Focus group lolz
This evening I found myself sitting around a table in the meeting room of a hotel in my hometown with seven other women, taking part in a focus group for the Labour party. My aunt is on a mailing list for focus groups and she received an email looking for female Labour voters which would pay £40 for an hour’s worth of your time. She sent it on to me; I needed the money and thought it might be interesting; and so off I went. Not only were we handed £40 the minute we walked in, we also had to hang around the bar area for a while beforehand and were offered “a free drink – which can be alcoholic”. I settled for a J20 but most of the women had wine. I got the impression this was rather encouraged – after all, we were there in our capacities as ordinary people to give our honest opinion, and in vino veritas.
The discussion kicked off with us giving a short introduction on our family situation, where we got most of our news from, and who we voted for in the last election. I was the youngest person there by 25 years, and the only one who had any real political interest. Everyone took great pleasure in introducing themselves and saying a lot about their families, and very little about their news sources. It took me about 2 minutes to realise I was the least appropriate person for this kind of group ever. Focus groups are not about listening to the opinions of politics obsessives like me, they’re about gauging the mood of people who don’t generally pay much attention to politics. I was at a loss how to respond to most of the questions, because if you ask my opinion, I’ll give you an analysis, but they were looking for reactions. The role of the interviewer is very interesting . They run the group like a discussion, throwing out questions and seeing who responds, encouraging currents in a conversation, and steering the topic back towards certain issues. I would actually love to do that job. It’s amazing how much people will tell you if you act as though their opinion is worth listening to (and maybe give them some wine).
The first topic of conversation was our views on Ed Miliband. There were eight of us in the room, and two women stuck out – one was very domineering and spoke over people a lot, and the other was a Malaysian woman who came to the UK to study and met her husband, and who kept describing herself as “very family orientated”. It was someone else who first described Ed as “creepy” and there were murmurs of assent around the room as most people agreed. It surprised me that they called Ed “creepy” – I can understand thinking he was geeky or awkward, maybe, but “creepy” seemed unnecessarily harsh. I disagreed and said I thought Ed comes across as who he is – an affable, intellectual policy wonk (I didn’t use the word wonk) and that I thought he’d make a decent leader. Then the Malaysian woman kept going on about how she couldn’t trust someone who had “stolen” the election from his brother. This view was quite widely shared; at least, everyone was more interested in the sibling rivalry between Ed and David than in any of Ed’s policies. At one point they were so busy speculating about why it often is that siblings compete in the same field that the interviewer had to shut everyone up. I was genuinely baffled that these women thought they were being paid £40 for their pseudo-analysis of the Miliband family. It was probably the most heated part of the discussion, and the Malaysian woman said that “as someone who is very family-orientated, I just don’t understand how those two brothers and their wives can sit around a table together… after Ed betrayed David like that”. It was all completely bizarre. We were asked whether it made a difference to us that he got married – the consensus was “No it doesn’t”, and then Domineering Woman quipped that she “felt sorry for his wife”, to general laughter. And we were all chosen because we were Labour voters! You could do a lot worse than Ed, that’s all I’m saying.
Next up was our views on why Labour lost the last election. By this point I decided just to give pat answers. The general view was that Labour were unlucky enough to be in power when the financial crisis happened, but that it was partly their fault because (apparently) the crisis was caused by too much borrowing and public spending. Tony Blair was a good leader because he was a showman, but Gordon Brown seemed awkward. The low point of the evening was when a woman (one who was particularly obsessed with the Ed-and-David psychodrama) said she started taking in an interest in Gordon Brown when she read about his child being ill, and subsequently dying. That warmed Brown to her. Someone else pointed out that David Cameron’s child had died too. No one had any qualms about this. I thought it was grotesque.
There was a brief detour onto Boris Johnson, who divided opinions. About half the group liked him, although they couldn’t really say why. I actually gave my real opinion at this point – “he’s ruthlessly ambitious and would do anything for power, I don’t think he even has any principles beyond a vague view that rich people are better than the rest of us” and no one challenged me. Domineering Woman said that “at least Boris is dynamic enough to get people talking”, to which my (inner) reply was that if it takes Boris Johnson to get you interested in politics, that probably says more about your ignorance than anything else. I spend a lot of time around young people who are informed and very used to defending their opinions. It was a shock to be around middle-aged people simultaneously so uninformed and so sure of themselves. At several points people said “It’s just common sense” or “Everyone agrees that…” or “Come on, we all know that”. There’s something stultifying about people who haven’t changed their opinions in the past two decades. Not everyone was this bad – two or three kept quiet for a lot of it. But overall I was amazed to think that in this day and age there are still people confident of walking into a room of 9 strangers and expecting that everyone shares their point of view.
Next up – the economy. “There do have to be cuts because we’ve run out of money” was the general consensus. No one talked about inequality, but there were comments about “the bankers”. Most were broadly in favour of the changes to the benefits system – “people have been milking the system for too long”. In fact, the interviewer steered the conversation around to ask whether Labour would have more chance of winning the 2014 election if they would take an equally harsh line on benefits cheats, and most people said they would. And this is people who have almost always voted Labour. Domineering Woman claimed to “know better than anyone” how the economy worked, because she was a mortgage advisor. This was one of the many times I had to refrain from laughing out loud. That the country is in debt, that a structural deficit is essentially a national overdraft, and that the only solution was spending cuts, was accepted by everybody. Most of the women had professional jobs, or their husbands owned small businesses, and almost all of their children had or would consider university. When the subject of tuition fees came up, there was talk of how people they knew had put their children off going to university, because of the cost. And while everyone thought the rise in fees was disgraceful, their understanding of why it had happened, or just how shocking the cost is in comparison to every other developed country in the world, was very superficial. They complained about it in the way people complain about the weather.
The conversation turned back to Labour, and who else in the party aside from Ed we had any strong opinions on. One woman complained that the party has no rising stars, and this then segued into a talk on why young people weren’t interested in politics. My favourite question of the evening came from the interviewer – “After all, do normal young people go into politics? Aren’t all these student activists a bit weird?” No one agreed, exactly, but there was definitely a consensus that politicians can’t be trusted. And that student activists are weird. We are, of course. Anyone who is really into politics isn’t normal. I forget most of the time that a “normal” interest in politics is thinking about it for about 30 seconds twice a week. When the interviewer asked if we thought the Labour party had any rising stars, I mentioned Chukka Ummana, and nobody knew who he was. In fact, not a single person could name a member of the Shadow Cabinet, which I thought was mindboggling. These were middle-class women, and they had only the vaguest idea of who Ed Balls is.
Lastly, we were asked if we would vote in the European elections. The interviewer (I can’t get across how much he conducted the session as though he were making up questions in response to peoples’ answers) asked if any of us would vote for UKIP. One woman said “Ugh, no, they’re horrible” and the Malaysian woman asked if they were the Party who didn’t like foreigners. The interviewer summed them up as the party who want Britain out of the EU, partly because they think the EU brings in too much immigration, at which point the Malaysian woman said she might vote for them! Someone else chimed in with a comment about there being too many immigrants, and no one disagreed. And then it was time to go home.
All in all, it was an interesting evening, and certainly the easiest forty pounds I’ve ever made. I think there’s almost nothing as interesting as just getting people to tell you what they think, even if their opinions will probably appal you. I was reminded of the extent to which people use political opinions to voice certain things about themselves – whether that’s an opportunity to go on about how “family focused” they are, to talk at length about the several hospitals they’ve worked in as an NHS nurse, or perhaps to point out how their immigrant story was a respectable journey into middle-class Englishhood, unlike the hordes who arrive today. Liberal leftie types like myself do this as well, of course. It still infuriates me when people blame their political ignorance on politicians, and I feel for the policy wonks who will have to make sense of an hour’s worth of very misinformed, tipsy ramblings from seven “ordinary voters”, and one girl rolling her eyes in the corner. If I had several hundred pounds to spend on gathering the views of, to quote The Thick of It, “muggles”, I would hang around in pubs, buy people drinks, and ask them what they think. Or I’d just pick up a copy of the Daily Mail, because evidently most people just agree with what they read in the papers. But as a rule of thumb, it’s less about the politics of pre-distribution and more about how Ed Miliband looks a bit funny. Oh, and student politicians are weird.
Still “lower than vermin” – liveblogging the Tory conference
In 1948 Anuerin Bevan (the son of a Welsh coalminer and Labour MP who founded the NHS) made a speech in Parliament which started “No amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin”. As the Conservative Party Conference creaks on, #lowerthanvermin is making the rounds on Twitter, as true as it was 64 years ago when Bevan first created the hashtag. I don’t know if it’s a pleasing historical continuity or just a sign of how far we haven’t come. As well as outlining plans to cut welfare by £10bn, demonising the unemployed during a recession exacerbated by the Government’s own economic policies and having a large number of their members protesting against gay marriage (LOWER! THAN! VERMIN!), George Osborne unveiled another big idea.
It is a plan that workers receive shares in return for giving up some of their rights. This situation is less like being unable to distinguish between The Thick of It and the actual Government, and more like being unable to distinguish between the Guardian and the Daily Mash. Obviously, £100m spent on a scheme to give tax breaks to shareholders of small businesses is very much part of the Tory property-owning dream. The money would be better spent on Sure Start centres or bursaries for low-income students or investing in green energy. But whatever. It won’t help with deficit reduction, but then again we all know that “deficit reduction” is a vehicle for reducing the size of the state, and ensuring workers’ rights are upheld is clearly a part of the state Osborne would like to see trimmed.
It’s not the worst idea in the world until you get to the part that says people will be able to purchase these shares in exchange for giving up their workers’ rights. Like their right to unfair dismissal. Like their rights to request flexible working hours. Like certain aspects of the right to maternity leave. I don’t think it would be possible to conceive of a single policy more illustrative of the conservative mindset. It simultaneously aims to puts a price on the rights that people have fought for for centuries, and then puts a false tension between possible material benefit for oneself and one’s support of universal human rights. I mean, surely Osborne could just spend £100m on giving out these tax breaks if he wanted to? But his borderline sadistic political mindset sees a Government doing something beneficial for a population presumably as akin to having a Nanny State . I mean, what if people just bought these shares and benefited from them?! They might get a taste for voting for Governments which proposed redistributive measures to improve their lives, and then where would we be? STUCK IN A CYCLE OF SLAVISH STATE DEPENDENCY.
The idea that workers’ rights are in some kind of opposition to the concept of employee-owned shares is a false dichotomy. I am all for employees having a share in their business, but then that’s because I’m a Marxist who sees capitalism as inherently exploitative. For the same reason, workers’ rights are a good thing. For most people, more universal rights are synonymous with them (as the Tories put it) “getting on in life”. This is only untrue for a tiny minority at the top who profit from lax workers’ rights, and as usual, the Tories are conflating the interests of the 1% with the interests of the population as a whole. It’s also classist dogwhistling of the most tiresome sort, dividing the country into the sort of (entrepreneurial) types who want to own shares in a company and the (lazy) ones who think workers’ rights are important. The Conservative party conference has been doing this over and over again – not content with painting the unemployed as people living a life of total luxury on £50 per week through sheer fecklessness, they are now trying to portray working people who want to keep their rights as in opposition to responsible shareholders. I know, I know, The Pope is a Catholic, bears shit in the woods and Tories try and sell their policies through divisive, classist rhetoric.
They just don’t get that people may support universal rights for reasons bigger and more profound than the capital those rights may allow them to accrue. Unable to conceive of anyone holding motivations larger than their own self interest, this is an ideological move to undermine the solidarity of workers who have organised for decades to fight for these rights, because the conservative mindset can only view mass organised movements with suspicion.
I could write something about how this commodification of the very concept of workers’ rights represents a new frontier for capitalism. About how when George Lukacs wrote about the commodification of greater and greater aspects of the human experience, he probably didn’t think this would one day come to include putting a price tag on workers’ rights. About how Marx must be turning in his grave.
Instead I thought I’d draft some policy ideas which I’m sure we’ll see the Chancellor announce in due course:
– Students to swap right to protest in exchange for £1000 off their tuition fees (rising to £2000 in their final year for a clean track record of no political action whatsoever apart from the occasional Port & Policy session).
– Parents could swap their right to parental leave in exchange for vouchers for private schooling for their firstborn.
– The disabled could swap their right to accessible workplaces in exchange for keeping their disability benefit.
Honestly, this is so easy, I don’t know why I’m still unemployed when I could easily be working as a Conservative policy advisor.
#lowerthanvermin indeed!
Government policy: ‘If it ain’t broke, use it as an outlet for private capital’.
Following the Warwick Higher Education summit, I thought I’d outline what I felt it added to my understanding of the current dire situation in UK Higher Education.
The Government’s Higher Education policy is so terrible that I honestly cannot see what is driving them to implement it. I don’t have a high opinion of the Conservatives, to put it lightly, but in the interests of political survival if nothing else, I cannot see what would drive a Government to destroy, for no monetary gain, one of the only sectors in our country that is truly world-class.
The UK university system is one of the best in the world. Not only are Oxford and Cambridge world-famous, but this international quality is spread throughout a dozen institutions in our relatively small country – LSE, Imperial, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol, Durham, St. Andrews and Sussex all make it into the Top 100 World Universities according to the Times, with 32 overall UK universities, including Warwick, represented in the top 200. Now we have an obvious advantage in teaching and publishing in English, but nonetheless having 15% of the Top 200 comprised of British universities when we make up 1% of the global population is clearly something to be proud of. The higher education sector generates £59 billion annually for the UK economy, as well as training the next generation of professionals, from academics and architects, to midwives and primary school teachers, vital for any developed country. We attract international students from all over the world who contribute financially to the sector as well as often staying in the UK after graduation to contribute their skills and tax payments to the UK economy. Twelve percent of all the academic research cited across the world was published in the UK. This contribution to the economy notwithstanding, universities are the sites of technological endeavour to improve the human condition, and the development of ideas which further the reaches of human understanding. I’ve forgotten who it was who said that ‘the greatest task a human being can undertake is to contribute to the history of ideas’ but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t David Willetts.
The contribution to our economy and society is in some cases immeasurable – how many successful theatre shows and TV comedies started out as student productions? How many novelists owe their first book deal to the fact they studied an Arts subject, or took courses in creative writing? Of course, I don’t think the study of literature is valuable only insofar as it keeps bookshops stocked with bestsellers, but the argument that the Arts contribute to the UK economy complements the idea that they contribute to human flourishing generally. The creative industries generate 6% of Britain’s GDP, and yet the Government has just cut all State funding for the Arts & Humanities, despite the fact it is these graduates who overwhelmingly go into those industries. The financial services sector makes up 9% of our annual GDP and any threat to their existence is treated as synonymous with a threat to Britain’s economy as a whole.
All of this is despite the fact that the UK spends less on higher education as a proportion of its GDP than most other developed countries. In fact, the OECD average is 1.5% where Britain spends 0.7%. An outlay of £13 billion per year on higher education in this country is estimated to generate £59 billion annually each year for the economy. Universities also contribute to regional development, providing jobs in areas suffering post-industrial decline, attracting both academics and professionals to the area as well as providing thousands of jobs in catering, construction, estates management and administration.
This is of course before you even get onto the benefits of an educated populace. One of my favourite speakers yesterday, Fazia Shaheen, pointed out that what are usually considered ‘intangible’ benefits are actually quite measurable – studies have shown that graduates tend to leave university with higher levels of interpersonal trust, better levels of health and a greater understanding of politics. This is true even when taking into account their original social background. And last but no means least, there is simply what a university education contributes to the human experience. It allows young people to live away from home and meet people from different backgrounds to an extent unparalleled in any other walk of life, especially in our class-ridden society. It develops critical thinking skills and specific subject knowledge, as well as general knowledge simply from being in an intellectual climate, surrounded by other students. Most universities have an active social life of talks, debates, film screenings, sports clubs, theatre groups, music groups and cultural groups. Going to university develops all the ‘soft skills’, from self-confidence to time management to organisational skills.
Universities remain socially divided, but they are still the only time in a lot of people’s lives when they will mix with such a variety of people, combatting insularity, prejudice and closed horizons. In their contributions to Britain’s economy, technological development, quality of life, intellectual and cultural life, and the existence of a critical public sphere, British universities play a vital role and are both of better quality and better value-for-money than their European equivalents.
So what did the Government do?
The Government, then, in May 2010, inherited a higher education sector that outperformed its equivalents across the world. The main failing of the British Higher Education sector is the sad fact that its elite institutions remain dominated by those from professional backgrounds and have a huge proportion of privately-educated pupils. Many factors affect this, some easier to change than others. Nonetheless, a lot could be done to improve this, from improving the state education system generally to funding more outreach schemes and increasing funding for programmes such as AimHigher and EMA. Needless to say, all of these have been cut. Maintenance grants could be raised, which would give young people from poor backgrounds the message that going to university isn’t some kind of burden on the state – it’s something that should be encouraged. If I were David Willetts settling into my new role as Minister for Universities and Science, my first priority would be to widen participation, which is of course both intrinsically fair and would benefit the country as a whole, as a meritocracy means the best actually rise to the top, as opposed to the privileged. Case in point: almost the entire current Cabinet. David Cameron would be lucky to be a middle manager by now had he been born on a council estate: George Osborne born into, say, a single-parent family on Moss Side would be currently be in a position more suited to his aptitude, like emptying bins. These men are intellectual pygmies. Anyway, if I were David Willetts, I would want to improve access to universities, and to do what I could to improve an already effective model. Being a conservative, of course, I would have no interest in radically reforming something already so successful.
Let’s instead have a look at what the Government has planned for Higher Education. Now, these reforms are still ongoing, and with the news that the White Paper has been shelved indefinitely, it’s very hard to say what is actually going to happen. Nonetheless, it’s easy to understand the strain of thinking that dominates conservative Higher Education policy, and it goes something like this:
“State spending is intrinsically bad, and the deficit needs to be reduced. We can save the Treasury money and implement brilliant free-market reforms at the same time by shifting the burden of payments from the State onto the student. Oh wait, that would make access to education massively unequal, so we still need to loan out all the money for tuition fees, and make some attempt to help the disadvantaged through maintenance fees and loans. And of course we need to incentivise the study of Science, Maths and Engineering so we’ll still fund all of those.”
Now, not only a terrible idea, it’s also impossible to implement. The result has been a mish-mash of policy which will have an appalling effect on higher education in this country. The new fees regime will not make the sector ‘market-driven’, but even if it would, let’s just go over some of the reasons why marketising universities is one of the worst ideas EVER. Someone at the summit pointed out that Willetts has never denigrated the value of a university, he just doesn’t see why something that is valuable should be paid for by the State. I would argue that UK universities have been state-funded for most of their 800 year existence, and free to students for all but the last 15 years. One speaker used the example of the Government valuing the provision to food while at the same time letting the free market provide it, and thus planning to do something similar with universities. For those seduced by that logic, I would just like to offer:
Four Reasons why doing a degree is not like buying a sandwich
1. Universities are complex institutions that involve both teaching and research, both of which are vital to their survival, and necessary to the functioning of society as a whole. They are not simply advanced versions of ‘schools’ where one purchases an education.
2. Unlike, say, buying a pair of shoes or choosing a restaurant to visit, you only go to university once. Yes, some people switch institutions after a year or so, but this is very rare and comes at considerable financial and personal cost. So the market-driven model of subpar institutions failing due to lack of popularity makes no sense because there is a massive feedback gap between attending a university and realising it wasn’t what you wanted. As Liam Burns said yesterday, is dropping out of university (when there is no way of getting a refund) because it isn’t right for you going to make you feel like an empowered market actor? Is filling in a feedback form negatively at the end of your degree, safe in the knowledge it might discourage a later student from going to your old university, going to improve standards overall? Is realising ten years into your career that you’d have been much better off studying a different subject, and letting the QAA know in no uncertain terms that your degree hasn’t helped your career, going to make any difference to the next cohort of 18 year old embarking on university study? No, no and no.
3. Treating higher education as a financial investment makes little sense when most students choose their course at the age of 17 or 18, with little idea of what job they will end up in and how much they will earn. Even those determined to train for a certain career can’t know for sure that they are guaranteed a certain salary – parenthood, disability, a change in circumstances or more likely, the unpredictable nature of the economy – are such that it is akin to asking teenagers to gamble somewhere in the region of £40,000 on an investment they might not get back. At a time when the Government is obsessed with the idea that having the State in debt could mean the end of the world as we know it, isn’t there something paradoxical in simultaneously telling students that getting into massive amounts of debt before they even start their working lives is a good idea? Oh wait, that’s because deficit cutting through the form of privatising everything is an ideological move. MY BAD.
4. A market system presupposes that anyone with the money, whether loaned or otherwise, has the right to purchase a service. This makes no sense in a university system based on academic achievement, as well as personal preferences, to gain access to certain institutions. From my own experience, it’s definitely true that I would have higher future earnings if I’d studied Management at, say, Oxford. The fees could be much higher than £9,000 and it would still be a worthwhile investment. However, as previously discussed, being a human being capable of feeling other motivations than economic ones, I chose to do my course at this institution through a mixture of personal preferences and aptitudes, as well as not wanting to go to a university too far from home. I wanted to learn about literature and the world, I wanted to understand how society worked, I wanted to become fluent in French and have the chance to live abroad, I wanted to develop my analytic skills and general knowledge, and I wanted to meet different kinds of people, and see a bit of the world outside the place I grew up. I knew having a degree would open a lot of doors, and I thought that the acquisition of one would help me work out how I could best use my aptitudes to make some kind of positive difference in the world.. All of these things have benefitted my life, and will hopefully benefit society also, in a way that it would be ridiculous to try and put a price tag on, let alone to try to put a price tag on before I’d even experienced any of them. These factors can’t be entered into a simple equation of “My education will cost me X and later allow me to earn Y% more than I would otherwise”.
5. Private universities are private companies, with profits going towards shareholders, paid for by public funds ie. the student loans system. This is not a free market system, it’s a corporatist model. Unless the student loans company itself becomes privatised, which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Current policy
Current policy is thus a mish-mash of aspects of the above failed and reductive capitalist model, mixed with concessions to the idea of equal access, as obviously a totally free-market system would benefit the rich to a politically unacceptable degree. Various other measures were proposed in the White Paper to incentivise universities to attract AAB students, and to provide courses for less than £7,500. As universities must attract students to gain funding, and having had all their funding cut, they now need to raise fees to £9,000 to continue functioning; this would have led to the bankruptcy of many ‘low-ranking’ universities – a failure that was entirely desired by the architects of the policy.
I am certain the Daily Mailesque, classist, anti-intellectual mindset displayed by the Government, and a good proportion of the populace, has a lot to do with this. You know, the one which says that low-ranking institutions should be shut down anyway, as they only teach David Beckham studies and other Mickey Mouse degrees to students who’d be much better off in the world of work – in our thriving manufacturing sector, or something. In reality, these institutions do a lot of vocational training for careers in healthcare, business and education, as well as providing academic degrees to some of the country’s most disadvantaged pupils. I have time for the argument that some students would be better off in work or vocational training, but we’re not talking about a reform to the sector that would propose positive alternatives to less worthwhile university courses. Nothing of this kind has been proposed at all – no restoration of teacher training colleges, or polytechnic institutions, or an increase in apprenticeships. Perhaps those measures, or, I don’t know, doing something about our decimated manufacturing sector, our million-plus youth unemployment, and the cuts to careers services and youth centres and public sector jobs WOULD BE A BETTER IDEA THAN FORCING THE UNIVERSITIES THAT ACTUALLY MANAGE TO GIVE WORKING-CLASS KIDS ACCESS TO A DEGREE TO SHUT DOWN.
London Metropolitan University is the university most at risk from shutting due to Government cuts and has more black students than the entire Russell Group. This idea that ‘low-ranking institutions deserve to fail’ promotes a view of education as being about hierarchy and competition, and completely ignores the social factors that influence which university students end up in. According the conservative mindset, the value of a degree is based mainly in how much ‘better’ it is than other peoples, as oppose to education and training being valuable for both individuals and society, whether that’s an academic degree at a Russell Group, or a vocational degree at a former polytechnic. A flat rate of £3,00 per year, whether a student did PPE at Oxford, or Midwifery at Lancaster, was in recognition of the fact it was a contribution to a system that, in theory, educated people in a way that was valuable for everybody. Asking students to cover the full cost of their degrees is making them purchase an education, at an amazingly high price, as if it were some kind of luxury. What kind of message does it send to young people? Does it tell them that going to university, if they are interested in their subject and will work hard, is a positive move both for themselves and for society? No, it does not.
As I’m writing this, UCAS has published figures on the decrease in applications this year. Overall, they are down 7%. Applications to degrees allied to education are down 7%, engineering applications are down 2%, architecture applications are down 16%, those allied to non-European languages are down 20%, and those allied to European languages are down 10%. In a few years’ time, we’ll have a lack of teachers, architects, medical professionals and linguists, and although the figures aren’t out yet, I would bet the full £9,000 that these remaining professionals will be from more socially exclusive backgrounds than they are already. It doesn’t take a degree in Sociology to posit that the young people most put off by these fees will be from low-income backgrounds. The Minister for Higher Education, David ‘two brains’ Willetts has himself written an entire book on what the older generation owe to the young, with sentences like “The competition for jobs is like English tennis, a competitive game but largely one the middle classes play against each other.” And yet his Government’s policies are going to make this unacceptable situation even worse. The only sense in which this man has two brains is that he has one which wrote ‘The Pinch’ and one which drafted the White Paper, and they seem never to speak to one another.
Every single country in the European Union is investing in higher education to promote growth, apart from the United Kingdom and Spain. Spain has 50% youth unemployment. Everything this Government does it say is to promote growth, and the economy contracted by 0.2% in the last quarter. Investing in higher education promotes growth and makes complete economic sense. These reforms will harm our economic recovery and they save the Treasury no money because all the money needed to finance loans must be loaned out by the Government, doing nothing to reduce in the short term. Instead of funding institutions directly, Government’s now fund them via loans to students, meaning that the funding of the entire sector now depends on the choices of 17 and 18 year olds. Is this a mature policy? Furthermore, the huge irony is that by the Treasury’s own estimation, 38% of the loans won’t be paid back, as they can be written off if a graduate doesn’t earn enough to pay them back. This move will not reduce the deficit. It is a political choice – the tertiary sector equivalent of the voucher system they’d love to introduce for secondary education. And in an era where we are told that State debt is the biggest threat to society imaginable, we are also encouraging 18 year olds to take on a debt they may never repay. THIS IS INSANE.
The Government’s policy on higher education is symptomatic of its overall failed worldview. Ideologically committed to slashing the State under the guise of slashing the deficit, and unable to understand the value of anything that won’t produce obvious economic returns before the next election cycle, they are taking a scythe to one of the few aspects of Britain we can still be proud of. A speaker yesterday posited that it’s due, again, to thinking their own experiences were similar to everyone else’s – almost all of our Cabinet went down the “private school, Oxbridge, lucrative career” which renders £40k+ of debt far more manageable than for the vast majority of students.
So, it’s easy to criticise, especially with a policy this bad. What would I do differently? Well, tuition fees aren’t going away any time soon, and the system of £3,000 per year fees, repayable without interest only once you were earning a decent salary, worked well enough. One speaker yesterday seemed to want to concede that academics shouldn’t be ‘Luddite’ and want to preserve the status quo (circa 2010); on the contrary I would argue that the status quo, while having room for improvement, was essentially great. Isn’t the essence of conservatism, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’? These radical reforms are more along the lines of ‘if it ain’t broke, use it as an outlet for private capital’. The same can of course, be said of the NHS.
And so in 25 years’ time, because the loans won’t be able to be paid back, we’ll have another budget deficit, another financial crisis, until our whole rotten economic system topples. This is what I mean when I say capitalism IS crisis. It cannot exist without them; it generates wealth at the expense of equality and security.
Capitalism as we know it is dying, and it’s taking the aspirations of Britain’s young people with it. I don’t actually know or particularly care whether the Government believes its ‘marketisation is efficiency’ nonsense, I only know that is much easier to get into power when you’re shitting on students and the disabled rather than asking your donors to cough up some of the tax they owe, let alone raising taxes on the richest. Never forget, the Treasury loses £95 billion per year in corporate tax avoidance, and the cuts to higher education are to the tune of £5 billion. This is a political choice, and it is mind-boggling in its idiocy.
Found an occupation 