The Next Tory Attack on Universities

It's no secret the Tories hate higher education. And yet, you'd think they'd love it. The university sector is responsible for £14.4bn worth of the UK's export earnings and, according to the latest report, this has been increasing at a healthy rate since the Tories came to power in 2010. This has happened on their watch and should be a success worth trumpeting, surely? Instead we get crap like the attempted appointment of Toby Young to the Office for Students, public fretting about the censorious safe space/no platform culture supposedly dominating campus politics, the introduction and enforcement of complex and ludicrous metrics that serve to deepen the bureaucracy and sclerosis of the sector, and, as of last week, the refusal to provide bailout loans to universities hit by shrivelling revenue streams and a projected collapse in student numbers.

What is the Tories' game? In the age of the magic money tree, the idea of tax payer value-for-money is complete fiction. From the standpoint of the rational management of British capitalism, there's no rhyme nor reason for not printing the money and handing over the cash to keep universities going. They are anchor employers in many locations - particularly away from the big cities. Instead, according to The Times the government is mulling over a raft of conditionalities. These include mergers, a curtailment of research, and the downgrading of some institutions (in all but name) to the delivery of vocational programmes and apprenticeships. Gavin Williamson favours the tackling of "low quality courses" where "low quality" has nothing to do with teaching or course content and everything to do with so-called marketable skills and a capacity for graduates to make their future employers money.

In other words, these poltroons, some of whom have spent their political careers bigging up the wisdom of the market have decided they don't like the HE landscape the invisible hand has shaped for them. It's too lefty and too critical, despite being the most market driven and neoliberalised arm of the state. Therefore the Coronavirus crisis is an opportunity too good to pass up for bringing the sector to heel, and their thinking has nothing to do with affordability or value metrics and everything to do with the interests of the Conservative Party.

As noted here plenty of times, the Tories have a pronounced young people problem that exists across all occupational groupings, and is especially negative among young women. This isn't much of an issue for them as long as older people keep turning out in greater numbers and, as the old pass away, are reproduced by new cohorts of the elderly. However, whether one grows more conservative with age or not there's no essential reason why that should affect voting preferences. One does not retire and simply put a cross next to the Tory candidate, it is mediated by structural location and property acquisition. And this is breaking down. Millions of working people cannot buy a house or save for one thanks to exorbitant prices and the monies renting swallows up. This isn't just the lot of young people, millions in their 40s and 50s are in this position too. Add to that the immaterial labour and precarity younger people have to live with, and the replacement of their coalition of older voters is placed in jeopardy. In 20 years there will be more pensioners without property, and a memory of how Tory governments of the early 21st century made life tough for them.

The Tories know something is wrong, but most of them are groping in the dark for answers - especially when values survey after values survey shows young people to be suspicious of social security, intensely relaxed about the filthy rich (as long as they pay their taxes), and A-okay with what you might loosely describe as entrepreneurial values. Rather than putting two and two together and coming to the conclusion the party of Thatcher is the biggest block on the aspirational values she affected to champion, they cast around for alternative explanations that exonerate the Tories of all responsibility. Therefore the reason why the young are anti-Tory and why university towns pile up huge votes for Labour is because ... they're brain washed. Universities as bastions of liberal values are in the vanguard of the great crusade against social conservatism. The whip of marketisation and the introduction of the Office for Students as sector regulator-cum-watchdog has done nothing to curtail it, so why not use the hammer of debt to change them more. Limiting numbers, forcing universities to become factories for worker drones (a pill most universities have happily chomped down already, not that the Tories have noticed), limiting the provision of humanities and the social sciences and going hard on STEM, Law, and Business are, they hope, the means for depoliticising universities, their faculties and the student body.

Naturally, it's doomed to fail because the Tories misrecognise the wellspring of discontent. But the inevitable failure has the happy by-product of denuding society of critical resources, forcing students into what the Tories regard as ideologically safe programmes, and throwing out of work tens of thousands of academics knowing it will play well with a unhinged base happy to see the "liberal elite" taken down a peg or two. Never mind the economic damage and the social cost of gutting universities this way. Owning the libs is an upside most considerable.

In the age of Coronavirus, one cannot be seen to play politics. Oppositions have to tread carefully. Still, how else can you explain the dog's breakfast the Tories are cooking up for the HE sector? This is their chance to hobble an assembly of institutions they perceive as hostile to their interests, and perhaps curb the influence of the left among young people. For them, this disaster, this emergency is precisely the time to settle scores and consolidate higher education provision more congenial to their prejudices.

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