This year I’m finishing my second five-year term doing one of the happiest things I’ve ever done – being Chancellor of the University of Kent. It’s one of those “new” universities created in the 1960s on a greenfield site in Canterbury by the forward-thinking British governments of the time to expand opportunities through widening education. Our summer graduation ceremonies are in two of the loveliest buildings in the world, Rochester, and Canterbury Cathedrals. At a rough count, this year I shook 4,000 hands of successful, ambitious students who make our country a better place. Their enthusiasm is infectious.
But as I chatted to the new graduates there was further evidence of British politicians treating young people shabbily. The latest outbreak of arch condescension stretches from silly rhetoric to profoundly stupid and short-sighted policies. On the day of one of our graduation ceremonies, Keir Mather was elected as a Labour MP. He’s 25. An amazing achievement? I think so, but a (middle-aged) Tory MP, Johnny Mercer, suggested that Mather was like one of the Inbetweeners. Joshing Johnny is perhaps unaware that 24-year-old William Pitt the Younger was the “Inbetweener” prime minister of the United Kingdom as revolution was about to break out in France. Then there’s the confected row from another (middle-aged) Tory MP, Miriam Cates. She claimed that “low value” university degrees (whatever they are) are responsible for a new (and invented) phenomenon of “elite over-production” resulting from the “overblown and under-scrutinised expansion of the higher education sector over the past 25 years.” Higher education is not for the likes of oiks like me, presumably. I was born into a Clydebank council house and was the first in my family to go to university.
The Conservative party treats young people with contempt
Beyond the snobbery and the bizarre logic linking “low value” degrees to an invented elite, Cates ignores our truly magnificent education success story. In the 1950s three per cent of Brits went to university. That’s a real elite. Now it’s just short of 40 per cent, an incredible “levelling-up”. But while costs have increased, money from Cates’s government has not. Reports suggest a third of England’s universities trade at a deficit. The Home Office’s determination to cut student immigration, coupled with worldwide astonishment that brainy Britain had a Brexit headache so shot itself in the foot, means many European students have decided they’re better served by universities in countries not so committed to dimwitted self-harm.
Yet our universities remain among the best in the world. Oxford, St Andrews, Edinburgh, Imperial College and others are shining stars. Cambridge has more Nobel prize winners than any country in the world except the United States and the UK itself. The University of Kent, despite being a relative newcomer, has two Nobel prizewinners for literature: our emeritus professor Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021) and Kazuo Ishiguro (2017). And yet the Conservative party and its cabal of opaquely-funded “think” tanks whinge about our great British university success story. Their argument includes the idea that a university education teaches people to have “woke” leftist thoughts. But an education – any education – teaches people not what but how to think. Perhaps the Tories are now anti-thinking as well as thoughtless. There is empirical evidence for this – I mean, Truss? Kwarteng? Johnson? Hancock? Williamson?
Even the most boneheaded should grasp that education may be expensive but it’s cheaper than ignorance. Undaunted, however, they plough on with what The Times headlined as Rishi Sunak’s politics of “divide and rule”, their invented Culture Wars and “War on Woke”, creating problems when what we need are solutions. The future of Britain’s young people is indeed blighted but not by the phantom enemy of “low value” degrees. The real enemies are ballooning student debt, the cost-of-living crisis, unaffordable housing, underfunded schools and universities and a political system in which the so-called cream rise to the top. Although often they resemble cream only in that they are thick and rich.
The Conservative party treats young people with contempt and are rewarded in return. A 2022 PoliticsHome poll found that only two per cent of British voters aged between eighteen and 24 intended to vote Conservative. That rose to fifteen per cent among 25-49-year-olds. In past years what typically made a lefty young person turn back towards the centre was starting a family and paying a mortgage. Given the cost of childcare and mortgages under the Conservatives, an enthusiastic rightward drift now seems unlikely. Politicians who offer vacuous slogans instead of solutions, who pretend to Take Back Control, Level Up, or Stop the Boats are actually waging War on Reason, and on aspiration, talent, youth and just the facts. They will fail. That’s because those tens of thousands of students who graduate every year from our great universities have parents and grandparents who are proud of their achievements, and fearful for their future. The “low value” in our society comes not from universities. It comes from politicians parroting the brain-dead politics of despair. But you may know that Boris Johnson did do something for British youth. He put a 30-year-old woman into the House of Lords for life – although it’s unclear what talents have deservedly been rewarded.
Gavin Esler’s new book “Britain Is Better Than This” is published by Head of Zeus in September
