Lucas had any decency, instead of writing a slogan about protecting the environment on that placard, she’d have sold the space for advertising. She could still have had “Stop Climate Change” in one corner, but the rest of it would have been sold for £3,000 to £5,000 to someone reputable such as British Aerospace, and say something like “There’ll be sod-all to frack after our bombs attack”, and the reputation of our government would be intact.

Countless MPs seem to be involved in the process of lobbying, so much that it’s now an industry in which companies employ specialists to butter up politicians to influence policy, or secure the odd million-pound contract. But Caroline Lucas has taken it too far, using her position to meet a bloke with dreadlocks who lives up trees.

When Tony Blair was Prime Minister he used his post only to meet people of vital importance to the nation, like Cliff Richard and President Assad of Syria, but that Lucas woman has spent her time hobnobbing with an angry farmer and a couple who haven’t worn shoes since 1973.

Then there were all those MPs who seemed to be competing with each other to file the most imaginative claim for expenses. One of them must have thought he’d won when it was revealed he’d claimed public money to have his moat cleaned, but then must have been horrified and yelled, “Oh no, some bastard’s trumped me by claiming for a duck island.”

One or two of these were arrested, but most of them weren’t, including those who claimed tens of thousands for unnecessary second homes. Because, as they all pointed out, they weren’t breaking any rules, not like Caroline Lucas who stood only a few hundred yards from a giant drilling machine, intimidating it so much it now needs counselling at a specialist therapy unit for bullied industrial equipment.

And none of the MPs who were caught claiming all this money could possibly have been doing it for personal gain. But protesting in a Sussex village opens up so many business opportunities, lucrative sponsorship deals and chat show appearances it’s only right such selfish behaviour is what the authorities crack down on.

It could also be argued that telling a blatant lie in order to get elected could be a breach of the electoral system. To pick an example at random, if you, let’s say, won votes by pledging to abolish tuition fees but once you were elected you trebled them instead, that may bring democracy mildly into disrepute. But no one gets arrested for that, because it’s a trifle compared to the deception of Caroline Lucas, who stood for the Green Party, and then betrayed all those who voted for her by protesting in defence of the environment, a policy no one could be expected to be associated with the Green Party in any way.

Or imagine if you’d insisted, throughout an election campaign, that you would absolutely not under any circumstances raise VAT to 20 per cent, and then a week after the election you raised VAT to 20 per cent. Could that, if you were to examine it carefully, be seen to contain a hidden mistruth? Maybe, but not as much as someone who pledges to oppose fracking, and then once elected opposes fracking. Such behaviour makes a mockery of our constitution; is it any wonder politicians aren’t trusted?

Another issue that might have resulted in a small arrest could have been the politicians who led the country into a war on a premise that turned out to be a pile of nonsense. As this is a week for locking people up if they’ve jeopardised our national security, maybe that jeopardised it a bit, as it appears to have angered some people in the Middle East. But across that region the local population will be yelling, “Thank God the British have finally arrested one of their politicians. Because the one who ruined everything was that Green Party woman from Brighton. Every time she waved that placard it caused another of our buildings to collapse. Now she is arrested at last we may sleep in peace.”

Her arrest, along with the other protesters, according to a police spokesman, was due to the fact she was “disrupting the life of the village”. So now they’ll be able to carry on with their tranquil lives, enjoying the sweet morning coo of a 25-ton boring drill clacking into the earth to extract gas in a process likely to cause underground tremors, without it being spoilt by the racket of a Sussex MP standing in the mud.

It’s not just school grades that parents buy

Sandie Shaw claims that today, she’d need a private education to make it as a star. Is she right?

Mumford & Sons and Sandie Shaw 

By Harry Wallop

9:05PM GMT 27 Mar 2013

Is there a single public figure in Britain who did not go to private school? With the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury all owners of the black and pale-blue striped Old Etonian tie, it can sometimes seem that way.

Half the Cabinet, more than half of the country’s top medics and 70 per cent of judges went to fee-paying schools – compared to just 7 per cent of the overall population. It is not just men in suits, wigs and white coats who are likely to have been privately educated. Over a third of Team GB’s Olympic medallists from last summer went to private schools.

This week, the debate was reignited by the improbable figure of Sandie Shaw. The 1960s singer, of Puppet on a String and lack of shoes fame, was in front of the culture, media and sport select committee at the House of Commons. She claimed that it would be impossible for her, the daughter of a Dagenham car worker, to repeat her success in today’s world.

“At the moment, unless you are Mumford & Sons and come from a public school and have a rich family that can support you, you’re on the dole and you’re trying to work and by the time you get a sniff of a record contract you just grab anything they might offer you,” she said.

Poor old Mumford & Sons – forever destined to be wheeled out as an example of the public-school mafia that dominate the Top 40. Most of the members of the “nu-folk” band met while pupils at King’s College Wimbledon, incidentally the same private school attended by Nick D’Aloisio, the 17-year-old who landed himself a £20 million internet fortune this week. Then there are Chris Martin of Coldplay, Florence Welch, Dido, Lily Allen, Radiohead and nice, fresh-faced Will Young – public school educated one and all. Even the Saturdays, the girl band currently occupying the number one slot in the singles chart, contains two members whose parents paid for their education. 

How private schools have continued to attract pupils during the downturn has baffled some economists, particularly considering fees have increased by 75 per cent in the last decade. But this sheer weight of success – across the full spectrum of British life, from the track of Sir Chris Hoy’s Olympic velodrome to the stage of the Birmingham hippodrome – is one of the reasons why parents seem willing to dig deep into their pockets. Sandie Shaw’s comment struck home: a private school education increases your child’s chances, even their artistic ones.

The Sutton Trust, which monitors the rusty wheels of Britain’s social mobility, carried out a snapshot survey of the school backgrounds of 8,000 “notable people” deemed important enough to have their birthdays announced in the broadsheet newspapers. Even the arts – where you might think raw talent rather than education would be the deciding factor in a successful career – were dominated by private school pupils. Half of the 135 theatre producers and directors went to private school, and four out of 10 actors too (including Old Etonians Eddie Redmayne and Damian Lewis).

Pop stars, in fact, were one of the least privileged groups, only out-plebbed by policemen. The government-funded Brit School, the performing arts college in Croydon whose alumni include Amy Winehouse, Leona Lewis and Adele, has a far better track record than Eton, which hasn’t had a chart-topper since Humphrey Lyttelton. Even so, a considerable 19 per cent of singers and band members went to private school.

The success of private schools in the so-called “soft” areas such as sport and the arts is partly down to facilities, which have tended to mushroom over the last generation as schools have entered into sports-hall and recording studio “arms races”. Ed Smith, the former England cricketer, pointed out in his book Luck that when England toured Pakistan in 1987-1988 all but one of the 13 players selected were state-educated. When England played India in the summer of 2011, eight of the team’s 11 were privately educated, including Stuart Broad, an alumnus of Oakham and Andrew Strauss, the captain, who went to Radley.

This happens to be my old school (yes, I am one of the 52 per cent of newspaper journalists who went to private school), an institution where the playing fields stretch almost as far as the eye can see – certainly far enough for every single one of its 640 pupils to be playing cricket on a summer afternoon. It also boasts a state-of-the-art theatre, studio space for smaller productions, a music school and concert hall. My hackles rise when a begging letter arrives asking me to help fund yet another Olympic-standard fencing gallery.

Phil DeFreitas, the cricket all-rounder from the 1988 era, went to Willesden High School in north London. Its playing fields were dug up to build a new City Academy, with a glittering building by Sir Norman Foster. It has a basketball court and an Astro Turf pitch for football, but no lovingly watered cricket wicket. It is no surprise that when DeFreitas retired he ended up as a cricket coach not at his old school, but at Oakham, where his experience was used to train future privately educated Stuart Broads, not comp kids like himself.

It is not just the equipment, however. Lee Elliot Major, at the Sutton Trust, says: “There are just not enough state schools that have an aspirational culture. The grammar schools, whatever you may have thought of them, created pupils who aspired, and most independent schools share that. This is as true for pop stars as it is for doctors and lawyers.”

Jo Dickinson, an accountant and mother of three, is about to send her 11-year-old daughter to a private girls’ school. Both she and her husband, a banker, attended comprehensive schools. “My school was good, but it did nothing to nurture me or give me confidence,” she says. “My daughter’s school prides itself on inviting artists and actors as well as doctors and lawyers to give talks to the girls. It’s just something I never had.”

Rachel Johnson, the journalist and sister of Boris, says: “It’s peace of mind. That’s what you are getting when you take on that third mortgage to pay for fees. It’s the peace of mind that you can’t do anything more for your children.”

She thinks the fabled confidence that private schools give their pupils is more of a “veneer”. She, like many parents, frets that this comes with a major disadvantage. Namely, that children will mix in too narrow a social group, shut off from the real world. But this is usually outweighed by the hope that, articulate or not, they will get a leg-up, often in the form of an unpaid internship. In the 1980s, just five per cent of the film industry workforce had under-taken unpaid work, but this rose to 45 per cent over the last decade.

Ryan Shorthouse, at the Social Market Foundation, and author of a report about access to the creative industries, says it is not the unpaid element that is the key barrier. “Bright, talented and enthusiastic people will always find the means and ways to fund an unpaid internship; but they don’t all have access to the network of these internships. This is particularly the case in the creative industries, which tend to be made up of small firms, without the large-scale work experience schemes accountancy or law firms have.”

The confidence that privately educated children are supposed to possess is generated not just by small class sizes, world-class facilities and an encouragement to aspire. It comes from an innate understanding that they will grow up knowing the right people, that there is a network they can tap into. As Dr Elliot Major says: “Politicians talk of soft skills; it’s more than that. They are life-defining skills – that is what the top private schools are so good at giving their pupils.”

This is something that parents who are lucky enough to have money understand. For all the promises from Michael Gove’s education department to inject academic rigour into the state school system, governments will always struggle to compete with the “life-defining skills” on offer in the private system.

Sex for tuition fees anyone? Students being offered up to £15,000 a year to cover cost of studies, in exchange for having sex with strangers

Students are being offered up to £15,000 a year to cover their university studies in exchange for having sex with a stranger, an undercover investigation by The Independent has revealed.

The website SponsorAScholar.co.uk claims to have arranged for 1,400 women aged between 17 and 24 to be funded through their studies by wealthy businessmen seeking “discreet adventures”.

But in a secretly filmed encounter with an Independent reporter posing as a student, a male “assessor” from the website asked that she undertake a “practical assessment” with him at a nearby flat to prove “the level of intimacy” she was prepared to give before being permitted to find a sponsor online.

He said this was required for “quality control”. He told her that the more she was prepared to do, the more money she would get.

The website’s claims to have a roster of hundreds of students could not be verified. The reporter asked for evidence that scholarships had been awarded and was told that she would have to come back to the flat with the man.

But the requirement for potential “scholars” to submit to a “practical assessment” raises fears that young women students may have been exploited.

The elaborately constructed site gives the appearance of operating in the grey area in Britain’s sex laws which allow escort agencies to function legitimately by offering introductions between clients and sex workers.

Young women facing financial hardship brought on by the rise in the cost of studying were urged tonight not to be tempted into using the website.

Rachel Griffin, director of the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, which promotes personal safety, said: “Meeting a complete stranger in private could be highly dangerous at any time but when it is in connection with a scheme like this, the risks are sky-high.” The National Union of Students accused those behind the website of seeking to “capitalise on the poverty and financial hardship of women students”.

SponsorAScholar.co.uk offers young women “up to 100% of your Tuition Fees” in return for two-hour sessions with men in hotel rooms or private flats up to four times per term.

“Because of the considerable sums of money our sponsors are offering in scholarship, they tell us that they have expectations of a high level of sexual intimacy with their chosen student,” the website says.

During the meeting between the “assessor” and our reporter – which our reporter insisted must begin in a public place, choosing a fast food restaurant in south London – the man said: “The more you’re prepared to do, the more interest you're going to get, obviously the more sponsorship amount you’re going to get for that.”

SponsorAScholar.co.uk uses a false company and VAT number belonging to the legitimate dating site Match.com. A spokesman for the company said: “The website is not affiliated with Match.com in any way and we are in the process of contacting them to legally require that all references to Match.com are removed immediately.”

SponsorAScholar.co.uk purports to be registered at the former address of a senior academic from a leading British university, and the man claiming to be the assessor used the lecturer’s name in the encounter with the reporter – as well as in email correspondence and on his answerphone message.

The academic, approached by The Independent last Friday, said he had no idea that the website had been registered to his name and former address. He did not recognise the man in our undercover footage. Yesterday he added that he had now contacted the police to report the matter.

The meeting took place at the Powis Street branch of McDonalds in Woolwich, south London, last Thursday at 6.45pm.

As other diners tucked into burgers, the “assessor”, who said he lived near Leicester, bought the reporter coffee and sought to reassure her that the prospective “sponsors” had been vetted and were safe to meet.

Our reporter asked the “assessor” whether the “sponsors” have health checks. He answered: “We do invite them to do that, not all of them choose to do that but you can choose to have protection or not have protection on that basis.”

He described the need for her to first of all have the “practical assessment” with him as like “quality control for us”, adding: “Whatever you put on your sheet what level of intimacy you’re prepared to go into, you and I will go through that today. We’ve got a questionnaire we’ll go through, your likes and dislikes and the kind of thing you’re comfortable doing.”

He added: “We have to do that, to make sure when we put you in front of your sponsor you’re confident in doing the things you said you would do.”

The man added: “You see what you’re trying to do is attract a certain level of sponsorship, you don’t want to go up there saying you know you’re not even going to hold hands type of thing… cause you’re not going to attract any interest at all.”

After the initial 10-minute meeting – which our reporter ended by saying that she would like to reconsider his proposal rather than immediately follow him to the nearby flat for the “practical” – the man walked back to a large block of flats around the corner where he said he was staying on the fifth floor.

SponsorAScholar.co.uk claims to have been operating since 2006, but the website was registered earlier this year.

The site claims to charge “sponsors” a £100 fee and to take three per cent commission from the final “scholarship” total.

When a male reporter approached the site as a potential sponsor, however, he was told there was a “waiting list” and would be contacted in the new year. By contrast the meeting with the woman reporter posing as the female student was immediately arranged.

The “assessor” said our reporter’s decision not to go back to the flat with him was “ok”, adding: “I’ve got other candidates I need to see this evening”, before asking again if she wanted to “do the questionnaire or stop now”.

After being told stop, he suggested meeting on 13 December in Stratford, south-east London: “If we don’t do it tonight I can’t fit you in until then.”

Attempts to confirm the true identity of the “assessor” have since proved unsuccessful.

The man was today no longer returning repeated telephone calls, emails or text messages from The Independent.

Kelley Temple, NUS Women’s Officer, said: “It appears to be… exploiting the fact that women students are in dire financial situations in pursuit of an education.”

SponsorAScholar.co.uk had been changed  tonight to say simply: “Sorry website unavailable for maintenance”.

Tuition fees: Nick Clegg should come clean about what really happened

The Lib Dem leader campaigned on a promise to abolish tuition fees but confidential papers show he had no such intention

• 
• • Rob Wilson
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 September 2012 15.15 BST

Nick Clegg speaking at Oxford Brookes University before the 2010 general election. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

Nick Clegg has gone through some of the biggest highs and lows of any politician in recent years. During the 2010 general election campaign he was briefly as popular as wartime leader Winston Churchill and commentators talked about his "Obama-esque" poll ratings. For a short time Clegg and his inner circle thought seriously about the prospect of becoming prime minister in a Lib-Lab pact, having (they hoped) received a higher percentage of the general election vote than Labour.

It was a serious possibility, given that Labour was pushed into third place in a number of polls and the Liberal Democrats hoped to poll more than 100 seats. Of course it had evaporated by the end of the campaign and the Lib Dem leader was left with fewer seats, wounded pride and depression. He was devastated by the final result.

Next, the high of negotiating his party into government and himself as deputy prime minister, was rewarded with the low of a dramatic drop-off in the Lib Dem poll rating. Part of the reason was what was considered "the party's treachery" over tuition fees.

The Lib Dems had gone into the election promising to abolish tuition fees over two parliaments, while the two big parties had kicked the ball into the long grass through the Brown review, while privately recognising an increase in fees was highly likely. The party targeted university campuses with their campaign to abolish fees and its MPs and Clegg signed the NUS pledge not to vote for a rise in parliament. Clegg even made a direct appeal to students through a video, again making a promise to students about his party's intentions.

What students and potential voters did not know is that months before the general election David Laws, Chris Huhne, Danny Alexander and Clegg had met in secret as part of their preparations and decided that the abolition of tuition fees was not a priority for the party. This senior group had for some time been taking seriously the likelihood of a hung parliament and were meticulous in their preparations. In making their plans, the Lib Dems knew with certainty they would not be in government alone.

Thanks to confidential Liberal Democrat papers passed to me as part of my research for my book Five Days to Power, the evolution on the party's negotiating position is clear. By March 2010 the party had come to the clear position that the Lib Dems would not waste political capital pushing for the abolition of tuition fees. It was clear and unambiguous. This was a totemic party policy and it was to be ruthlessly sacrificed without any attempt to salvage it. The document said: "On tuition fees we should seek agreement on part-time students and leave the rest. We will have clear yellow water with the other [parties] on raising the tuition fee cap, so let us not cause ourselves more headaches."

With these words the full extent of the Lib Dem political calculation being made becomes clear. The party would gain its benefit from its public position vis-a-vis the other parties, but privately fighting for their key general election pledge was always a non-starter. Even more than two years later, I still find the level of cynicism involved quite shocking. The party's MPs and candidates were not told of the strategy.

So Clegg's apology this week is welcome. He is right, he should not have made the promises he did on tuition fees – they were unaffordable and he knew that. He is right his party had become irresponsible in opposition, making promises it knew it could never honour. The Lib Dems were well known for saying one thing is one area and the opposite in another and that culture had seeped into the party's DNA, hence its "treachery" on fees. But the Lib Dem leadership should not try to rewrite history. What the leadership did at the 2010 general election was pretty cynical and calculated. He knew he would not fight to abolish fees but said he would. This also requires an apology to the public and probably to the Liberal Democrat party as a whole, who were not aware of the leadership's position.

It is welcome that Clegg now realises his party needs to grow up and to turn its back on being a party of perpetual opposition and frivolous chancers. But he needs to do it with the full and open recognition of past mistakes, not a selective narrative that is historically inaccurate.

How foreign students with lower grades jump the university queue

By Holly Watt and Claire Newell

10:00PM BST 26 Jun 2012 The Daily Telegraph

The official agent in Beijing for universities in the elite Russell Group claimed that it could secure over-subscribed places for a Chinese student purporting to have scored three C grades in their A-levels - when British students are required to have at least A, A and B.

Undercover reporters were also told to tell the UK authorities that the student would be returning home immediately after graduation - even if that was not their intention – in order to secure a visa.

Universities were accused of profiteering by rejecting tens of thousands of British teenagers, currently sitting A-levels, so they can fill places with more profitable foreign students.

Universities say that even the new £9,000-a-year tuition fees for British and European Union students do not cover their costs, and they need to turn to foreigners who are charged 50 per cent more.

Headmasters at some leading private schools have told The Daily Telegraph that some of their foreign pupils were being offered places with lower entry requirements than their British counterparts.

Following concerns raised by academics and schools, undercover reporters visited Golden Arrows Consulting in Beijing, which placed more than 2,500 students in British universities last year, purporting to being looking for a place for a Chinese student.

The firm is the official agent for more than 20 British universities and acts as their representative in China.

The fictitious student was said to have achieved three C grades at A-level – far below the entry requirements of most leading British universities. However, they were offered a place at both Cardiff and Sussex.

The agent, Fiona Wang said: “We send student [sic] to Cardiff Business School to study accounting and finance with ACD. So with CCC we can help her”.

An applicant would normally need AAB to study this subject at the university, so the reporter asked again about the potential offer.

“If the student wants to study economics, it’s three Cs. So economics she can also do”, the agent replied.

When the undercover reporters asked what universities the student could go to if they re-sat their exams and managed to obtain three grades Bs at A-level, Ms Wang explained that those grades would mean that as well as Cardiff and Sussex, she could “choose” between the University of East Anglia or Southampton University.

“Even some high ranking universities, but not Bristol, not KCL [King’s College London], not Warwick”.

The undercover reporters were referred to another employee of Golden Arrow who offered to doctor documents to help the student’s application, including paperwork required to obtain a visa to study in Britain. Assistance with the personal statement that each student is required to fill in was also available.

Universities are able to make discretionary offers to students and there are no rules governing entry requirements.

Headmasters at some top private schools confirmed that they were experiencing growing problems with British students facing discrimination.

Many wealthy parents would be prepared to pay the higher fees charged to foreign students but the system bans this from happening.

Andrew Halls, the headmaster of King’s College School in Wimbledon, south-west London, said: “There was a boy this year who told me that he was made an offer dependent on him being a non EU candidate, and when he clarified the fact that he was a UK candidate, even when he appeared not to be, they said that the offer doesn’t stand.

“There are occasions when I have said to a candidate, if you can apply as an international candidate it slightly strengthens your hand.”

He added: “Universities are disincentivised from taking UK candidates. We have to address it.”

Richard Cairns, the headmaster at Brighton College, said: “Universities are increasingly searching for, and needing, overseas fees. It’s something we have noticed. It’s tougher for British students to get into top universities than overseas students… There is a higher offer rate to overseas students.”

A third leading headmaster said he was aware of cases where a pupil had dual nationality and applied to university from abroad with lower grades than would be accepted for a British candidate.

Since 2006, the number of foreign students has risen by a third to almost 300,000. Teenagers from China represent the highest proportion of overseas students. At the same time the number of British students missing out on a university place reached a record high last year of 180,000.

Last month, 68 chancellors, governors and university presidents wrote to the Prime Minister warning that the government’s immigration crackdown should exclude students, to drive the economy and boost university income.

The recruitment of foreign students by overseas agents is big business – almost all university websites have pages dedicated to listing their “partners” in each country for prospective students to contact about obtaining a place. Agencies compete for business with some being paid by both the student and agent.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said that “money is the main factor” in universities recruiting foreign students.

“The reason universities are recruiting more foreign students, is at its heart, about fees. Universities are business, they have to secure their future, they look at their income streams.

“There is the risk of standards being compromised if the driving force is the extra money these students are bringing in”.

From September the government will remove a cap on the number of British students a university can recruit if the applicant had A, A, B grades at A-level to ensure that high-performing teenagers are not denied places.

Next year the threshold will be lowered to A, B, B, but so far only a handful of universities have said they will participate because of concerns over costs of admitting more UK students.

The Daily Telegraph will expose further issues with the system later this week. The disclosures are expected to lead to demands for a review of entry requirements.

Golden Arrow admitted that it had found a place for a student at Cardiff with A, C and D grades at A-level but insisted this was an exceptional case.

It said it had “never” sent a student to Cardiff University with C, C, C grades, but that lower grades could be accepted during clearing for a number of high ranking universities.

The firm denied offering to doctor visa applications and said that when the agent had offered to write the personal statement for a student, he meant that it could “instruct students how to make a good PS [personal statement], but never write on behalf of them”.

Sussex University said, “We have not offered places on degree courses to international students in the way that you describe… We make no C, C, C offers whatsoever.

“It is possible, however, that during the Ucas clearing process offers may be made at slightly below the advertised entry criteria, but this is unlikely to drop by more than one or two grades.

“Any such offer would be the same for overseas and UK/EU students”

Sussex said that it did not enter clearing last year because of the cap on the number of UK/EU students it can accept and it had met its “limit”, but overseas students were offered places during this period because their numbers are not restricted.

Cardiff University said it was “unlikely” that any student would be offered a place to study with A-level grades C, C, C, but that the university “may vary its typical offer where there are mitigating circumstances or aptitude to study demonstrated by other means”.

It confirmed that in the 2011/12 academic year, 258 of its students applied via Golden Arrow, but said that agents “do not make admissions decisions”.

A spokesman for the University of Southampton said that international students were given the same offers as UK students. It said they would be investigating the allegations.

The University of East Anglia said that no student would be offered a to study maths with grades C, C, C .