The Newby-Mandelson ‘Axes’
…to engage in corruption, and to expect to survive in public life is to have either a generous faith in the mechanisms of secrecy or a confident sense of what one can get away with in the event that activities hitherto hidden are suddenly made visible to others. —John B. Thompson, in Political Scandal
Please note: this is the fourth post in a series: to read the rest of the series, click on any of the following:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: When Knowledge Is Exchanged
Part 3: Case Study A: the Beeching ‘Axe’
Part 4: Case Study B: the Newby-Mandelson ‘Axes’
Part 5: Scandal in the Times of the Internet
Part 6: Conclusions: Financial Scandal and Neoliberalism
Abstract
Where the previous post in this series examined the politics of the ‘Beeching Axe’—the proposed closure of approximately a third of Britain’s railway lines and stations in the 1960s—the present post examines what I regard as an analogous politics in the context of Britain’s higher education in the mid 2000s. The first part of the post provides an outline of the recent history of Britain’s higher education system, beginning with the ‘nationalisation’ and cuts in funding that were effected by the Tories during the first Thatcherite era (1979-1997). While Margaret Thatcher is well known for her antipathy for a higher educational system dominated by left-wing politics, I join those who note that, for all the slashing of budgets and despite their talk of market-led reform, the Tories never actually dared to privatise higher education. In my view, this began to change during the New Labour era (1997-2010). I make the case that a succession of education and then business secretaries, beginning with David Blunkett and continuing through to Lord Peter Mandelson, as well as at least one neoliberal ‘reformer’ within higher education itself, Sir Howard Newby, took a series of steps that began to pave the way for the kind of process seen in Britain’s railways after Beeching famously published his ‘Reshaping of the British Railways’. The steps in question included the development of Newby’s theory of Knowledge Exchange in the context of Hefce, and New Labour’s championing of ‘business-university collaboration’ via two reviews of education: the Lambert Review, which was led by a former editor of the Financial Times and the current head of the CBI; and the Leitch Review, which was led by a former insurance man and now a leading director in the Lloyds Banking Group. Alas, New Labour’s brave new world of higher educational ‘reform’ became embroiled in scandal when allegations were made that in two of the universities most directly affected by the changes, there were ‘conflicts of interest’ involving a private training corporation—Carter & Carter—and then a private management consultancy—Spirit of Creation. A Beeching-Axe-like furore erupted in early 2010 when Business, Innovation and Skills Secretary Peter Mandelson suggested that higher education institutions should engage in a little ‘belt-tightening’ after his department announced that universities’ budgets would be slashed by nearly a billion pounds in three years.
* * *
If the previous post engaged in a case study about the railway policies of Richard Beeching, Ernest Marples and the Macmillan government, in this post I will be concerned with the higher education policies of Sir Howard Newby, Lord Peter Mandelson and the Brown government.
Howard Newby may well be the most highly respected vice-chancellor amongst New Labour politicians. Newby started out as an academic specialised in rural sociology, but in 1983 his career took a turn towards academic management. At that point, he became the Director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC’s) Data Archive, an entity which made available social scientific research to public and private users. Between 1988 and 1994, Newby went on to become the Chairman of the ESRC, and then briefly served as its Chief Executive. In 1994 he became the vice-chancellor of Southampton University(1). In 2001 he returned to public office when he became the chief executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE). In 2006, Newby became the vice-chancellor of the University of the West of England (UWE), a position he held for 16 months; thereafter he became the vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool.
At UWE and Liverpool, Newby’s managerial style was controversial. Towards the end of Newby’s tenure at UWE, a mediated scandal erupted when Private Eye published a short piece that alleged that Newby was linked to Carter & Carter, a private training company to which UWE was reportedly planning to award a contract(2). Newby was again in the news when, less than a year after taking up his new vice-chancellorship at Liverpool, he proposed a sweeping reorganisation of the university along the lines of his discourse of ‘knowledge exchange’(3). Some weeks later he was back in the news when the University of Liverpool proposed to close down several of the university’s departments on the grounds that they had not performed well enough in the national research assessment exercise(4).
For his part, Peter Mandelson has long endured allegations that he is Britain’s most hated politician(5). More recently, he has achieved a belated recognition, at least amongst New Labour activists, as a possible saviour of the increasingly beleaguered Brown government. In the late 1970s, Mandelson started out as a director of the British Youth Council and then as a member of the Lambeth Council. Later he became a TV producer at London Weekend Television. In 1985, Mandelson was appointed as Labour’s Director of Communications, and thereafter came to be known as one of Britain’s leading ‘spin doctors’, the term used to describe someone devoted to producing party-political propaganda. In 1992 he was elected as the MP for the safe Labour seat of Hartlepool, and he is credited with having played a leading role in securing Labour’s—by then ‘New’ Labour’s(6)—return to power in 1997.
The rest of Mandelson’s trajectory as a leading New Labour politician has been documented in some detail, and so it is not necessary to rehearse the details in this post. In 1998 and then again in 2001, Mandelson’s own career became embroiled in scandal, and Mandelson was forced to resign not once but twice from Blair’s cabinet. He relinquished his position as MP for Hartlepool, and thereafter spent some years as a European Commissioner. In 2008, Mandelson was brought back, by way of a peerage, into the New Labour cabinet as the Business Secretary (7). Mandelson not only survived a third scandal(8), but after New Labour’s disastrous results in the June 2009 European Parliament elections, he consolidated his power in Brown’s cabinet. Brown agreed to give Mandelson the extraordinary titles of First Secretary of State and Lord President of the Council, and increased Mandelson’s powers as the new Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), a ‘super department’ which included the former Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills. Even before this department was created, several commentators suggested that Mandelson had become the de facto deputy Prime Minister(9).
Towards the end of 2009, Mandelson generated an uproar in the higher education sector when, as Secretary of BIS, he proposed to engage in a series of cuts to funding in higher education. The cuts, and his suggestion that universities might reduce the duration of their degrees to make savings(10) bring me to the subject of this post: in this second case study, I would like to compare and contrast aspects of the railway policies pursued by Beeching, Marples, and the Macmillan government in the 1960s with those pursued by Newby, Mandelson, and the Brown government in higher education in the 2000s/2010s.
In proposing to do so, I should acknowledge firstly that more than forty years separate the fields and institutions in question. While I believe that the ‘Beeching Axe’ was a kind of prototype for the kind of ‘reform’ in public services that would become commonplace in the UK during and after the Thatcher government, clearly universities are not railroads, and a vice-chancellor is not the head of the British Railways Board. Indeed, in my view only someone intent on using Britain’s infamous libel laws to censor an inconvenient comparison would feign the obtuseness required to pretend otherwise.
I should note secondly that, unlike the actors and events I considered in the post subtitled ‘The Beeching Axe’, those whom I will refer to in this post are contemporary to the writing of this blog; the actors are, in popular parlance, very much alive and kicking. This means, on the one hand, that the historical verdict, if one can speak in such terms, has yet to be returned. But it also means that, if it is true, as of course it is, that the contents of the EcoLogics blog are a matter of my personal opinion(11), then this is especially true with respect to this and the following posts. The posts refer to events whose most private, unresolved, or indeed censored aspects may not see the light of public, factual acknowledgment for 30 or more years to come(12). Even then, they may well be the subject of heated, contradictory, and politically interested interpretations.
It is nonetheless my belief that, given the knowledge that we have already have, and given the public significance of the fate of our higher educational system, there are sufficient grounds with which to form an opinion, and offer ‘fair comment’ about at least some of the continuities and discontinuities across the events associated with what David Henshaw described as the ‘Beeching-Marples Axis’, and those associated with what I regard as the ‘Newby-Mandelson Axes’.
What, the reader may ask, are the grounds for this comparison? I believe firstly that, in both sets of contexts, so-called ‘end users’ of public services suffered from an initially gradual, and then a rapidly accelerating erosion of the services. In both cases, I suggest that the erosion had as much to do with policies that were driven by economic realities as they were by political priorities. Put more sharply, I believe that in both contexts, politicians conflated alleged economic ‘imperatives’ with political objectives and preferences. In my view, this was a conflation that allowed key players in both contexts to claim that sacrifices were required thanks to economic circumstances, when their policies arguably reflected a rather more complex, and some might even say ‘corrupt’ set of motivations.
I suggest secondly that, even as politicians in both contexts developed policies that affected the different fields (public transport in the 1960s, and higher education in the 2000s and 2010s), key managers working within particular institutions in each field (e.g. the British Railways, and Liverpool University) proposed measures that arguably aided and abetted the aforementioned conflation. Central to these measures were proposals (and in both institutional contexts they were, at least to start with, only proposals) for the business-led reform, and then closure, which is to say the elimination of significant parts of the institutions.
The different policies were not only controversial, but became a matter of public, and indeed mediated scandal in the sense defined with Thompson in the second part of this series. This leads me to what I regard as the third continuity. As I began to suggest above, in my opinion the different scandals arose, as scandals, because significant numbers of end users of the institutions came to believe, however rightly or wrongly, that the policies proposed by the managers a) were not actually motivated by the ‘official’ justifications; b) were a result of institutional myopia by highly paid managers; and/or c) involved financial conflicts of interest which some interpreted as a form of ‘corruption’.
Whatever the validity of any such allegations, it is my belief fourthly that, in both contexts, the proposed policies (both intra and extra-institutional) undermined the field and institutional status quo in such a way that, however deliberately or inadvertently, they eventually made possible dynamics of privatisation which were in the interests of at least some of those who lobbied politicians to secure the changes in the first place.
I should note finally that, while I have emphasised what I perceive as a series of continuities across the two sets of contexts, in the fifth post I will also be interested in analysing what I regard as one particularly interesting difference between the two contexts: if the scandal that initially enveloped the ‘Beeching Axe’ (or some of its actors) was a ‘simple’ one in Thompson’s classification (more on this later), the ones that eventually enveloped what I think of as the ‘Newby-Mandelson Axes’ were complex.
* * *
Let us begin, then, with what I regard as the first parallel, which involves the similarity in the politics across the two fields: Britain’s transport system in the 1960s, and its higher education in the 2000s/2010s.
In the post titled the ‘Beeching Axe’, I noted that, in the postwar period, Britain’s railways were suffering from extensive war damage, underinvestment and mismanagement. I also noted that, after the Tories returned to power in 1951, automobility was seen by many as ‘the way forward’, but this valuation was complexly overcoded by distinct political interests: on the one hand, the Labour Party was reluctant to modernise the railways in ways that might undermine the powerful railway and coal industry unions. On the other hand, post-Atlee Conservative governments had a ‘lobby debt’ to private road hauliers, and to the road lobby more generally.
In this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Atlee Labour government failed to embrace ‘dieselisation’ (a key aspect of the modernisation of railways across the world). It is also unsurprising that Tory transport ministers gradually shifted state subsidies away from the railways, and towards road-building and motor transport more generally. But at the same time, the railways continued to be closely controlled by the state. Little wonder that the railways went from being a profitable industry to one that experienced mounting losses. This selfsame process paved the way, almost literally, for a decisive shift in Tory policy: Macmillan and his Transport minister Marples used the mounting losses to argue that the only viable way forward was to ‘sacrifice’ what they represented as the unsustainable aspects of the railways.
Despite numerous differences, I believe that a process with some similarities may be observed in the context of Britain’s higher education from the early 1980s to the present.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Britain’s universities were, in the words of Simon Jenkins, a former editor of The Times, ‘in remarkable shape. They were second only to those in the United States for international popularity and were both a growth industry and an export earner’. After Margaret Thatcher came to power, Jenkins suggests that ‘scholastic leadership and tradition collapsed in the face of state intervention more fierce than anything done under Labour. Thatcher mesmerised higher education and transformed its structure beyond recognition. It was one of her most vigorous “nationalisations”’(13).
I believe that this process, like that of the railways in the 1950s and 60s, involved the conflation of economic necessity and politically motivated—which is to say, an ideologically driven—set of priorities. In higher education as in the case of the railways, the motivations for this conflation were complex, and at times contradictory.
After the Tories were elected to power in 1979, they embraced the kind of neoliberal values that I have critiqued in several other posts in this blog. In political principle, Thatcher was determined that no public institution should be exempted from the idea that state intervention in public affairs in general, and via the welfare state in particular was a social cancer that needed to be extirpated from British society.
However, and as noted earlier with Jenkins, Tory policy with respect to higher education in the UK amounted, paradoxically, to a form of ‘nationalisation’. Even as the Tories cut the funding for research, development and learning, they instituted a series of measures that probably made Britain’s universities the most severely audited and centrally controlled in OECD countries.
A detailed analysis of this shift is beyond the scope of this post. It suffices to note that, between 1984/85 and 1994/1995, state expenditure in research and development went from £6.6 billion to £5.5 billion(14). And if at the start of Thatcher’s reign grants for university students were perhaps the most generous in the world, by the time that New Labour was elected to office, full-time students had lost eligibility for income support, unemployment benefit during vacations, and housing benefit. They also had half of their means-tested grant converted into a cunningly named ‘top up’ loan administered via the scandal-laden Students Loan Company(15). By the account of one New Labour education secretary, student funding went down by an extraordinary 36%(16).
At the same time, what had hitherto been a largely autonomous sector was brought under the control of a series of quasi-autonomous national government organisations—now known as ‘quangos’—one of the first of which was HEFCE, the institution to which, some years later, Sir Howard Newby would be appointed as chief executive(17). After Thatcher, British academics would have to submit to periodic, and extraordinarily bureaucratic audits of the quality of their teaching and their research. Moreover, after Kenneth Baker became the Secretary of Education (1986-1989), the Tory government effectively told each university how many grant-maintained students it could admit, with penalties for institutions that deviated from the expected numbers. Aspects of this form of control continue to this day, making a nonsense of Mandelson’s claim in 2010 that academics were ‘set in aspic’(18); if anything, British academics have shown a remarkable capacity to adapt to red tape, and to produce year on year ‘productivity gains’.
Throughout the Tory government-led transformations, an ostensibly ‘economic’ discourse was employed to legitimise the changes. An example of this tendency can be found in the autobiography of Kenneth Baker, the Tory education secretary credited with introducing the most important changes to higher education during the Thatcherite era. In a statement that arguably reflected the contradictions in Tory policy, Baker explained that he
‘wanted to see a system where expansion would be determined by student demand. So the first action we took was to abolish the ‘unit of resource’, which had become a rationing system. We replaced it with a system of per capita funding with different rates for arts, science and medical students. This would encourage universities to increase their income by attracting more students and providing them with an incentive to expand at a lower cost. I also wanted to see universities become more independent and draw their income from a range of sources, particularly private ones. That was the sure guarantee of academic freedom. Universities and polytechnics had to be autonomous to maintain their vitality, to manage themselves effectively and to be accountable to the individual student, the economy and the society that sustained them’(19).
Tory politicians such as Baker might wish to emphasise ‘student demand’ and other indicators of economic ‘necessity’. But as the quote above makes clear, the policy was to be implemented by controls which betrayed the dirigisme I alluded to earlier; far from being left to their own devices—e.g. to the wayward fortunes of student or indeed business demand—universities were forced to take on more students and do with less funding even as they faced greater quango—in fact, an indirect form of state—control.
We now know, thanks in part to the publication of hitherto censored Cabinet documents, that a significant motivation for these and other changes involved Margaret Thatcher’s desire to bring universities to heel. Thatcher was convinced that the universities were hotbeds of left-wing activism. During her time as prime minister, she famously railed at academics for ‘putting out poison’. As early as 1971, when she was Secretary for Education and Science during the Heath government, Thatcher even went after the student unions. In 2002, papers released by the Public Records Office under the 30-year-rule revealed that Thatcher pursued student union ‘reform’ because, in her view, the unions ‘tended to be controlled by politically conscious cliques; and money was being diverted from its proper purpose to the support of political demonstrations and extreme leftwing activities’(20). By implication, students should be politically ‘unconscious’!
Left-wing or not, academics across Britain’s higher educational system reacted with fury. The extent of the fury can be gauged by the fact that in January 1985—at least a year before the most draconian changes had begun to be enacted—even the good dons of Oxford University, an institution not exactly known for its political radicalism, voted to deny Thatcher, an Oxford graduate, the by then customary honorary doctorate in Civil Law(21).
Alas, viewed from the perspective of the changes that are now looming over Britain’s higher educational system, the Tories’ policies seem almost progressive. Indeed, aspects of Conservative policy contradict any simplistic suggestion that the Tories were simply intent on controlling left-wing academics.
First, and flatly contradicting the ‘natural’ Tory inclination to maintain class-based privileges, after the Conservative Party itself deposed Thatcher, John Major’s government eliminated, in principle if not quite in research funding practice, Britain’s ‘binary’ divide between polytechnics and universities. One result was that in future the former ‘polys’ would compete with the older universities for state research funds. In Britain’s class-bound system of higher education, this competition was, and still is, intensely resented by some members of the more established universities, who appear never to have forgiven the Tories for letting the polytechnics ‘out of the box’.
Second, during the 1980s and 1990s, the Tories pursued a policy of wider student access to higher education. In fact, we have seen that the policy was accompanied by sharp reductions in the per capita student funding, and so what was given with one hand was arguably taken with the other. It was nonetheless the case that more working class, and ‘mature’ students (students 21 or older) were able to obtain college degrees than had hitherto been the case. One of the remarkable gains during this period was that non-vocational subjects in the humanities and the social sciences—subjects which had traditionally been the prerogative of the upper classes, and which were arguably the most likely to lead to the formation of a critical political consciousness—might also be taken by students, ‘mature’ or otherwise, from poorer backgrounds. To the extent that some such subjects might be taught by liberal, if not left-wing academics, it is not exactly surprising that they were eventually targeted by those most to the right of both the Conservative, and the New Labour parties.
This leads me to a third point: for all their talk of making universities accountable to national economic interests, the last years of 20th century Tory rule saw a flourishing of teaching and research in areas which could hardly be described as being ‘business-led’. On the contrary, one of the areas that took off was the field of Media Studies, which many scientists and Tory politicians alike condemned as being a frivolous, and a ‘soft’ subject. Despite a steadily rising number of students who wished to take such courses—or perhaps precisely for this reason—the Tory and not-so-Tory press produced a chorus of condemnations. So much for Baker’s supposedly laissez-faire honouring of student demand!
* * *
As this interpretation suggests, the Tory legacy for higher education was, in some respects, a mixed one. However inadvertently, the Conservatives proved themselves remarkably able to engage in the high art of lived ideological contradiction: even as billions were taken from higher education, and this ostensibly to ‘free’ the system from the kind of state intervention that was and remains so despised by neoliberals, steps were taken to ensure that the sector came to be closely controlled by quangos. But even as this happened, the Tories themselves somewhat undermined the elitism of Britain’s academic establishment by giving many of the polytechnics the status that they deserved: that of full universities.
When the first New Labour government was elected to office in 1997, there followed a period during which little appeared to change. Tony Blair’s government not only left the Tory educational quangos in place—amongst them HEFCE—but gave even more emphasis to the kind of audit culture, popularly known as ‘league tables’, that was one of the hallmarks of populist Tory efforts to control a variety of public sector practices.
That said, it is my belief that higher education in Britain was about to experience a Marples and Beeching-like swerve to the political right. Unlike the political scene in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we do not know as yet of any single corrupt minister who, in the manner of Marples, steered higher educational policy from behind the scenes so as to benefit his own company. However, I suggest that in higher education in the early 21st century as in Britain’s transport sector in the 1950s and 60s, an economically interested, if not lobby-led process was about to take place that might itself undermine, if not close down significant parts of institutions within the field. If in the 1950s and 60s transport policies were determined largely by a road lobby was made up of a loose alliance of motor hauliers, motor corporations, road builders and their associated industries, in the early 2000s higher education came to be more and influenced by an ‘educational’ lobby which included multinational corporations with ambitions to engage in their own, ‘in-house’ forms of ‘higher’ education; private equity firms with an interest in making a quick profit by investing in private institutions in the emerging market; and a new generation of British private educational providers which were themselves intent on branching out into new educational fields.
* * *
I would now like to consider in some detail the manner in which the changes in question were enacted by the New Labour government, and within particular institutions. I will divide my commentary into two parts: I will begin with an interpretation regarding the manner in which New Labour prepared the field of higher education for what I regard as a de facto process of privatisation, or part privatisation. Thereafter, I will examine the way in which the changes were both expressed in, and promoted within particular institutions.
I should perhaps begin by suggesting that, if in the 1960s the motor lobby could derive popular support for the notion that automobility was the way of the future, at the beginning of the New Labour era many in the leading national media, and in right-wing forums more generally, had an almost blind confidence—to not say economic interest—in promoting what are now known as PPP’s, public private ‘partnerships’. While the critics of such partnerships denounced their potentially catastrophic effects in particular activities—an example that comes to mind is former London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s opposition to the London Underground’s PPP–New Labour leaders were more often than not determined to press ahead with them.
In the context of higher education as in other domains, it may well take decades before government documents are released that might (or might not) reveal the extent to which this agenda was promoted by way of direct lobbying on the part of one or more private organisations. Certainly there appears to be ample evidence that such lobbying has taken place across a variety of sectors; like the Tories before them, many New Labour politicians have engaged in what are popularly known as ‘revolving door’ practices, and indeed several have been dogged by a string of financial scandals. Seumas Milne, a journalist writing in the Guardian, has gone so far as to suggest that a ‘culture of corruption’ has seeped far into the New Labour government (22).
We will return to questions of ‘corruption’, or at least ‘conflicts of interest’, in due course. Here I should like to suggest that a first indication of a drastic change in government policy towards higher education began to be made evident in a speech(23) which David Blunkett gave in 2001. Blunkett was New Labour’s first Education Secretary, and was himself forced to resign twice from Cabinet after two scandals(24). In his speech at Greenwich University, he offered what I regard as a blueprint for the political course that New Labour would impose on higher education over the following decade. As Blunkett himself put it at the beginning of his speech, ‘I want today to make a significant statement about the future direction of higher education. I hope it will stimulate discussion and debate over the coming months about the policy framework for this vital sector of our education system.’ In fact, it appears that a New Labour policy was drafted and eventually enacted with little if any consultation with the two groups that were most directly affected by the policy: lecturers on the ‘shop floor’ level of universities, and the students they taught.
Three general policy principles can be deduced from Blunkett’s speech. The first is that higher (and indeed further) education would continue to be conceived as a market. In one sense, this was clearly a continuation of Thatcherite neoliberalism. However, while the Tories had flirted with this discourse, New Labour began to give it a rather more concrete and effective, which is to say performative form. Blunkett not only suggested that higher education had a certain economic value (‘The global market for higher education is already estimated to stand at £300 billion’) but intimated that a number of private corporate players were already taking steps to enter the market: ‘Global corporations are … reaching into areas of teaching and knowledge traditionally held to be the sole preserve of higher education institutions. The US now has some 4,000 corporate “universities”. Two years ago it was estimated that 85% of the US Fortune 500 deployed remote learning for employees. The same report gave the example of health giant Kaiser Permanente “eating into university business” by doubling its distance learning sites and offering bachelor’s and master’s degrees for nurses and continuing education for physicians.[…] The corporate “university” trend has developed in the UK: Motorola, British Aerospace and others offer clear examples. These corporations bring with them global brand names, multi-national workforces, and extensive resources. The combination is a powerful one’.
This leads me to the second principle: in future, New Labour would be prepared to allow private corporations to compete with chartered universities for the educational ‘market’. As Blunkett put it rather obliquely, and in a manner that itself conflated economic determination with future political priorities, ‘Now I do not contend that these are universities in the fullest sense of higher learning as we know it – many are simply re-engineered human resource departments. Sometimes these corporations seek partnerships with chartered universities, but in many instances they do not. There is no doubt that competition for lifelong learning provision from the private sector will intensify.’
The third principle, which I have analysed in another post and so will not consider here, was that distance education via the internet and other new media would in future constitute what I regard as the brave new world of New Labour’s increasingly privatised higher educational provision.
If it is true that this was to be the New Labour policy, what remained was to enact it by way of concrete changes in the legal, institutional, and everyday working contexts of Britain’s universities. As I noted in the context of the Conservative’s period in office, there was no guarantee that lip service to such principles would actually turn into a working policy. But unfortunately for those of us who believe that universities should remain relatively autonomous, while the Tories proved quite capable of slashing funding and of threatening the higher education field with market-led ‘reform’, in the end it has been New Labour that has actually begun to secure such reform.
From an early stage, I believe that New Labour politicians and their agents within higher education must have realised that key to the transformation of higher education would be the dismantling of the field’s ‘sacred’ status as an autonomous sector. Of course, aspects of this sacrality had already been undermined by the Tory dirigisme. To be sure, and as I have noted in other posts, this boundary was and even now remains a complex one in so far as university degrees have long been treated as a kind of ‘coupon’ for the exchange of economic, cultural and symbolic capital, in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of these concepts(25). Moreover, many university degrees have long been vocational, and/or have been tied to the fortunes of profit-driven industries. It is, in this sense, misleading to use the convenient stereotype of ‘ivory tower’ to describe higher education in general. It is for this reason more accurate to speak of the relative autonomy of universities, or of some departments in universities, vis-à-vis the fabled and not-so-fabled markets(26).
Still, if the New Labour agenda was to succeed, then the contradictory Tory counter-invocations of the sacrality markets would have to be transformed into concrete institutional practices. This would require at once a sea-change in the predominant philosophy of higher education—which to this day defends the importance of education and research that are comparatively free from the bias of religious, economic or indeed political ideologies—as well as the overhaul of most universities’ everyday practices.
In my opinion, a significant step in this direction was taken in 2001 when Howard Newby was appointed as the new chief executive of HEFCE. One of Newby’s projects during his tenure at HEFCE was to make the agenda of ‘knowledge transfer’ (or ‘knowledge exchange’, as Newby himself was later to describe it) central to the UK’s higher education. I have critiqued the logic behind this market-led discourse elsewhere (see the post titled Lord Leitch’s Levers, Part III), and so need not do so here again. It suffices to note that one of the changes that Newby supported involved developing ‘Centres for Knowledge Exchange’, or what HEFCE defines as ‘innovative partnerships aimed at developing good practice in knowledge exchange between institutions and businesses and within a specific locality, region or sector’(27). As explained to me by John Rushforth, a former director at Newby’s HEFCE(28), and then a deputy vice-chancellor recruited to UWE during Newby’s tenure, knowledge exchange involved not just the exchange of ‘ideas’ between business and higher education, but indeed, the ‘exchange of people’: executives from ‘UK Plc’ should come to teach in universities, and lecturers should go to work in ‘UK Plc’.
Newby himself explained in a lecture on knowledge exchange(29) that older varieties of knowledge transfer had focused too much on the research activities by established academics; in future, knowledge transfer should be extended to curricular design, and to the actual teaching and learning in university classrooms. University graduates, regarded by Newby as future employees of industry, should emerge with a pertinent mixture of knowledge, skills and aptitudes. But equally, when graduates eventually returned to university to engage in continuing professional development, they should use the discourses acquired in industry to ‘refresh’ the universities’ curricula, to ‘feed’ the universities’ research agendas, and to develop the universities’ learning and teaching ‘markets’. This ‘two-way flow’ was what justified Newby’s proposal of a new name for the process, which should now be called ‘knowledge exchange’.
In my view, this discourse meant that Newby, in a manner not entirely unlike that of Beeching many years before him, acted as a pivotal figure that encouraged executives from the private sector to become more involved in, if not to enter what hitherto had remained a largely public, or quasi-public service. Of course, as head of a quango, Newby did not have the power that Beeching did as head of Britain’s Railways Board; if I compare the two fields and their agents, it is initially to foreground their shared roles as catalysts for business-led ‘reform’.
During this same period, New Labour took additional steps to secure the reform. Two of these involved educational policy reviews which were led not by academics, but by figures drawn from the world of finance—a world to which the New Labour government was very close at least until the financial catastrophe of 2008-2009.
The Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration was named after Richard Lambert, a former columnist and then editor of the Financial Times who went on to become the head of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Lambert’s report was published in December 2003, and it explained in its foreword that an era of allegedly ‘open innovation’, as coupled to business R&D ‘going global’, would have ‘big implications’ for universities, ‘which are potentially very attractive partners for business’. A ‘marked change of culture in the past decade, with many universities casting off their ivory tower image and playing a much more active role in the regional and national economy’(30), meant that universities would be able to get down, in three words, to the business of doing business with business.
The second review, the Leitch Review of Skills, whose findings were published in December 2006, was led by Sandy Leitch, another figure drawn from the world of finance. At the time of the review, Leitch was chairman of BUPA, Britain’s leading private health company, as well as a non-executive director of Lloyds TSB, United Business Media and Paternoster. Before that he was Chairman and Chief Executive of Zurich Financial Services (UK, Ireland, Southern Africa and Asia Pacific) and Chairman of the Association of British Insurers(31). According to the Guardian, Lord Leitch was a donor for Gordon Brown’s virtual leadership contest(32), and indeed it was Brown that commissioned Leitch to produce what became known as the Leitch Review in 2004. Leitch went on to become one of the leading directors of the part-nationalised Lloyds Banking Group, which at the height of the banking crisis was allowed to take over HBOS despite issues involving competition law.
In its own words, the Leitch Review extended the ‘mantra’ of ‘economically valuable skills’ to all of Britain’s educational levels, making at once more radical, and more concrete the neoliberal ideal of shifting from a so-called ‘supply-led’ form of educational provision—arguably a code-word for education determined by the State—to a ‘demand-led’ form of education provision, to be determined by the ‘employers’—itself arguably a euphemism for the nation’s biggest corporations.
This blog has offered a detailed critique of the Leitch Review, and so I will not repeat my analysis here. It suffices to note that, over and beyond the proposal of these policies, the mid-2000s saw a series of changes which suggested the kind of quickening and sharpening of right-wing economic ‘reform’ and ‘sacrifice’ that took place after 1959 in the context of the Macmillan government and Britain’s railways.
First, after New Labour had pledged ahead of its re-election in 2001 that it would ‘not introduce [higher education] top-fees and has legislated against them’, it performed a u-turn and did exactly the opposite. On January 27, 2004, in one of the closest parliamentary votes of the New Labour era, a higher education bill was passed with 316 votes for and 311 against. At the time, many within New Labour itself recognised the change for what it arguably was: the completion of the dynamic of privatisation of the learning side of higher education that had begun during the Thatcher years.
Thereafter, and second, the drumbeat of business-university collaboration, or what Newby described as ‘knowledge exchange’ began to acquire the rhythms of what some described, apparently with a complete lack of irony, as a ‘cultural revolution’. The 20 July 2007 edition of the Times Higher included an article titled ‘Embrace Leitch or lose out to FE, sector warned’(33), in which policy makers effectively threatened universities with cuts in funding if they failed to adopt the Leitch Review’s agenda of vocationalisation, or what I have described as the ‘skillification’ of higher education. The article spoke of the government’s plans to impose a ‘cultural revolution in higher education’, with John Denham, Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, saying that he wanted a ‘skills revolution’ and that employers would be given the ‘purchasing power to shape what our country supplies by way of skills and qualifications’. As I have also noted in earlier posts, Richard Brown, chief executive of the Council for Industry and Higher Education, was quoted as saying that if universities didn’t embrace this ‘revolution’, ‘then the private sector will continue to take this market. Universities have to decide how much of a loss that would be’. The Council of Industry and Higher Education was funded by what read like a who’s-who of the UK’s largest private corporations—the list included BAE Systems, Corus, Rio Tinto, the Bank of Scotland, Tesco and BUPA(34). One of the council members was Professor Drummond Bone, the vice-chancellor of the University of Liverpool whom Newby would replace(35).
On 3 March 2008, New Labour’s Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) published its plans for a ‘New University Challenge’. The following is an extract from 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…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(36).
But as I explained in the post ‘Unlocking the Business of Higher Education: New Labour’s “A New University Challenge”’, buried in an appendix at the back of the DIUS announcement were two statements that confirmed what many academics had feared: that the New Labour agenda was to effectively blur the distinction between further and higher education (via vocationalisation or skillification), even as the way was opened for private companies to enter the higher education ‘market’.
According to DIUS, there would be four ways of setting up one of the new ‘centres of higher education’: one of these involved
‘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’.
But the ideological key to ‘A New University Challenge’ was arguably no more than a short sentence in length; it suggested the new centres could ‘be set up as, or become private companies’.
* * *
I would now like to consider the manner in which the New Labour policies began to be transformed into practices in specific institutions. In my view, if New Labour’s continuation and radicalisation of Thatcherite policy was to have the desired effect, it would be necessary not just to allow private businesses to become universities—or as New Labour delicately referred to them, ‘centres for higher education’—but for such business to ‘seize the day’ and take steps to become such centres. At the same time, and second, it was also necessary for universities to transform themselves along the lines recommended by the Lambert and the Leitch reviews, i.e. to devote themselves to teaching ‘economically valuable skills’, and to become centres for ‘knowledge transfer’ or what Newby described as ‘knowledge exchange’. In this part of the post I will examine the way in which two institutions attempted to effect such changes: the first was Carter & Carter, a former automobile accident repair company that in the early to mid-2000s became a leading player in government-funded training schemes; and the second was the University of the West of England, one of Britain’s ‘new’ universities, which, from 2006 onwards, began to be restructured along the lines of Howard Newby’s discourse of ‘knowledge exchange’.
By coincidence, Carter & Carter was both created, and then led by a man who himself started out at the chemical multinational ICI (Richard Beeching was recruited by Ernest Marples and the Macmillan government from the same company). Philip Carter left ICI and established an independent accident repair company in 1992, and then transformed it, from 1997 onwards, into a business devoted to training mechanics for automobile repair(37). In 2001, a massive capitalisation by Bridgepoint Capital—the private equity firm better known for its substantial investments in the private healthcare sector— allowed Carter & Carter to acquire a number of firms, and thereby to engage in an extraordinary diversification of its activities. In 2003, the firm more than doubled in size when it purchased Emtec, a company that offered technical services and support to the automotive industry. This was followed by the purchase of the AA’s technical services operation in early 2005, at which point Carter & Carter went public; the company’s shares rose by 25 per cent on the very first day of trading. In the late summer of 2005, the company diversified further with the purchase of training group ASSA, which took it into the transport, aerospace and food and drink industries, as well as into the government-funded vocational training market. A later acquisition of the Fern Group, a leading provider of training for the unemployed and disabled under New Labour’s ‘New Deal’ programme took Carter & Carter even deeper into the public sector(38).
By October 2005, Citywire declared that Carter & Carter was now ‘the market leader in government funded training’. It explained that ‘Carter & Carter manages government-sponsored training on behalf of major blue-chip customers, drawing down available government funding and helping the customer to ‘optimise’ the use of the funding’(39). A year and a half later, the company had become the central training provider under New Labour government’s ‘Train to Gain’ scheme, which was designed to eliminate the boundary between work and education by taking training to the workplace. Having begun as a tiny bedroom-based auto repair company, by April 2007, Carter & Carter was a full-blown vocational training corporation valued at an astonishing £550m(40).
It is at this point that Carter & Carter’s fortunes intersected—or almost intersected—with those of the University of the West of England (UWE). UWE, formerly known as the Bristol Polytechnic, became a chartered university thanks to the Conservative Further and Higher Education Act of 1992. A combination of its location in the popular city of Bristol, its offer of a variety of courses taught by academics, many with national and international research reputations, as well as a very prudent financial policy transformed it into one of Britain’s most successful ‘new’ universities.
Until 2006, UWE’s structure and management principles were similar to those of other former polytechnics. In 2006, Sir Howard Newby took up the post as vice-chancellor of the university. He set out to produce a root-and-branch restructuring of the university along the lines of his discourse of knowledge exchange—a form of vocationalisation which, in my opinion, is tantamount to what I have described in other posts as the ‘skillification’ of higher education: the reduction of higher education to the pursuit of teaching and learning of so-called ‘economically-valuable skills’, and of conducting research mainly, if not entirely on principles conducive to the kind of business-university collaboration proposed by the Lambert Review.
News of a proposed partnership with Carter & Carter—or at least, the awarding of what was described as some kind of contract—appeared in issue 1185 (April/May 2007) of Private Eye. Private Eye alleged that UWE’s academic board had only given its ‘cautious approval’ to a project ‘to agree a contract with private sector training company Carter & Carter’; according to Private Eye, it ‘wasn’t just the “perceived increased privatisation of education” that had board members worried – there was a “possible conflict of interest” too. That’s because the decision to “enter into a work-based learning collaboration” followed discussions between UWE (whose vice-chancellor is Sir Howard Newby), Carter and Carter (whose non-executive directors include Sir Howard Newby) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England (whose former head is, er, Sir Howard Newby)’(41).
This short piece in Private Eye scandalised many UWE academics, who wondered why a full university might wish to award a contract to a former automotive-repair company turned government-funded vocational training corporation. The implicit allegation of a conflict of interest prompted many to suspect, however correctly or incorrectly, that the changes at UWE might be driven as much by the kind of ‘third way’ rationality publicly presented by Newby, as by rather more personal, if not financial motivations. Rightly or wrongly, this suspicion was further fueled when it was later alleged in the national media that the ‘rationalisation’ of UWE along the lines of knowledge exchange involved private consultancy firms that were purportedly linked to Howard Newby and his wife Sheila. As the Guardian put it, ‘The use of management consultancy firms linked to both Sir Howard and his wife, assistant vice-chancellor Lady Sheila Newby, also caused concern. “They were private companies with no idea about university or academe telling us how to do things and what to do. People got upset because he was running the university life a little fiefdom and giving very big contracts to his mates,” said one academic, who preferred not to be named’(42).
It is unclear to me what the level of involvement actually was, and whether any contract was actually about to be issued, or was even being considered—I myself am not familiar with any statement produced by Newby accepting or denying any of the allegations. It is also unclear to me whether or not Newby and/or the rest of UWE decided to drop any such plans following the publication of the piece in Private Eye. Whatever the case, soon after the allegation of a possible conflict of interest appeared, Philip Carter, his son, a family friend and a pilot died when the Carter’s helicopter crashed near the Carter estate in the vicinity of Peterborough; the Carters were returning from watching a Chelsea Football Club game in Liverpool.
Soon after the tragic crash, Carter & Carter began to founder. According to the Independent, ‘cracks started to appear soon after the death of Phillip Carter…The shares dropped by 41 per cent in a single day after the first profit warning at the end of June, which was blamed on slow take-up of the Train to Gain apprenticeship programme. They dropped by another 80 per cent in July with a second profit warning issued after the firm failed to win the Government’s Pathways to Work deals.[…]Another profit warning in October saw trading suspended and shares priced at 85p. The finance director John Green – appointed the previous year after the takeover of Assa – quit. And PricewaterhouseCoopers, the company’s auditors, announced an investigation of accounting irregularities for the year ending 31 July 2007’(43).
In July 2007, it was announced that Newby, who had only been at UWE for 16 months, would be taking up a new post at Liverpool. The Guardian noted that ‘The announcement of Sir Howard’s sudden departure from his post as UWE’s vice-chancellor – after just 16 months – followed a similarly hasty appointment at Liverpool, where he has been a council member since 2005.[…] The position was advertised in the first week of June with an application deadline two weeks later on June 15. UWE officially announced Sir Howard would go to Liverpool less than a month later on July 6, just a day after he informed the board of governors of his resignation(44).
A Freedom of Information request made by Julian Todd in 2 April 2009 provides some indication of the process by means of which Newby was appointed; according to the University of Liverpool’s Joint Selection Committee, 34 applications were received for the post of vice-chancellor, and one candidate, Howard Newby, was invited for interview; ‘at the conclusion of the interview, it was agreed that Sir Howard Newby should be appointed to the position of Vice-Chancellor’(45). Liverpool was, of course, perfectly entitled to conduct the selection process in this manner.
The articles about Newby that appeared in the national press soon after his new position was announced give some sense of the extent to which Newby’s management style divided the university. According to an article in the Times Higher, ‘… Newby’s early exit from UWE – and his legacy – has divided opinion among staff and students’. The paper noted that the local branch of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) had launched an ‘extraordinary attack’ on Newby; in a statement it suggested that Newby’s tenure had been ‘disruptive for students and staff, disastrous for the morale of staff and damaging to the reputation of the university’. But the same paper noted that John Rushforth, the former HEFCE director and a Newby-UWE-era appointee, was quoted as saying that ‘During his [Newby’s] tenure, student retention, graduate employment, student satisfaction and research income have all improved. Twelve colleges have joined the UWE Federation, connections with employers have increased and a clutch of our students have won prizes in national competitions’(46).
Newby’s departure from UWE did not put an end to the controversy surrounding knowledge exchange, and the associated ‘reform’ of universities. Some months after he took up his new post as vice-chancellor at Liverpool, Newby once again made headlines when the Times Higher reported that there was ‘unease’ over Newby’s plans to ‘realign’ the University of Liverpool’s teaching and research; one aspect of the realignment reportedly included plans to make half of academic staff engage in knowledge-exchange activities(47). But a veritable furore erupted some weeks later when it emerged that Liverpool was proposing to close down several of the university’s departments, purportedly because they had failed to achieve sufficiently good results in the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Although a number of different departments were threatened, it was politics and communication studies, philosophy, and statistics/probability that were apparently in line for the first closures. According to the Times Higher, a leaked document reportedly stated that it was ‘the view of the senior management team and the deans that, given the need to invest in excellence, it is not feasible to continue to support these areas in future’(48). After recognising once again the differences in scale and industry, I am reminded, on this level too, of Beeching’s invocations of the need to invest in the ‘best’ lines of the railways, and to sacrifice those that were not sufficiently ‘efficient’ or cost effective.
If the scandal that surrounded the alleged contract for Carter & Carter had generated an opprobrious discourse amongst many of UWE’s academics, the uproar that followed Newby’s attempts to close several of Liverpool’s departments gave rise to highly critical comments on the national level. An article in the Guardian reported that Local Labour MP, Peter Kilfoyle, had ‘lodged an early day motion in parliament condemning the cuts, while John Pugh, Liberal Democrat MP for Southport and alumnus of the university, said the cuts were “deeply troubling”.”Proposals to close entire departments on the flimsy justification that research scores aren’t high enough are simply outrageous,” Pugh said’(49).
Academics in the threatened departments made the case that the proposed cuts were based on a problematic calculus, even as the University and Colleges Union members prepared to engage in industrial action. Students of the threatened departments organised a campaign whose protests were themselves reported in the media. As I will note in the next post in this series, it appears that a key aspect of the organisation of the SOS (Save our Subjects) campaign involved the use of web-based social networking media. In the end, Newby and Liverpool’s high management were forced to reconsider the proposed closures, but not before Newby’s links to private firms once again became a part of the controversy. The Times Higher reported that ‘Spirit of Creation, a private consultancy used by UWE during Sir Howard’s leadership, has been used by Liverpool for “work associated with strategic planning”. Spirit of Creation’s website says it enables organisations to “transform themselves into engines of change”’(50).
In my opinion, the discourse of the website of Spirit of Creation reveals just how close the firm was—and presumably remains—to the kind of ethos advocated by the Lambert Review, if not the Leitch Review. According to the website, ‘The missing piece of the puzzle, in a largely service economy, is the toolset and skillset to design a service so it is 100% centred around the needs of the customer, and responsive and flexible enough to change and adapt with the customer, through all the stages and many interactions of the customer journey’; ‘Today Spirit of Creation enables organisations to:
* Transform themselves into engines of change innovating and improving services in schools and universities, hospital and community services, banks and financial services and many more
* Reduce costs – make services as efficient and as effective as possible
* Improve performance and margins – matching services to quite specific needs – at the point of delivery, making useful, useable and desirable services for customers to buy’(51).
In the context of higher education, this post-Fordist discourse, so typical of the contemporary managerial, to not say managerialist(52) discourse, overlooked two fundamental contradictions. First, as Newby himself had noted in some the ‘pep talks’ he’d given staff at UWE, ‘UK Plc’, arguably the main ‘customers’ of the knowledge exchanged universities, might not actually know what ‘services’ they would want from the universities. In contrast, and second, at Liverpool Newby was to discover that some of his university’s other ‘customers’—the students in the departments about to be closed—not only knew full well what they wanted, but were prepared to do battle with Liverpool’s high management in order to prevent the university from imposing its ‘engine of change’ on the departments of politics and communication, philosophy, and statistics. So much for the Spirit of Creation’s idea of a ‘toolset and skillset to design a service so it is 100% centred around the needs of the customer’…
* * *
To conclude this post—in fact, an essay—I would now like to return to the level of field, and to consider some of the latest developments. In my view, these developments provide additional evidence for my contention that a parallel can be drawn between the proposed ‘reform’ of Britain’s railways in the early 1960s, and that of higher education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. They also explain why Peter Mandelson, a figure thus far absent from my analysis, was to play a key role in the field.
In December 2009, the New Labour government generated an uproar across Britain’s higher education when a Pre-Budget Report announced that the government was looking to make ‘savings’ of £600 million in higher education, science and research budgets (53). Later that month it emerged that in fact, the HEFCE budget would be slashed by £915 million over three years (54). In a letter to HEFCE, Mandelson stated that he wanted universities to develop more ‘flexible’ degrees: ‘Over the next spending review period, we wil want some shift away from full-time three year places and towards a wider variety of provision’, in a reference to so-called ‘fast-track’ degrees with a duration of two years(55).
Soon after, a group of vice-chancellors from the Russell Group of universities denounced the cuts, which they suggested would have ‘a devastating effect not only on students and staff, but also on Britain’s international competitiveness, economy and ability to recover from recession’(56). Many academics believed that the government might slash funding by as much as £2.5 billion over the next three years. It was widely feared that the cuts would lead to the loss of scores of university programmes, and over 10.000 jobs in the field. Some went so far as to suggest that several universities might be forced to close.
Mandelson for his part later insisted that the cuts would amount to no more than a little ‘belt tightening’, and in what some saw as a characteristically venomous, if slightly awkwardly phrased comment, he suggested that lecturers thought ‘they have a right to be set in aspic in what they do’(57).
Even as the debate about the true extent of the cuts went on, The Guardian published an analysis that suggested that many vice-chancellors earned higher salaries than the Prime Minister(58). A few weeks later the same paper suggested that, despite government cuts, university leaders had landed an average pay increase of 10.6% in 2009(59).
If during the Macmillan era the closure of lines was in my view misleadingly justified with reference to a massive deficit within the railways, in the Brown era the ‘belt-tightening’ (sic) was similarily justified with reference to the massive national deficit. But this was a deficit which was generated when the New Labour government used hundreds of billions of state funds to bail out the very financial institutions whose irresponsible—many would say corrupt—business practices had caused the global financial system to come close to collapse in 2008-2009. It was from this same sector that New Labour had recruited some of the key advocates of higher education ‘reform’, and it was now Peter Mandelson—himself a politician who had been embroiled in financial scandals—who was ordering academics to show ‘flexibility’ and to accept deep cuts that might well lead to the elimination of their jobs.
Even as Mandelson suggested that everyone would have to engage in some ‘belt tightening’, the Brown government remained committed to projects such as the construction of two new aircraft carriers, the replacement of the Trident Missile System, and a variety of huge IT projects which many associated with a creeping ‘surveillance society’. In a class of political prioritizing of its own was New Labour’s expeditionary war in Afghanistan.
In such a context, many within academia had little doubt that in the end, Mandelson’s, and the rest of the New Labour government’s invocations of economic scarcity were at least partly an act of dissimulation of political priorities—priorities which, by late 2009, appeared to assign comparatively little importance to higher education. Whatever support was showed to higher education tended to privilege those aspects that were deemed to be ‘economically valuable’. At Liverpool, some academics expressed concern that part of Newby’s project was to privilege big scientific projects(60). Conversely, at the UWE that Newby left behind, academics in the humanities and the social sciences faced growing difficulties in obtaining funding for research that was not deemed to be economically valuable.
To be sure, it was not just historians or experts in media and literary studies that faced such pressures; as was noted by George Monbiot in a highly critical piece published in the spring of 2009, higher education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is now driven by such a business-led ethos that, in the words of the title of his article, ‘These men would’ve stopped Darwin’(61).
Will the cuts announced by Mandelson—and proposed within some universities by figures such as Howard Newby—lead to the completion of a higher education equivalent of a Beeching Axe, i.e. to eventual closure of the ‘branch lines’ of our higher education? And have the policies which I have outlined been motivated not just by individuals or institutions with real or alleged ‘conflicts of interest’, but by manifest acts of corruption of the kind that were eventually exposed in the case of Ernest Marples and the British railways in the 1960s?
As I noted at the outset of this piece, it will be for historians—and perhaps also for bloggers ready to use Britain’s freedom of information laws—to tell.
In the next post: an analysis of changes in the mass mediation of financial scandal. In the final post, a return to Thompson’s theory, and a more general analysis of the implications of these case studies for financial scandal, corruption and censorship in the context of neoliberalism.
References
1) Biographical information taken from Universities UK press release, issued in December 1999. See http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/Newsroom/Media-Releases/Pages/MediaRelease-105.aspx, accessed 18 March 2010.
2) In ‘High Principals’, Private Eye, Issue 1185, May/June 2007. A copy of the full article can be viewed at http://bristle.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/bristolbloggergate-wot-private-eye-said-about-sir-howard-newby-back-in-2007/, accessed March 23, 2010
3) See M. Newman, ‘Unease over Liverpool’s plans for a research-focused “realignment”’ in Times Higher, 15 January 2009, at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=405004, accessed 18 March 2010.
4) See M. Waddington, ‘Protests over University of Liverpool plans to shut departments’, in Liverpool Echo, 10 March 2009, http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpool-news/local-news/2009/03/09/protests-over-university-of-liverpool-plans-to-shut-departments-92534-23103701/, accessed 18 March 2010.
5) This word is not used casually; the degree of vitriol rightly or wrongly directed at Mandelson over the years has been astonishing. To get a sense of the extent of the passions involved, see H. Siddique, ‘Cabinet reshuffle stuns the blogosphere’, in Guardian Politics Blog, 3 October 2008, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2008/oct/03/labour.mandelson, accessed 20 March 2010.
6) I will refer to the ‘New’ Labour Party in order to distinguish it from the Labour Party, which was effectively transformed by Kinnock, Blair, Brown and Mandelson ahead of the 1997 elections.
7) The British parliament requires ministers and secretaries of state to be either elected MPs, or members of the House of Lords.
8) See for example BBC ‘Tories seek Mandelson ‘clarity’, 26 October 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7691678.stm, accessed 20 March 2010.
9) See for example, A. Sparrow, ‘Peter Mandelson “has become deputy prime minister”’ in Guardian Politics Blog, 4 November 2008, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2008/nov/04/peter-mandelson-gordon-brown, accessed 18 March 2010.
10) P. Curtis, ‘Fast-track degrees proposed to cut higher education costs’, in Guardian, 22 December 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/dec/22/fast-track-degrees, accessed 1 April 2010.
11) See the ‘About EcoLogics’ page.
12) I am mindful of the comments made by David Henshaw with respect to the censorship of documents surrounding the Beeching Axes (see previous post).
13) S. Jenkins ‘The lady who turned to nationalisation’, in Times Higher Education, 20 October 1995, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=95716§ioncode=26, accessed 20 March 2010.
14) D. Watson & R. Bowden (1999) ‘Why did they do it?: The Conservatives and mass higher education, 1979-97′, in Journal of Education Policy, 14: 3, p. 252.
15) Watson & Bowden, ‘Why did they do it?’ op. cit., p. 253.
16) As suggested years later by David Blunkett in a speech given at Greenwich University on 15 February 2000. See http://cms1.gre.ac.uk/dfee/#speech, accessed 18 March 2010.
17) Might the old British Railways Board itself be regarded as a proto-quango?
18) J. Shepperd, ‘Mandelson says academics are “set in aspic”’, in Guardian, 11 February 2010, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/feb/11/academics-in-aspic-says-mandelson, accessed 18 March 2010.
19) Kenneth Baker, quoted in Watson & Bowden, ‘Why did they do it?’ op. cit, pp. 248-249.
20) H. Richards, ‘Papers reveal Thatcher’s persuasive powers’, in Times Higher Education, 4 January 2002, at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=166437§ioncode=26, accessed 20 March 2010.
21) See BBC, ‘On This Day’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/low/dates/stories/january/29/newsid_2506000/2506019.stm. Thatcher became close to the ‘Cambridge Conservatives’.
22) S. Milne, ‘A culture of corruption has seeped far into government’, in Guardian 1 July 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/01/corruption-business-government-transport-health, accessed 20 March 2009.
23) speech given at Greenwich University on 15 February 2000. See http://cms1.gre.ac.uk/dfee/#speech, accessed 18 March 2010.
24) The second scandal erupted after Blunkett had been the Secretary of Work and Pensions for less than a year, and after it was alleged that a conflict of interest was created by him having been director of, and holding shares in a company that proposed to bid for government contracts to provide paternity tests to the Child Support Agency, a part of Blunkett’s department.
25) See P. Bourdieu (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. See also Bourdieu’s (1986)[1979] ‘The forms of capital’ in J.G. Richardson’s (ed) Handbook for Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, Greenwood Press, pp. 241–258.
26) P. Bourdieu and R. Passeron (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture. London: Sage
27) HEFCE, ‘Centres for Knowledge Exchange’, at http://www.hefce.ac.uk/econsoc/buscom/heif/centres/, accessed 20 March 2010.
28) see http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2002/sep/04/highereducation.uk3, accessed 30 March 2010.
29) Lecture given as part of Sussex University’s SPRU 40th Anniversary. For a reference, see http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/1-6-4-1.html, accessed December 12, 2007.
30) R. Lambert, Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration: Final Report. Norwich: HM Treasury, 2003, p. 1
31) This information provided by the Treasury’s press notice on the day that the Leitch Review was published. See http://www.hmtreasury.gov.uk/newsroom_and_speeches/press/2006/press_leitch.cfm, accessed August 24, 2007.
32) D. Hencke, ‘Brown’s £113,000 war chest for the leadership contest that never was’, 31 May 2007, http://politics.guardian.co.uk/labourleadership/story/0,,2091743,00.html, accessed August 24, 2007.
33) T. Tysome, ‘Embrace Leitch or lose out to FE, sector warned’, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=209662§ioncode=26, accessed May 14, 2009.
34) http://www.cihe-uk.com/fundingorganisations.php, accessed 24 August 2007.
35) http://www.cihe-uk.com/members.php, accessed 24 August 2007.
36) 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
37) As described by the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_&_Carter, accessed 30 March 2010.
38) Information about Carter & Carter in S. Arnott, ‘Struggling Carter & Carter goes into administration’, Independent online edition, 11 March 2008, at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/struggling-carter–carter-goes-into-administration-794063.html, accessed 29 March 2010.
39) J. Wallen, ‘Why the shrewd money gets Carter & Carter’, Citywire.co.uk, 13 October 2005, http://www.citywire.co.uk/personal/-/news/markets-companies-and-funds/content.aspx?ID=269322, accessed 27 March 2010.
40) S. Arnott, ‘Struggling Carter & Carter goes into administration’, op. cit.
41) In ‘High Principals’, op. cit. A copy of the full article can be viewed at http://bristle.wordpress.com/2010/01/06/bristolbloggergate-wot-private-eye-said-about-sir-howard-newby-back-in-2007/, accessed March 23, 2010
42) A. Lipsett, ‘Will the Newby broom sweep clean?’ in Guardian online, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2007/jul/23/highereducation.uk, accessed 30 March 2010.
43) S. Arnott, ‘Struggling Carter & Carter goes into administration’, op. cit.
44) A. Lipsett, ‘Will the Newby broom sweep clean?’, op. cit.
45) See the Freedom of Information request ‘UofL VC Appointment Report’ at the WhatDoTheyKnow website, http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/uol_vc_appointment_report, accessed 29 March 2010.
46) M. Newman, ‘Mixed views on Howard’s end’, in Times Higher Online, 20 July 2007, at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=209676§ioncode=26, accessed 28 March 2010.
47) M. Newman, ‘Unease over Liverpool’s plans for a research-focused “realignment”’, in Times Higher, 15 January 2009, at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=405004, accessed 28 March 2010.
48) M. Newman, ‘Future of eight Liverpool departments in doubt’, in Times Higher, 9 March 2009, at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=405704, accessed 30 March 2010.
49) quoted in A. Lipsett, ‘Liverpool staff promise strike over subject cuts’, in Guardian Online, 10 March 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/10/liverpool-rae-closures, accessed 27 March 2010.
50) ‘Unease over Liverpool’s plans for a research-focused realignment’, op. cit.
51) see http://www.spiritofcreation.com, accessed 14 March 2010.
52) M. Newman, ‘Mixed views on Howard’s end’, op. cit.
53) ‘Science and education budgets face “bleak” £600m cuts’ in BBC News, 10 December 2009, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8404788.stm, accessed 1 April 2010.
54) M. Newman & J. Morgan, ‘Hefce budget to be slashed by £915m over three years’, in Times Higher online, 31 December 2009, at http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/stry.asp?storycode=409782, accessed 1 April 2010.
55) P. Curtis, ‘Fast-track degrees proposed to cut higher education costs’, op. cit.
56) M. Arthur and W. Piatt, ‘Universities face meltdown—and all of Britain will suffer’ in Guardian, 11 January 2010, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/11/universities-face-meltdown-britain-suffer, accessed 18 March 2010.
57) J. Shepperd, ‘Mandelson says academics are “set in aspic”’, op. cit.
58) D. MacLeod, ‘Vice-chancellors’ salaries on a par with prime minister’, in Guardian online, 19 March 2010, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/19/administration-universityfunding, accessed 1 April 2010.
59) J. Shepherd, ‘University leaders land big pay rises despite government cuts’, in Guardian online, 1 April 2010, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/apr/01/university-vice-chancellors-pay, accessed 1 April 2010.
60) See M. Newman, ‘Unease over Liverpool’s plans for a research-focused “realignment”’, op. cit.
61) G. Monbiot, ‘These men would’ve stopped Darwin’, in Guardian Online, 11 May 2009, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/11/science-research-business, accessed 1 April 2010.
