EcoLogics

Gordon Brown is an advocate of neoliberalism, which is another way of saying that his policies are Thatcherite in nature. Simplifying greatly, we can say that Thatcher borrowed her economic model from Sir Alan Walters, who in turn borrowed it from Milton Friedman, who himself first tried to apply his theories in Pinochet’s Chile. (This by way of the notorious ‘Chicago Boys’, a group of Chilean economists trained by Friedman at the University of Chicago.) One of the myths of contemporary British politics is that Brown’s neoliberalism has been successful—as successful in Britain as it was in Chile under Pinochet. According to this myth, we should thank Margaret Thatcher and Alan Walters for our own modest version of the economic ‘miracle’ that was made possible in Chile by Milton Friedman if not by Augusto Pinochet. As I have noted in another post, it is not surprising that Margaret Thatcher was so keen to visit mi General during his infamous house arrest in London; after Pinochet, Thatcher was the second ruler to sign up for Friedman’s neoliberal model and its bitter prescriptions. In one of the great ironies of the time, Thatcher’s own Cecil Parkinson is famous for having said in an interview that ‘It [the Chilean economic experience] is very similar to what we are trying to develop now in Great Britain.’

The following quotes, taken from a book written by Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, a leading Chilean economist, and published by the highly respected University of Michigan Press, provide a rather different perspective on the real effects of the monetarist experiment, an experiment which ultimately led to Pinochet’s nationalization of several of Chile’s main banks in 1983:

‘The increasing adherence to [a neo-liberal] orthodoxy from 1974 onward met its first severe obstacle in 1981, and in 1982 it suffered several notable setbacks… During 1982, GDP and manufacturing output fell by 14 and 21 percent, respectively; construction was cut by one-half, and open unemployment was affecting one of every three workers in 1983.’

‘The problems developing in the productive apparatus were closely linked to the functioning of the financial system and the indiscriminate trade opening. The model conceded a leading role to the financial reform. In fact, the financial system was transformed into the dominant decision-making center in the Chilean economy. In 1982, it became clear that indebtedness of firms and individuals was strangling economic activity and was growing rapidly owing to the prevailing high interest rates, while the revenue of enterprises was declining as a result of the domestic recession. The financial reform and the opening to capital flows constituted at first a determinant factor in the concentration of wealth and in crowing out of productive investment (Agosin 1998). Then, towards the end of the period, it revealed additional vulnerability that it had introduced into the national economy and the distortion of economic development created by the unbridled financierism [emphasis added] to which it gave rise.’

‘The results observed were actually the result of both intrinsic features of the model, and errors in its implementation […] The intrinsic components of the model are observable in three areas, which form the pillars of orthodox neoliberalism. These are the assumption (1) that privatization and the suppression of state intervention rapidly result in integrated, flexible, and well-informed markets and spontaneously generate dynamic development; (2) that adjustment processes are stabilizing and characteristically speedy; and (3) that “competition,” even among unequal competitors, leads to greater well-being for the majority. All three assumptions proved to be false in the Chilean experiment…’

‘First, the indirect and “neutral” economic policies were introduced in a context of “competition” between unequals, which intensified differences, so that institutions such as the cooperatives and a semipublic system of savings (SINAP) were discriminated against. The restraint on union activity accentuated the inequality between “suppliers” and “demanders.” As has been shown, the concentration of income and wealth was dramatic [emphasis added]. Second, the slowness of adjustment processes involves substantial costs because of the inefficient underutilization of resources and the disincentive it implies for capital formation… Third, although a mistaken interventionism also severely accentuates the structural segmentation and heterogeneity of markets, the extreme alternative option, consisting of the cessation of state action and the indiscriminate privatization of the means of production as fast as possible, disregarding the conjuncture and balance of benefits and costs, does not lead to the rapid integration and flexibility of markets…’

‘In summary, the neoliberal experiment produced a society with increased inequality on many fronts and a predominance of economicism over other human activities [emphasis added]. A highly productive segment coexisted with impoverished large segments of the economy. It markedly deepened the unemployment problem, discouraged investment, and in general favored speculative and financieristic trends to the detriment of activities likely to increase overall productivity and capital formation [emphasis added]. It intensified external vulnerability, as attested by the greater impact of the 1982 recession on the Chilean economy compared to the rest of Latin America.’

Quotes from Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, Economic Reforms in Chile: From Dictatorship to Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002, pp. 51-52.

We have already seen how Gordon Brown’s own ‘financierism’ has created the conditions in which New Labour has been obliged to nationalise Northern Rock. The same process has taken place, albeit rather more covertly, with Bear Stearn (in the U.S., the Federal Reserve avoided an explicit nationalization of that bank thanks to a special deal with JP Morgan). The news today that yet another bank—HBOS—is rumoured to be on the ropes, as combined with the news that Sterling is, like the US dollar, losing value, suggests some striking parallels between Gordon Brown’s Britain in 2007-2008, and Pinochet’s Chile in 1982-83.

We can only hope that Pinochet’s ‘miracle’ will not also be Gordon Brown’s ‘miracle’. Given that the history of Chile’s experiment will have been well known to the Gordon Brown that once attacked Sir Alan Walters for his neoliberalism, why is Brown making the same mistakes all over again? Might it be that there is something in it for some of the politicians, if not for the New Labour Party as a whole?

Perhaps in Tony Blair’s new post as an advisor to JP Morgan we may find an answer to this question.

This week it was announced that Carter & Carter is going into administration. The company began to fail after founder and CEO Philip Carter’s death in May 2007. Carter was returning home with his son and two friends after watching a Chelsea game when his helicopter crashed close to the Carter estate.

The media’s descriptions of the company throw into sharp relief the critique that this blog has offered of the ‘symbiotic’ partnership that was nearly instituted between the company and the University of the West of England’s (UWE) former vice-chancellor, Howard Newby. As part of his scheme to vocationalise higher education at UWE, Newby tried to give Carter & Carter a contract, presumably to train staff at the university, or perhaps to ‘outsource’ some of its teaching. As EcoLogics has noted in several of its posts, the scheme was eventually aborted, but not before a potential conflict of interest was noted by UWE staff and by Private Eye, which published a short piece pointing out that Newby was a non-executive director of Carter & Carter(1).

The Guardian described the company as ‘a former stockmarket darling that runs government-backed training schemes’(2). Little wonder that its value rose from £100m in 2005 to £526m at its peak in April 2007. The newspaper confirmed that the bulk of the company’s work was for the Department of Work and Pensions and for the government’s Learning and Skills Council. Carter and Carter also trained apprentices for companies like Ford and Audi. It seems clear that the while the early success of the company was a result of a radical change in direction from automotive repair to car repair training schemes, the firm’s phenomenal growth in recent years owed much to New Labour’s de facto policy of corporate welfarism. As described by The Independent,

‘Carter & Carter started out in the early 1990s as a niche service-provider to the automotive industry. It grew rapidly, securing outside investment from Bridgepoint Capital in 2001 and more than doubling in size two years later with the purchase of Emtec, which offered technical services and support to the automotive industry. […] Investors responded well to an aggressive expansion strategy, which included the purchase of the AA’s technical services operation just a month before Carter & Carter went public in February 2005. […] The shares were offered at £2.35 in the company’s initial public offering – valuing Carter & Carter at about £78m – and the price rose by 25 per cent on the first day of trading. […] The following August, the company diversified with the purchase of training group Assa for £24m, which took it into the transport, aerospace and food and drink industries, and into the government-funded vocational training market. Acquisition of the Fern Group, a leading provider of training under New Labour’s New Deal programme, took the firm further into the public sector. […] By April 2007, shares were worth more than £12, valuing the company at more than £550m’(3).

According to Guardian things started to go downhill after Philip Carter’s tragic death. ‘The profit warnings during the summer followed the group’s failure to secure any of the government’s first phase of Pathways to Work contracts and poor uptake of the government-funded Train to Gain vocational training schemes.’ ‘In November it had to return government payments for tuition at its North East Skills unit after an inquiry found falsification of some supporting documentation.’ The Independent also notes that ‘…PricewaterhouseCoopers, the company’s auditors, announced an investigation of accounting irregularities for the year ending 31 July 2007.’

Events are, of course, always easy to re-interpret with the benefit of hindsight. While UWE will perhaps now be relieved that the partnership did not go ahead, EcoLogics is more interested in the light that Carter & Carter’s corporate history sheds on New Labour’s efforts to impose the skillification of higher education via corporate welfarism. As noted in earlier posts, the existence of privately-owned, but virtual public sector monopolies such as Carter & Carter shows up the fallacy of the notion that New Labour’s neoliberal policies really champion so-called ‘free markets’.

EcoLogics would argue that it also reveals the extraordinary risks that Newby/UWE were willing to incur. It is in this sense relevant to quote two paragraphs from the third part of the series of posts titled ‘Lord Leitch’s Levers’:

‘Universities that go down this route [the route of the skillification of higher education, with firms such as Carter & Carter] would be forced to compete for what is, in temporal terms, at once a rather short-lived form of funding ‘per capita’, and a recipe for much additional administrative work. If my experience at UWE is anything to go by, the most traumatic times of the year for both staff and students are always the beginnings and endings of academic courses, when induction procedures or end–of–course marking really concentrates the work for students, academics and academic-related staff. If the government has its way, and if Newby’s keenness on CPD prevails, the number of ‘beginnings’ and ‘endings’ might increase exponentially. But presumably lecturers and admin staff would still be paid the same relatively low salaries to do more and more administrative work, and to spend more of the year doing it. Indeed, if one recent conference (‘Universities: Public or Private?’) is anything to go by, universities might fully privatise themselves to ensure a greater ‘flexibility’ on the part of their staff. No doubt such a ‘flexibility’ would be required to impose more and more draconian work conditions.

Second, this self-same process would almost certainly mean that, far from securing its finances, the university would, if anything, be even more exposed, albeit, now to the vicissitudes of skills ‘vogues’ and to economic downturns more generally. What nobody in the UWE board of governors seems to have figured out is that ‘demand-led’ means that the educational provider loses a great deal of control over the educational process. The provider is now subject to the whims of corporations who demand this or that product, and do so when it suits them. In effect, by putting all of its educational eggs in the business skills basket, the educational provider ties its institutional fortunes to entities that are likely to be as ruthlessly determined to have things their way as Newby was to transform UWE into a UWE-KE.’

What this analysis failed to mention was that in a context of corporate welfarism, a university like UWE would also be exposed—as exposed as Carter and Carter—to the vicissitudes of political patronage. It appears that after Philip Carter died, New Labour lost interest in Carter & Carter. Will it have lost interest in UWE now that Newby has left for Liverpool? And will it lose interest in Liverpool once Newby leaves for his next job?

References

(1) Private Eye, 1185, 25 May-7 June, 2007.
(2) ‘Carter & Carter goes into administration’ in The Guardian, Tuesday March 11, 2008, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/mar/11/2?gusrc=rss&feed=politics, accessed March 13, 2008.
(3) ‘Struggling Carter & Carter goes into administration’ in The Independent, Tuesday March 11, 2008, at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/struggling-carter–carter-goes-into-administration-794063.html, accessed March 13, 2008.

On March 9, the Sunday Times—a Rupert Murdoch paper, not exactly known for its liberal perspectives—revealed that Ferrovial’s BAA (the privatized British Airport Authority) had ‘colluded with government officials to “fix” the evidence in favour of a new third runway at Heathrow’.

The paper suggested that documents obtained under freedom of information laws showed that

‘BAA gave instructions to DfT officials on how to “strip out” data that indicated key environmental targets would be breached by the airport. The airports operator repeatedly selected alternative data used for the consultation to ensure that the final results showed a negligible impact on noise and pollution. The DfT gave BAA unprecedented access to confidential papers and allowed the company to help to rewrite the consultation document. The final document significantly reduced the likely carbon emissions caused by the runway by not including incoming international flights.’

The paper quoted one official involved in ‘Project Heathrow’ – the Department for Transport unit that researched the environmental impact of the runway – as saying that ‘It’s a classic case of reverse engineering. They knew exactly what results they wanted and fixed the inputs to get there. It’s appalling’(1).

Today’s Guardian is reporting that New Labour’s own Environment Agency is now confirming that the plans for a third runway would indeed breach the EU directives on nitrous dioxide polution, leading to increased mortality rates across the south-east of England:

‘In a damning conclusion, the agency said the consultation process, which ended last month, had not proved that the scheme would not breach EU directives on nitrous dioxide pollution. “After full consideration of the documents our conclusion is that overall we do not think the evidence presented is sufficiently robust to conclude that the proposed Heathrow development will not infringe the NO2 directive, bearing in mind the uncertainties that need to be addressed.

“This is because the assessment of air quality pays insufficient attention to these uncertainties and to the range of possible future scenarios, like road traffic, meteorological variability, climate change, background air quality and atmospheric quality,” the report said.’(2)

* * *

On March 11, George Monbiot revealed in The Guardian that Gordon Brown’s apparently popular measure to force general practitioners to open their surgeries late into the evening and on Saturday mornings is also part of a New Labour deception:

‘The government launched its campaign a year ago, with a press release published by the Department of Health. This claimed that a report by the Cabinet Office, published the same day, “reveals that nine out of 10″ people polled “said they want public services, such as GP surgeries, that are open some evenings and weekends, even if that means they would sometimes be shut during the working week”.’

‘This was reported verbatim by the press, but it was a complete fabrication. I have read the report. It contains no mention of this poll or anything resembling it. The terms “surgeries”, “evening”, “weekend” and “working week” do not occur.’

‘To the department’s intense discomfort, Ipsos Mori found that “the vast majority of patients (84%) say they are satisfied with the hours their GP practice was open during the last six months”. Those who must visit GPs most often are the most relaxed about opening hours: only among 18- to 34-year-olds – the healthiest section of the population – does the level of unhappiness rise above 20%, and then only by a whisker.’

According to Monbiot, ‘The Confederation of British Industry was also unhappy with the results. It commissioned another survey, again from Ipsos Mori. This received responses from just 1,014 people – one 2,500th of the Department of Health’s sample size. It asked a slightly different question: “How easy or difficult was it to get an appointment at a time that was convenient to you?” It discovered that 31% found it “fairly or very difficult”.’

Monbiot says that the CBI then ‘issued a report claiming that “a commonly heard complaint is that GP practices are not open at weekends, early in the morning or in the evening … GP services are not responding to clear signals for change from patients”. But it produced no evidence: the survey didn’t ask about opening times. There are plenty of reasons why patients might have found it difficult to get a convenient appointment.’

Why, then, was the government so keen to get the GPs to change their surgery times? I quote Monbiot once again:

‘Because it assists a quite different agenda. To avoid the political firestorm big business rains on any government that stands in its way, Brown must make constant concessions. What business wants most is the 40% of the economy controlled by the state. He must find clever and camouflaged means of delivering it that do not prompt us to take to the streets. This means waging a PR war against GPs and the other public sector dinosaurs who impede choice and change. It means a thousand small steps towards privatisation.’

‘So government is expanding the number of independent sector treatment centres, even though they turn out to be far less efficient than the NHS and leave the taxpayer with major liabilities. It is opening staggeringly expensive polyclinics, operating seven days a week, which will be run by multinational companies. It will allow the primary care trust in Birmingham to shut the city’s surgeries and replace them with primary care units franchised to corporations – the promoter of this scheme happily admits to modelling it on McDonald’s. It is transferring GPs’ surgeries to supermarkets (the first was opened by Sainsbury’s last week) and giving high street chemists responsibility for diagnosing and treating minor ailments, even though they are not qualified to tell the difference between an ordinary cough and lung cancer.’(3)

Does this remind the reader of any other subject I have written about recently?

* * *

Three questions might asked by anybody who believes that this modus operandi runs counter to the most fundamental principles of democracy, and the autonomy of government:

If New Labour are willing to go to these lengths to secure private corporate interests in these contexts, in what other contexts are they doing the same?

If New Labour have lied about these issues, what else have they lied about, and what else are they lying about?

Finally, if New Labour are willing to go these lengths to secure other institutions’ interests, to what lengths will they go to secure their own power?

References

(1) ‘Revealed: the plot to expand Heathrow’ in Sunday Times, March 9, 2008, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article3512218.ece, accessed March 13, 2008.

(2) ‘Environment Agency joins Heathrow third runway critics’, in Guardian, March 13, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/mar/13/travelandtransport.theairlineindustry, accessed March 13, 2008.

(3) G. Monbiot, ‘Making GPs more accessible is just a disguised concession to big business’, in Guardian, March 11, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/11/nhs.health. Accessed March 13, 2008.

On March 3, 2008, New Labour’s Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) published its plans for a ‘New University Challenge’. The following are aspects of the DIUS’ announcement:

‘A consultation to open up opportunities for towns and cities to bid for new university campuses and centres of higher education was announced today by John Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Since 2003 17 new higher education centres have been opened or have had funding committed. The Government wants to accelerate the pace of development and expects to have 20 more opened or agreed over the next six years, subject to high quality bids. Filled to capacity, the new 20 centres could provide study places for up to 10,000 students. The Government’s ‘New University Challenge’, published today, underlines the importance of universities and Higher Education provision to the nation’s economic and social success. The paper sets out various ways in which local higher education benefits communities:

Unlocking the potential of towns and people: widening participation and unlocking talent; attracting, nurturing and retaining talent in an area; contributing to social cohesion; and underpinning population growth strategies. Driving economic regeneration: creating a highly skilled workforce, with relevant skills for the local business community; job creation; stimulating entrepreneurship; and engaging with business to solve problems and boost innovation and competitiveness’(1).

It is tempting to take this discourse at face value. Surely more universities, or rather, more people obtaining university degrees, would be a good thing? On the one hand, the degrees should allow their recipients to obtain better employment. On the other hand, studying for a degree might also enable students to develop the kind of reflexive and self-reflexive disposition that might help them to be more critical vis-a-vis class-, gender-, or ‘race’-based ideologies.

The ‘A New University Challenge’ document released by DIUS (2) appears to recognise this by speaking not only of the importance of generating employment, but of ‘unlocking’ (sic) the talents of students. It also suggests that ‘Higher education brings wider social benefits. Graduates enjoy better health; lower levels of obesity; are more likely to vote; and are more likely to display tolerant attitudes. Graduates are about 40% less likely to suffer from depression than non-graduates; three times as likely to be a member of a voluntary organisation than someone educated to level 2 or below; and over 30% more likely to hold positive attitudes to race and gender equality, compared to a similar individual educated to level 2 or below’(p.4).

The views of many a New Labour politician suggest that it would be unwise to assume that a university degree somehow inoculates one against racism, ethnocentrism, jingoism or indeed a host of other ideological discourses. Moreover, aspects of the last quote might well be read as a welfare-reformist rationale for supporting universities. It nevertheless seems fair that a government should do everything it can to ensure that as many people as possible have access to what has historically been an elite institution.

* * *

Alas, in this, as is so many other areas of New Labour policymaking, one learns not to believe carefully crafted sound bites, or indeed documents full of seemingly high-minded proposals. It is not just that the devil is in the details; it is that the devil hides behind a welter of many detailed, or apparently detailed, documents. Denham’s ‘A New University Challenge’—a name almost certainly chosen to generate a populist association between universities and TV quiz shows—is no exception to this rule. The document is evidence, if any is needed, that New Labour is determined to press ahead with its plans to engage in what I have described as the skillification of higher education. The skillification of higher education reduces teaching and learning in universities to the acquisition of so-called ‘economically valuable skills’; and reduces research to a matter of knowledge transfer, or knowledge exchange. In my earlier posts on this process, I have made the case that this process prepares the ground for the commercialization of higher education. This for the benefit of what one of the New Labour ideologues evocatively describes as ‘UK Plc’.

I have already offered an analysis of this process with reference to the Leitch Review, which formalized New Labour’s policy of skillification. I have also analysed the effects of this process on the University of the West of England, which was one of the first universities to embrace a totalizing form of skillification. In this post I would like to explain how Denham’s announcement is a continuation of this policy.

* * *

In the foreword to ‘A New University Challenge’, Denham suggests that

‘Today, I have written to the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFCE) to ask them to conduct a consultation on how proposals for new higher education centres can fully reflect the benefits that can flow from successful investment both by unlocking the potential of towns and people and by driving economic regeneration. I have asked HEFCE to lead a debate on taking proposals forward and report to me’(p.2).

The document was launched on the 3 of March, 2008. One week later, there is no sign that HEFCE has launched such a consultation. HEFCE might suggest that it is still early days. However, if the consultation was really planned as a genuine consultation, one might have expected DIUS and HEFCE to organize the consultation process in advance, and to have it ready to kick off as soon as the ‘New University Challenge’ was launched. Could it be that the consultation is little more than a public relations exercise? Or might it be that New Labour was anxious to pre-empt a Tory initiative, or indeed the publication of a critical assessment of its policy in some influential magazine, or any other news media?

Such possibilities should not lead one to overlook two rather more important issues.

First, HEFCE has itself now been thoroughly skillified, that is to say, knowledge-exchanged. This is hardly surprising; Howard Newby was the director from 2001 to 2005, and made it a priority to skew HEFCE’s priorities in the direction of skillification. The process continues under the current director. Anyone in doubt might wish to go to the HEFCE website (www.hefce.ac.uk) and investigate the heading under which HEFCE currently locates its strategic ‘Higher Education Innovation Fund’ (HEIF), or better yet, how this fund’s grants are being used to create ‘Centres for Knowledge Exchange‘.

Second, although Denham says that he is asking HEFCE to conduct the consultation, Denham suggests that the consultation should be a ‘wide’ one, and should involve

• ‘Regional Development Agencies (RDAs);
• Local Authorities;
• The business community, both nationally and regionally;
• Education partners; and
• Community groups’(p.2).

Note the order given to this list of ‘consultees’. At the bottom of the list are the ‘community groups’—presumably the people whom New Labour claims will benefit from the new ‘universities’—and next to last are the ‘education partners’—presumably the New Labour name for the universities and further education colleges that it wants to oversee the establishment of the new institutions. Conversely, topping the list are the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) and the Local Authorities, with the ‘business community’ acting as a convenient go-between on the list.

In case the reader is unsure about what an RDA is, and what are its priorities, the following information might shed some light: by the government’s own account,

‘The Regional Development Agencies are helping to create prosperity across England. They are strategic leaders, bringing together views of the people who live and work in each region, and combining these with a unique set of business and economic insights to make the most of the opportunities globalisation brings’(3).

In another page, the website puts this point rather more bluntly:

‘Their mission [the RDA’s mission] is to spread economic prosperity and opportunity to everyone in the nine regions of England. When establishing the RDAs, the Prime Minister [Tony Blair] said he wanted to ‘bring fresh vitality to the task of economic development and social and physical regeneration in the regions’ through a business-led approach’(4, emphasis added).

RDAs are, of course, New Labour quangos. Significantly, they report to the Department of Business, Enterprise, and Regulatory Reform. Should such quangos head the list of sectors that HEFCE is being ordered to consult? New Labour might suggest that the new universities, if they can be called that, should spearhead the regeneration of the areas where they will be established. One problem with this otherwise plausible argument is that the centres for higher education will not necessarily be located in areas that need regeneration.

To be sure, this overlooks the more fundamental point: why are universities, or centres of higher education (more on this distinction below), being used as instruments of a purely, or mainly economic regeneration? The answer lies, of course, in Tony Blair’s comment that universities ‘are the coalmines of the 21st century’ (5). Indeed, what betrays the discourse of skillification in this context is the extent to which the centres for higher education are regarded precisely as the 21st century equivalent of a mine or a factory that can be set up, and used to generate wealth—ostensibly, a distributed wealth that reaches what the DIUS document describes as a ‘latent demand’, viz., the ‘adults who have missed out on higher education in the past’(p.3).

* * *

One of the document’s appendixes notes that there are four ways of setting up one of the new centres of higher education: one of these involves

‘A stand-alone higher education centre set up by a higher education institution, sometimes by a further education college and often by both working in partnership, which wants to offer new or expand existing higher education courses. Such centres tend to be located near to, but separate, from existing further education facilities, both to encourage progression from further to higher education and to ensure that higher education is felt by students to be distinctive’(p.15, emphasis added).

This statement confirms a point I have made in previous posts, that the government is intent on blurring the distinction between higher and further education. This is not a bad thing in and of itself; what makes it problematic is the direction of the change: reducing higher education to skillification, which is the same as saying that the universities may be conceived as colleges for vocational training, which is in turn no different from saying that higher education can be treated as further education. To re-phrase one of the New Labour slogans, it is not HE in FE, it is FE in HE, or better yet, FE, period.

Interestingly, New Labour does see at least one problem with this process: as the ‘New University Challenge’ explains, ‘Such centres [the new stand-alone higher education centres] tend to be located near to, but separate, from existing further education facilities, both to encourage progression from further to higher education and to ensure that higher education is felt by students to be distinctive‘(p.15). So further education must not be confused with higher education, at least in the students’ minds. But note that there is no precise account of what actually distinguishes the two levels. The reason for this is that the skillification of higher education does not allow for any distinction; if what matters is the teaching and learning of ‘economically valuable skills’, then the discursive scene is set whereby, as I noted above, HE is transformed into FE.

* * *

This dynamic speaks volumes. But the ideological key to ‘A New University Challenge’ is no more than a short sentence in length, and is also buried in an appendix. The new universities ‘can be set up as, or become private companies’(p.15). Private companies? Why should universities become private companies?

The answer is that this exercise is really about creating an opportunity for private corporations to set up their own private ‘universities’ in a global market that David Blunkett once estimated as being worth £300 billion. As I have noted in other posts, a key, if not the key role of the skillification of higher education lies not in securing wider access for working class students, but in the privatization of higher education. This process not only appeases the free marketeers who are baying for new business opportunities, but has the added value (dare I use the expression) of getting New Labour off the hook, for once and for all, of its earlier commitments to fund its own calls for the radical expansion of higher education. Where once Labour would have paid for students in deprived areas to go to universities, now the ‘trick’ is to let private corporations set up ‘self-funding’ ‘universities’.

I’ve put ‘self-funding’ in between inverted comas because of course, the new institutions will not be entirely self-funded. New Labour’s quangos will provide some of the funds, with little or no accountability built into the process. (If this seems overly harsh, listen to the BBC’s latest ‘File on 4’ programme about the excesses of these agencies’ managers). It would appear, then, that just as the NHS is now paying private hospitals to treat some of its patients, the government will in future pay private corporations to train its ‘university’ students. This is a practice that is better known as corporate welfarism.

I’ve also put ‘university’ in inverted comas because the new centres will not necessarily be universities. First, anyone who reads ‘A New University Challenge’ critically soon realizes that DIUS appears to be making a very careful, and carefully dissimulated distinction between ‘universities’ and ‘centres for higher education’. For example, on page 15, the document refers to ‘An existing university or a consortium of institutions set up a university campus or centre to serve a particular area’ and then to ‘A stand-alone higher education centre set up by a higher education institution’. The DIUS press release itself speaks of ‘A consultation to open up opportunities for towns and cities to bid for new university campuses and centres of higher education…’. Is this a wink in the direction of understandably worried universities? Or am I reading too much into the text?

Whether I am or not, and second, it is clear that research will not really be a part of such centres. According to my computer’s word-search function, the word ‘research’ is used four times in the entire document (the fourth and last use of the word occurs in ‘Extracts from this document may be reproduced for non-commercial research, education or training purposes on the condition that the source is acknowledged’). So the emphasis is clearly on ’skills training’, and on ‘knowledge transfer’ from so-called ‘research led’ universities.

If this is the case, it provides further evidence for my suggestion that New Labour is in fact creating a policy that reiterates the existing class divide in higher education. If the ‘New University Challenge’ document provides an accurate indication of the kind of institutions that New Labour has in mind, then New Labour is intent on creating ‘universities’ for the working class or mature students that are no more (and no less) than re-branded—and privately owned—colleges of further education. That is what New Labour really means when it speaks, as it does in ‘A New University Challenge’, of ‘widening participation and unlocking talent’ via higher education.

References

(1) See DIUS press release, March 3, 2008. ‘Denham sets new university challenge: To open up our towns and cities to new university provision’. http://www.dius.gov.uk/press/03-03-08b.html, accessed March 3, 2008.
(2) Department of Innovation, Universities, and Skills, ‘A New University Challenge’, http://www.dius.gov.uk/policy/documents/university-challenge.pdf, accessed March 3, 2008.
(3) http://www.englandsrdas.com/, accessed March 3, 2008.
(4) http://www.englandsrdas.com/who_we_are/, accessed March 3, 2008.
(5) Speech given by Blair at the IPPR Thinktank and Universities UK joint conference on higher education reform. For the full text of Blair’s speech, see Guardian, January 14, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/jan/14/publicservices.tuitionfees, accessed March 1, 2008.