Last week, as the Conservative party conference got under way, Lower Saxony announced the scrapping of tuition fees, making Germany fully tuition-fee free. The fact that two such similar countries – both relatively wealthy, both with conservative governments – have such different approaches to education funding is emblematic both of the political differences between the countries, and of the effectiveness of grassroots dissent in forcing the hand of governments. Tuition fees, and the privatisation of higher education that accompanies them, are not the inevitability that the current orthodoxy in Westminster would have us believe.

While Germany’s settlement is by no means entirely subsidised, it is a world away from the situation in England. Here, universities are on their road to full privatisation with most HE funding now coming from student tuition fees – an amount that is under constant scrutiny from university vice chancellors and which could be increased yet again in the near future.

After Lower Saxony’s announcement, the least generous states will now fund one undergraduate degree and a consecutive masters, with some offering more. Any notion of free higher education being unaffordable or unrealistic is absurd in light of this reality: for Germany, fees were a brief and unpopular experiment. .

What separates the two countries is political will, both within the political elite and the population. The idea of education as a public good – a human right accessible to everyone – was reclaimed in Germany; in Britain it is still under threat.

Germany’s free education movement began in 1999 with the founding of the Alliance against Tuition Fees when 200 organisations including student unions, trade unions and political parties came together to declare their commitment to fighting for free education. In the mid-noughties it continued, with students taking to the streets all over Germany in response to the seven west German states that introduced fees. Students in Hamburg organised a fee strike and students in Hessen occupied their universities.

These movements were grassroots and drew on support from across society. In Bavaria, a state with the most stable and most conservative government in Germany, students started protesting in 2008 in their hundreds. They organised radical occupations, debates in schools and election campaigns, and organised events in the wider community. By 2013 their numbers had grown into the high thousands and public opinion had changed so much in their favour that they delivered a successful petition for a state referendum on HE policy: 1.35 million eligible voters signed it – 15% of the population. Only days later, the state’s premier made a 180-degree turn and scrapped tuition fees.

The UK’s student movement has a very different recent history. While 2010 saw a big student uprising against the increase in tuition fees, this was a reactive and short-term movement. What this country has lacked is a pro-active movement for free education for all, a movement that makes cross-society links, that is not afraid to be radical and that reclaims the core idea of education: that it is a public good. Until this April, the National Union of Students did not even hold free education as its own policy, and while less formal organisations – such as the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts – have fought consistently, the student movement has never sustained mass mobilisation for more than a couple of months.

It is astonishing that no major UK party has a free education policy, given how popular the policy would prove. The German experience of abolishing tuition fees shows clearly that ever-increasing tuition fees do not need to be a permanent fixture of the British education system. But most importantly, it has shown that the only way to shift government policy is by going on the streets with a clear and radical demand.

On 19 November, students will mobilise in their thousands in London to demand free education – and this will hopefully only be the start of a newly reinvigorated free education movement. We are now at a turning point, and we must ask ourselves: do we want to keep increasing fees and follow in the footsteps of the failed American system – with its $1tn black hole of student debt – or do we want to follow our European neighbours in Scandinavia and now Germany in scrapping tuition fees?