SIR – It may be that students should not face paying £9,000 per year for university tuition fees, but when I was a student at the Regional College of Art in the Sixties, the university students at Hull University Union liked to talk of themselves as being one of the three per cent, not 50 per cent who went to university.

I did hear a recent graduate of Liverpool’s second university say, “You don’t have to be clever to go to university today.”

If some of the students had read a little history, they would know, as R Halliday points out (Letters, December 21), that Sir Winston Churchill “fought very hard during the dark days of the Second World War”.

I know he gave immeasurable courage to my father as a young soldier in the 8th Army fighting in the desert of North Africa.

He would have been dismayed at the defacing of the plinth to Churchill’s statue, which I am sure will be the feeling of many comrades alive today.

Iain Morris, Caroline Street, Saltaire