Just another test post

Student protests against the tuition fee rise in December. The average cost is now much higher than predicted by education ministers. Photograph: Felipe Trueba/Photoshot

Ministers have suffered a major blow to their tuition-fee reforms after the government's access watchdog revealed that all universities intend to charge at least £6,000 a year.

The Office for Fair Access (Offa) announced that every one of the 123 universities and university colleges in England intend to charge £6,000 or more to full-time undergraduates from autumn 2012. A further 17 further-education colleges – out of 124 – want to charge fees of more than £6,000. Universities had until midnight on Tuesday to submit their plans to the watchdog.

Offa would not say how many of the institutions want to charge the maximum fee of £9,000. However, research by the Guardian has revealed that almost three-quarters of English universities and university colleges intend to charge this amount for at least some of their courses.

Just a test post

Can you remember the last time a British chancellor sounded so shrill? After 18 years of measured tones from Tory grandees followed by 13 years of Scottish gravitas, we are not used to hearing our chancellor sounding excitable and impulsive. Yet if George Osborne's recent outburst on AV and the Electoral Reform Society has received most attention, it is his rush to give partisan interpretations of events in Europe and the US that has caught my ear.

First he made the extraordinary claim that Britain could have gone the same way as Portugal if it were not for his deficit reduction plan. Leave aside the fact that Portugal is locked into the eurozone – so has no exchange-rate flexibility and the same interest rates as growing countries like Germany – or that Britain's debt is more long term than any advanced economy.