This Government, This Crisis.
Higher Education funding is in crisis and the present Labour government is not making comforting noises. Until recently, the Government has been mostly silent on Higher Education, even their manifesto says very little of substance. The closest I could find to a concrete proposal is this deliberately ambiguous paragraph:
The current higher education funding settlement does not work for the taxpayer, universities, staff, or students. Labour will act to create a secure future for higher education and the opportunities it creates across the UK. We will work with universities to deliver for students and our economy. (p. 86)
Labour does here, and elsewhere in the section acknowledge that ‘Higher Education is in crisis’ (77), but while apprenticeships and further education receive at least some detail about what they have in mind, the HE proposal is ambiguous. In the last few months, as the Government moves towards the final phases of completing the legislation in the current King’s Speech, the long silence on the plan for HE has been replaced with alarming rhetoric concerning the financial irresponsibility of universities.
This rhetoric, while having the limited grace of not being anti-worker, is out of touch with the reality. Asking universities to demonstrate where they spent their REF funding might have been welcomed by the unions ten years ago. In 2025, we are long past the point where the challenges in HE can be blamed on the shortsightedness of Vice Chancellors and, in the words of Lord Augur, their ‘vanity projects’. An enquiry into this conduct would be appropriate, but only after the damage has been repaired.
Disappointment in the Labour government is rife. While its economic priorities around housing, health and public services have largely held strong, they’ve shown themselves more than willing to give ground on what we might euphemistically call ‘social issues’, but can be more accurately described as civil liberties and human rights. It’s perhaps accurate to say that Labour had only been a party of progressive politics with the advent of the Blair era, but people are understandably surprised at how quickly Labour have reverted to a ‘no war but the class war’ platform. This has been borne out by a collapse in approval and in voting intention, although it is worth noting that their high polling going into the election was inflated by tactical voting. Labour secured its outright majority on the back of support from people who already actively dislike Labour, but saw them as distinctively preferably to another Conservative government. Labour have therefore lost support in three directions: from the people who only voted for them to get rid of the Conservatives; from the people who are now interested in giving Reform UK a chance; and from genuine Labour supporters who feel extreme disappointment and shock at the value gap between the ideal and actual Labour Government.
For workers within Higher Education, however, there was little to be optimistic about in the first place. Labour clearly had no concrete plan for Higher Education because they did not consider it to be a priority. Even in opposition, Labour have not taken a serious stand on Higher Education funding since the Miliband era, with the Corbyn era seemingly dismissing it as a ‘middle class kids issue’, and the Starmer era being consistently vague. That’s ten years of neither large party wanting to touch the mess of a funding system set up by the Conservatives and Liberal Democratic, despite it being a ticking time bomb. There aren’t many ticks left, and time is running out for the announcement of a plan. The one silver lining is the Employment Rights bill, which, despite understandable anxiety and scepticism, is still more likely to become law than not. This will give us crucial tools for defending ourselves and our colleagues in the battles to come.
This is not a good time to be working out a plan
Labour’s polling has suffered catastrophic, but not irreversible collapse. The ‘ming vase’ has smashed, but they are certainly not going to be keen on taking risks. There is a popular analogy, popularised by if not invented by Tony Benn, about weather cock and signpost politicians. Signpost politicians always point to what the right idea is, weather cock politicians turn with the wind of public opinion. Benn’s primary use of this image in the available recordings is really to distinguish himself from Tony Blair. It’s a nice image, and highlights well the gap between truth and action in politics. However, the entire point of democracy is to gain popular support so that you can enact your policies. Within the liberal democratic model, a government enacting an unpopular policy is usually a path to losing an election, and may even be anti-democratic per se. We ought to expect, although not necessarily encourage, the party of government to avoid unpopular policies with the crucial exception that the rights of the minority are protected. It is here that Labour have crossed the line with abandoning their platform of trans rights and leaving a vacuum of leadership in the wake of the supreme court decision regarding the Equality Act 2010. This is a moral and political failure and they must find the courage to reverse course.
This short history of the last year brings us to the present. Labour, at the time of writing, have seen a slight improvement in polling, but have had to fire both Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson due to scandals, two figures different in politics and popularity, but both very effective and core to the Government’s strategy. They are also about to stumble into a deputy leadership competition that could, if mismanaged, tear the party apart. In short, Labour are not going to be keen on taking risks.
This is not good for those of us in Higher Education. We have been deprioritised by all governments and oppositions of the last ten years and just as the sector reaches its crisis point, we find ourselves with a government that is short on funds, with a long list of problems to address, surrounded by a hostile media and seemingly incapable of its own independent communication. It will be very reluctant about opening up a new attack front on an ambitious new funding strategy, although such things must still be pushed for.
However, I do think we need to take a deep breath in our thinking here. With righteous anger in an extremely difficult situation, we must still avoid the temptation to multiply our enemies. We must avoid false equivalences between, for example, Labour and the Conservatives. The government are wrong to give with one hand and take away with the other, but I doubt very much we’d have had the with-inflation fees rise. The present funding system was designed to destroy universities. We at least do not have the architects of that slow burn sabotage in power anymore. Further, this government will at least be easier to deal with than a future Reform UK majority, which is the only realistic alternative at this point. Nevertheless, the risk of Labour allowing some universities to collapse either out of incompetence or fear is real, and we need to think strategically about why this is the case and what can be done.
Why are Labour unmoved?
I’d like to take a cue from fellow UCU Commons member, Bijan Parsia. In his excellent recent post, Parsia argues that a broader campaign directed at MPs is needed. He ends with the following observation:
[...] to move this government, I think we need to hit them where they care. The mere threat of the collapse of the system doesn’t seem to move them at all.
This raises the two questions that need to be answered if we are to prevent disaster:
- What do they really care about?
- Why are they unmoved by the potential collapse of the system?
I’m going to attempt a provisional answer to these questions. This involves some assumptions. I would not blame any of you for suggesting that the reason they are unmoved is that they’re immoral psychopaths and they only really care about themselves, or at least variations on that theme. I’m not going to consider that possibility simply because if it is true, there is very little that we can do to influence them. Instead, I am going to assume that the Labour cabinet are: mostly rational, mostly competent and primarily motivated by winning the next election, even more so now that they are struggling in the polls against a gleefully fascist Reform UK. To clarify, by ‘rational’ I do not mean ‘correct’ or ‘connected with reality’, only that they have goals and are acting according to plans that they genuinely think will achieve them. We may agree or disagree with those goals, but unlike the previous government, we can identify them and analyse the Labour strategy on the basis of them. The previous government was neither rational, nor competent, and perhaps it was not even trying to win the election, but rather salt the earth for its successor.
What Labour really care about right now is winning the next election. Which, whatever their faults, some of them serious, is the better of the two likely outcomes with current polling and the current election system. This means, as I said above, they’re going to be reluctant to take risks at the moment on Higher Education. This answers the second question: they are unmoved by the collapse because they don’t see an easy solution that has popular support. The hints we’ve been getting recently from spokespeople in support of mergers and auditing spending clearly follow a path of trying to blame Vice Chancellors’ hubris for the situation they are in. They are at least not blaming us, but such policies will not save the sector because the real problem is the eroded value of the tuition fee combined with the removal of the student admissions cap. A stop-gap measure, offsetting the genuine reform vaguely promised in the manifesto, might be continuing to raise the tuition fee with inflation (which they seem to be doing) whilst also re-imposing the cap. The latter is more politically risky, since it can be spun as taking choice (true) and opportunity (false) away from students. Anything more ambitious than this is going to be short of funds and radicalism, because the fight with the media over anything to do with Higher Education will be vicious. This is the sad answer to the question of why Labour are unmoved by our plight. It is because the general public are unmoved by it, and Labour’s primary motivation is public support.
The public
Higher Education, at least in appearance, is not a universal benefit. For sure, we can demonstrate a ‘return’ on the investment in academia, but that line of argument only gets us so far. Nigel Farage invoked the tired trope of ‘Mickey Mouse Degrees’, something that always particularly irritates me since my institution’s initials match the phrase ‘Mickey Mouse University’. Anti-intellectualism is rife and rising and while, for example, philosophy does indeed make its own positive impact to the economy, there’s always the question of ‘well what if we put that money into cancer research instead’. Further, the argument is very abstract, involves extremely large sums of money, and universities themselves are poorly understood by anyone who hasn’t been in one themselves. To be honest, even some of us who have been in them struggle to understand them.
Universities, like most things, are understood by people in terms of their own experiences. If they have not been to university themselves, their lens will be about friends, family and children who have been there. Further, even for those who have been to university, there is far too much tribalism between fields and all too often we find influential figures arguing against the funding of this or that discipline they happen not to like. Universities, by their nature, have to be funded universally. That is the source of their real social impact. And, like public industry, the United Kingdom has forgotten its value. As an example, take the ecological disaster that is the current AI boom. The reckless expansion of this incomplete tool of questionable utility was caused by the private financial interest in it. Unlike in the 20th Century, where most of the key advances in computing were developed in universities, today technological research is dominated by the private sector. If Labour were really serious about ‘mainlining AI into the veins of the UK’, it would be hurling money at universities to develop it in a sustainable, ethical way without further inflating the financial bubble that is going to pop soon enough. It would also throw money at young people of all backgrounds to study and develop their creativity and intellectual maturity in universities without hesitation. The greatest lie that has been told in favour of artificial intelligence is that it is a replacement for training and education. Instead, it’s just yet another thing that needs to be taught and thought about.
The fact is that universities, academics and students are crucial to any society that is worth being a part of, and yet this image is lacking in the public imagination. I will finish by complaining about one cause of this problem: our image of the academic. Happily, the tech bros have handed us a technology that can generate the lowest common denominator idea of something. This was the result from ChatGPT when I asked it to ‘give me a cartoon image of the quintessential British academic’:
Now, I have nothing against this chap or anyone who looks like him, but I have never met anyone fitting this archetype in my 18 years of experience in Higher Education. Perhaps you have. Perhaps you are such a person. But, this stereotype is not representative of the breadth and diversity of modern higher education. I’ll be honest, I don’t even think I’ve seen anyone smoking a pipe since I was about six. However, I don’t think this silly litmus test is too far away from the public perception of who we are and what we do.
I say, with sadness, that we are unlikely to get another government more well disposed to us than the current one, even though they seem to be pretending we do not exist, unless we can capture the public imagination in a new way. We need to platform each other and redraw the popular image of the public intellectual. We need to broaden the general understanding of what academia is. Then, and only then, will the public demand that academia exist, so that even a government worse than this one, one that is actively opposed to education will have to face tricky media battles to keep us in business.