A hard sell for Stephen Williams & colleagues

Where do you start on tuition fees for the Liberal Democrats in the West Country?

Martin Horwood in Cheltenham, Stephen Williams in Bristol and Don Foster in Bath: all Lib Dem MPs here - and all in university towns.

They all signed up to the (manifesto) pledge to scrap tuition fees over six years.

There are several ways to view this: the most abstract is as a basic u-turn which will leave many supporters cold.

Like Trident and nuclear power, the beards and sandals brigade will be seething - it's the principle of the thing after all.

But MPs seem to be finding the ubiquitous coalition wriggle room in the argument that Browne's report is "fairer" than the system we have now - and having them in the coalition has softened what the Tories may have done on their own.

Stephen Williams has been his party's spokesman on higher education, so has faced tough questions about their change.

He told BBC Points West: "The report recommends a much more progressive system than we currently have, because if you're a high-earning graduate you'll pay back much more than a middle-earning graduate and lower earning graduates may not pay back anything at all."

Some modelling systems dispute this, but it shows the wider political battle being fought: which party is the more "progressive"?

Labour used this term as a rallying cry at its conference, and at PMQs David Cameron assumed the mantle in his defence of scrapping child benefit for higher earners.

But selling yourself as progressive is a bit like selling apple pie and ice cream: who's not going to buy it?

So the Lib Dems may have to work harder.

On tuition fees, they think they can insert progressive measures into the legislation, such as stopping higher-earning graduates paying off their debt too quickly, thus avoiding lucrative interest repayments which could be used to fund others in the system.

No Lib Dems we've spoken to will say for sure which way they'll vote on this: keeping their powder dry means - they say - they have leverage on these finer points of detail, which they hope will make the news once the headline writers have moved on.

It is worth remembering though that Labour flipped on tuition fees in 1997 - and stayed in power for 13 years.

In part, because while there may be 70,000 students in the west, many of them don't vote here - or even in their home constituencies.

They're transient - and crucially, they're used to paying for their education now.