The Tories' war on foreign students isn’t for the good of the country – it's about saving their own skins | Polly Toynbee

This dying government is happy to see universities in crisis, the economy damaged and soft power lost – if it wins a few votesA key turning point in British politics was Tony Blair’s famous three priorities: “education, education, education”. A giant step was his 1999 conference speech: “Today I set a target of 50% of young adults going into higher education in the next century.” By 2017-18 that symbolic threshold had been crossed in England, with more than ha