Here are two things that Nick Clegg probably didn’t want you to know about his allegedly new-found enthusiasm for fiscal ‘austerity’
Mervyn King: I gave Clegg no new information on debt crisis
Nick Clegg: I changed my mind on spending cuts before the general election
p.s. Did you know that Clegg was once the speech writer and adviser to Leon Brittan, the former Tory Vice-President and Trade Commissioner of the European Union?
If you believe the mythology of Dem Tories, the new dash for privatisation is all about freedom. For example, teachers ought to have the freedom to set up new, and better schools if they want to do so. For their part, GPs should have the freedom to determine how they will spend the money that makes up the multibillion NHS ‘pot’. In a similar vein, and following on from a well-documented New Labour plot (in both the literary and conspiratorial senses of the word), if academics want to set up a new university, why they too should have the freedom to do so.
Yesterday this blog published a brief history of the policy behind one such form of ‘freedom fighting’: the establishment of what will undoubtedly be the first of a string of private universities. Again, if you believe Dem Tories’ mythology, it is, in the words of David Willetts, ‘healthy to have a vibrant private sector working alongside our more traditional universities’. Indeed, this will create a ‘dynamic and flexible’ degree system and may well encourage online degrees (1).
An alternative view is that this is the start of what may end up being a transnational takeover of our higher education. Does this seem like an exaggeration? Well, it’s happened with the energy utilities, and we all know that U.S. corporations are stalking the NHS. So why shouldn’t it happen with universities?
In my view, BPP, the new ‘university college’, is on the way to becoming a cash cow for the U.S. Apollo Global, a transnational joint venture between the Apollo Group and Carlyle, the world’s second largest private equity group (we do have a ‘special relationship’ with the U.S., don’t we? U.S. transnationals take our utilities, our hospitals, and now our universities!)
From this point of view, what Dem Tories would like us to conceive as ‘freedom-fighting’ will actually become a form of university-squashing. Initially, loads of private money may well be thrown at BPP and a host of other similar training firms so that they can compete for real universities’ students. Bona fide universities will then have to adapt their own practices to be able to keep up; this at a time when the government is, ever so conveniently, slashing their budgets by 25% or more. You can decide for yourself where the real universities will have to look for funding, and what all of this will do to academic freedom. How much academic freedom can you have when you have to go, cap in hand, to a private corporation to fund teaching and research?
Three further thoughts.
The first is, does anyone know what the acronym of BPP stands for? It sounds very much like BP plus another P!
The second involves the timing of the announcement regarding BPP. Am I overly cynical in presuming that the announcement was made in a manner that was carefully timed to coincide with university and parliamentary holidays, if not with the huge news about the Wikipedia leaks? After all, higher education policy was supposed to be one of those areas where the Liberal Democrats drew a red line…. In the event, there hasn’t even been a squeak from those progressive Lib Dems. On the contrary, Vince Cable himself seems quite keen on the idea of the private equitied universities. Once again, Cable has proven that he is not worthy of the reputation he and the rest of the Liberals so carefully cultivated as critics of neoconservatism.
Last but not least, if you want to see what an early effort to engage in this kind of freedom-fighting looked like—and catch a glimpse of the real behind–the–scenes politics, to not say conflicts of interest—have a read of my earlier post about Carter & Carter, another private training firm that received a huge injection of capital from a private equity firm, Bridgepoint Capital. Bridgepoint Capital was linked by Seumas Milne to Alan Milburn in his article about Britain’s culture of corruption.
Hospitals went through this same ‘freeing up’ before universities did, and Dem Tories are now talking more and more assertively of moving towards a U.S.-style private insurance system; are we really to believe that this whole ‘liberation’ has nothing to do with donations to the political parties, and a revolving door system for leading politicians?
See also The Lib Con
References
1) as quoted by the Guardian, in ‘Private university to be first in Britain for over 30 years’, 26 July 2010, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/jul/26/first-private-university-30-years, accessed 26 July 2010.
Margaret Thatcher is reported to have despised higher education—or rather, a higher education that in her view was famously ‘putting out poison’. The poison in question included left-wing ideas—of course—but apparently also politically-aware thinking. How else to interpret the fact that when Thatcher was Secretary for Education and Science (under Heath), she pursued student union ‘reform’ partly because the unions ‘tended to be controlled by politically conscious cliques…’(1)? Would Thatcher have preferred politically ‘unconscious’ cliques?
After she became prime minister, many academics felt that Thatcher pursued the universities with the kind of venom that she attributed to the academics themselves. Budgets were slashed, and after Kenneth Baker became the Secretary of Education (1986-1989), the Tory government introduced what its members would normally describe as ‘socialist’ controls. Amongst many other measures, the government told each university how many grant-maintained students it could admit, with penalties for institutions that deviated from the expected numbers. Higher educational quangos began to blossom, and academics began the long march towards a form of bureaucratic enmuzzlement (apologies for the neologism).
Simon Jenkins, himself not the most radical of Liberal Conservatives, described the changes quite aptly when in 1995 he wrote a piece for the Times Higher titled ‘The lady who turned to nationalisation’. In his words, ‘United Kingdom universities at the start of the 1980s were 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. Yet from the moment Margaret Thatcher came to power, 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”’(2).
Aspects of this form of control continue to this day, making a nonsense of Mandelson’s claim in early 2010 that academics are ‘set in aspic’. If they are set in aspic, it is in the aspic of Thatcherite controls of the kind I’ve just described, and which New Labour enthusiastically embraced. If anything, British academics have shown a remarkable capacity to adapt to red tape, and to produce year on year ‘productivity gains’.
Alas, there were three things that Margaret Thatcher never dared to do, and so three things that British academics never had to face—this despite, or perhaps thanks to, her ‘socialist’ intervention. One of these was to allow a university to fail. In a manner not entirely dissimilar from that of a Siberian tractor factory under the old five-year plans, universities and their academic workers were frogmarched to the tune of quality control (or what we might describe as ‘blue army’) choirs. Controls over teaching reached the point where academics had literally to justify, assess, and then reassess each lesson, each essay, and each exam in much the manner of primary and secondary school teachers who endured an analogous process of nationalisation. A craftily hegemonic system led by the Quality Assessment Agency, ostensibly introduced by the academics themselves, forced lecturers to go through the equivalent of an Ofsted examination every few years (will the Tories be eliminating this red tape too?). And yet, however bitterly we complained about this system, it is true to say that any failing university was rectified as opposed to eliminated.
The second thing that Thatcher did not do was set up private universities. Perhaps that would have contradicted the underlying logic of nationalisation, i.e. it might have allowed the alleged poison to spread to areas where the academics might be less closely watched and controlled.
This brings me to the third thing that Thatcher did not do, at least not directly. Despite the nationalisation, and despite a creeping curricularisation, she never dared to put in quango managers or indeed university vice-chancellors that suggested to academics what they could or could not teach, what they could or could not research, from the point of view of economically valuable skills. Of course, a case can be made that university managers, and indeed departmental heads still did this by way of indirect controls via funding regimes, curricular design, etc. But to this blogger’s knowledge, there was never a case of a university receiving as vice-chancellor a former quango head who threatened academics, however charismatically, with the big machete of business and vocational skills: if you don’t teach economically useful skills (or the social equivalent of), you may eventually lose your jobs.
That honour goes not to the Tories, but to Thatcher’s New Labour reincarnations, i.e. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. I remember rather vividly how, in the course of ‘pep’ talks given to the different departments at the University of the West of England, Howard Newby warned staff, in so many words, that if they failed to perform according to his new ‘knowledge exchange’ criteria, then jobs could eventually be lost (I take it that knowledge exchange is a radical subspecies of knowledge transfer, which I take in turn to mean ‘knowledge transferred to businesses for the sake of its commodification’).
It was also during the New Labour years that Newby engaged in knowledge transfer and then knowledge exchange activism at HEFCE. Thereafter New Labour took it upon itself to give knowledge transfer and knowledge exchange an institutional corporeality which went far beyond that of Newby himself. There was, on the one hand, a string of ‘reviews’ of education, all led by businessmen (and it was all men). All coached their unsurprisingly pro-business findings in the language of business, and one insurance man even went so far as to state that Adam Smith himself had had a go at universities for not teaching enough business!
There was, on the other hand, a sweeping change in the ministerial nomenklaturas. The Department of Education was abolished, and the very word, ‘Education’, was subtly exchanged (knowledge exchanged?) for ‘Skills’. In the New Labour higher ed bureaucrateese, education became a bad word. A new Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) emerged which began to subtly and not-so-subtly introduce the transformations that would be required to begin to switch from a Soviet model of higher education (ceteris paribus), to a Thatcherite model of higher education (well, to an ideal Thatcherite model, as opposed to the working model).
Way back in 2007 and 2008 when these changes began to become most evident, I was one of a handful of academics who editorialised them in this blog (see for example ‘Lord Leitch’s Levers‘, or ‘Unlocking the Business of Higher Education: New Labour’s “A New University Challenge”’, or indeed, the partly censored ‘Carter & Carter goes into administration’).
In 2009, the pace of privatisation/vocationalisation suddenly quickened; I wonder if Gordon Brown shared Tony Blair’s reported sentiment that it was time to eliminate that ‘left elite’, members of which were presumably still thought to be ‘putting out poison’ from the nation’s universities? Be that as it may, DIUS became a performative (in philosophy of language-speak) of its own acronym (Die-Us), and was replaced by a new acronym: BIS (as in Bus-iness). Universities were now placed under the aegis of Business, Innovation and Skills, and with it, the growing princedom of Peter Mandelson.
The announcement today that a new private university has been created (one whose untimely acronym is BPP) is, in my opinion, at once more bad news, and evidence that there is little that is new under the Thatcherite, which is to say the neoliberal, sun. As soon as it became apparent that Dem Tories would leave BIS intact, it also became obvious that we should expect more of the same. And when we heard that Vince Cable—he also of that famous Red Paper on Scotland—was now himself singing along in the chorus of privatisation, it became abundantly clear that this would be a re-run of that old classic, ‘When Tony Became Margaret’. Those who voted for the Liberals thinking they were getting an older Labour have once again been thoroughly duped; perhaps I will be proven wrong, but Clegg and the rest of Dem Tories should enjoy what may well be their last months in power, or rather, close to power.
The real change, if there can be said to be a change, is that Dem Tories now feel sufficiently self-assured in their ideological quest to be able to let go of that useful tool of laissez-fairism, nationalisation. From now on, the cadre of managers patiently groomed within and beyond universities will become, in the manner of the post-Soviet ‘oligarchs’, the new barons of the business of what was once truly a higher education.
Incidentally, why do we speak only of Russian oligarchs?
See also, Big Society, Big Oil, Muzzled Universities (especially parts 2 & 3, forthcoming)
For a longer account of the history of the privatisation of higher education in the UK, and its relation to financial scandal, see
Financial Scandal, Corruption, and Censorship, Part 4
References
1) 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.
2) 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 26 July 2010.
Am I the only one to be astonished that U.S. senators feel entitled to summon Scottish government officials to their hearings?
The equivalent would for the British government to summon Defence Secretary Robert Gates to the Chilcot Inquiry.
The arrogance is astonishing, and speaks volumes of what at least one part of the U.S. establishment thinks about the alleged ‘special relationship’ between the U.S. and the U.K.
Speaking of the Chilcot Inquiry: if you thought that the new government wouldn’t try to cover up what happened in the build-up to Bush and Blair’s illegal war in Iraq, think again: have a look at what Carne Ross, a UK expert on Iraq for the Foreign Office, is saying about the current Cabinet Office’s efforts to suppress key documents that confirm beyond a shadow of spin what we all already knew: that it was lies all the way down.
Update 30 July 2010: Now the fools are trying to say that they’ll send a delegation to Scotland to interview Scottish officials. (See Salmond snubs plan for Lockerbie delegation to visit UK). They don’t get it, do they?
Some of the Daily Telegraph’s columnists have long called for the replacement of the NHS with private insurance. For example, Simon Heffer made the case in Happy birthday, NHS: retirement beckon. He argued, back in 2008, that ‘Insurance schemes that let people decide how much of their own money to spend on healthcare and top up what they contribute in taxes are the way to bring greater investment into the system. Politicians must prepare the country for the realities that need to be faced’.
For those who don’t know who Heffer is, he is such a True Blue Tory that he’s authored defences of Enoch Powell, such as ‘When will Tories admit that Enoch was right?‘
Dem Tories, with David ‘Janus’ Cameron at the front, might try to dismiss the man as a ‘fringe’ quite-far-right-winger. But until 2007, he was an associate editor for the Telegraph, which is about as mainstream Tory as mainstream Tory gets.
If I mention the man and the paper, it’s because today the Telegraph has a headline (see Axe Falls on the NHS) that should alarm anyone silly enough to have believed Dem Tories (and indeed New Labour) when they said that the NHS would be protected from the machete which the Tories are taking to our public services.
The fact that the ‘uncomfortable’ story is being published by a right-wing paper means that it cannot be dismissed as a Guardian reader (let alone journalist) conspiracy theory. There may be devious politics behind the publication (such as embarrassing the ‘liberal’ Cameron), but anyone who is sitting back and giving Dem Tories a break needs to wake up from their dreamy state. The Tories, with a convenient Lib Dem sheath hiding their true blue machete, are out to dismember what remains of the welfare state, and the NHS will be no exception. If you think that’s a good idea, wait till you’re unemployed and lose the right to healthcare, as has been the case in America. (Then again, if you’re rich and a Tory and the Telegraph is your paper, then you would want private insurance and lower taxes, wouldn’t you?)
