Among those which expect to lose most of staff are Aston, which has announced 130 voluntary redundancies, and Sheffield, which is looking for 250.David Triesman, general secretary of the Association of University Teachers, said universities faced the dilemma of cutting marketing budgets and losing students, or keeping them up and being forced to cut staff."The idea of a system which is as crudely competitive between institutions as ours is absurd. Universities will spend at least pounds 13m on advertising their courses in the next year - enough to save more than 500 of the 3,000 jobs which are likely to be lost this year because of government spending cuts. New research shows that although there will be a drop from last year's all-time high of pounds 14m, many universities and colleges will still rely heavily on advertising to fill their courses after the A level results are published this month. Because funding follows each student, it is crucial for universities to keep numbers up even if they are having to cut staff jobs at the same time.Many new universities cannot fill all their places through the conventional entrance system and rely on the clearing system to find students who have not been accepted into the course of their choice.Last night, university lecturers' leaders condemned the competition that has developed in higher education and predicted that 8,000 jobs would be lost in the next three years.Universities have suffered a 5 per cent overall cut in budgets this year and will face a 50 per cent drop in capital funding over the next three years. If he does he will get our support."According to a compilation by Labour from Dod's, the parliamentary reference book, the following Tory MPs list shooting as a recreation: Rupert Allason, Peter Atkinson, Sir Nicholas Bonsor, Timothy Boswell, John Carlisle, Alan Duncan, Edward Garnier, Charles Goodson-Wickes, Warren Hawksley, David Heathcoat-Amory, Sir Nicholas Lyell (the Attorney General), Sir Hector Monroe, Michael Morris, Sir Cranley Onslow, Richard Page, James Paice, Graham Riddick, Andrew Robathan, Peter Temple-Morris, David Tredinnick and Nigel Waterson.. "The question is whether John Major will have the courage to face them down.

For non-gun killings the figure is just two-and-a-half times higher. Numbers of all gun-related crimes appear to be far greater than would be expected from differences in recorded crime for other offences, the paper says.Donald Dewar, Labour's Chief Whip, yesterday stepped up pressure on the Government to outlaw private ownership of handguns."I can assure the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary that if they try to rediscover the plot on law and order and introduce legislation to ban handguns, the Labour Party will back them," he said.Mr Dewar maintained that a significant number of Tories would oppose such a measure. "The general message of the research note - that there is evidence from a variety of sources of a correlation between gun ownership and gun crime - is overlooked."More than 50 times more gun killings take place in the US than in the UK, and for those involving handguns the toll is 150 times higher. They challenge specific pieces of research without acknowledging that no single study is ever watertight, including those they themselves quote," it said.