Big Society, Big Oil, Muzzled Universities (III)

Please note: this post is part of a series. Click on any of the titles below to see the rest of the posts.

Part I

Part II

Part III (this post)

In this last post in the series I begin to make the case that John Browne’s appointment as the head of Britain’s ‘Independent’ Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance’ can be interpreted as the coming of plutocracy—or as ‘global strategists’ for CitiCorp once called it, ‘plutonomy‘—to Britain’s higher education.

Vince Cable delivered today what was described as a ‘searing’ speech which attacked the ‘spivs and gamblers’ in Britain’s finance industry. But even before he had delivered the speech, he was forced to fend off attacks from much of the corporate media, and from the current and former directors of the CBI. Richard Lambert played what might be described as a gender card by accusing Cable of using ‘emotional’ language in his widely-trailed speech. Presumably Lambert would have liked Cable to use the cold, ‘unemotional’ language of, say, Digby Jones, the former head of CBI, who accused Cable of behaving like ‘a Liberal rabble rouser’. Jones urged Cable to re-write his speech, and according to the Guardian, he even suggested ‘There’s still time, Vince. You can still withdraw it,’ Jones said.

Cable may have left his speech intact, but he also left his policies in place. It is a sign of Britain’s extraordinarily conservative political culture that even as Cable threatened to regulate Britain’s runaway big business, he embraced a series of policies that have been promoted, to not say dictated, by that very sector. It is Cable who still wants to privatise Royal Mail, and it is also Cable that is determined to accept and adopt the likely recommendations of Lord John Browne, the Mandelson-appointed head of what many regard as the grossly misnamed ‘Independent Review of Higher Education and Student Finance’.

In case some of the readers haven’t seen the first two parts of this series, it was John Browne that led the image makeover of BP in the early 2000s, and indeed it was Browne who is said to have made ‘Beyond Petroleum’ the slogan of BP. It was John Browne that gave speeches in the early 2000s claiming that ‘we are all citizens of one world, and we must take shared responsibility for its future and for its sustainable development’. But alas, it was also Browne that advocated the relentless cost-cutting that many believe to be a cause of BP’s fatal industrial accidents as well as its calamitous oil spills. Indeed, some three years after Browne left the post as BP’s chairman, it was Browne that Time Magazine put at the very top of its list of ‘dirty dozen’ figures which it suggested might be blamed for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

And yet, scarcely two years after John Browne was caught out by a court signing an untruthful statement about his relationship to a former partner, it was also Browne that Peter Mandelson appointed to be the head of an ostensibly ‘independent’ review of the funding of Britain’s higher education —in effect, a review that would determine whether Britain would continue to have a public, broad-based higher educational system, or a private, American-style system dominated not just by business-led funding, but by the kind of class-based access to education which has been shown to be at the heart of Britain’s growing social divides.

Lest we forget (and how quickly people will forget), Mandelson was a politician in Britain’s New Labour Party—the same party that once pledged to draw a red line on tuition fees, and which was elected in 1997 on pledges to put an end to the Conservative Party’s culture of corruption—a key aspect of which was the policy of handing over more and more aspects of public sector work to the Tories’ cronies in the private corporations.

In this last part of the series, I want to address two questions: first, how is it that a manifestly pro-big business figure—let alone a publicly disgraced former oil baron—was appointed to head the UK’s higher education funding review? And second, how is it possible that, after 13 years of lived experience of the New Labour deceptions—and after less than six months of the coalition government whose kingmakers made tuition fees their own ‘red line’—we are about to witness yet another political betrayal?

*   *   *

Any explanation of the political process behind the higher education funding review must consider the UK’s political culture, and with it, a culture of corruption that in my view deepened under New Labour. It would, however, be a mistake to single out New Labour for all of the blame; if three sets of governments—the Tory government from 1979 to 1997, the New Labour government from 1997 to 2010, and now arguably the LibCon coalition—have engaged in much the same political practices, then our analysis has to look beyond party politics at the structural organisation of political representation.

It is no secret that the UK’s political system is less than perfect. For all of Britain’s much-vaunted tradition in parliamentary democracy, it still lacks a real system of checks and balances. If a party is elected with a large majority, and if that majority is undivided, then its leading politicians can wield a near-dictatorial power in what remains a constitution-less state.

The post-devolution arrangements may have weakened the power of 10 Downing Street over Scotland, but that power remains very much a reality in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. In the latter countries, it remains true that the government of the day not only proposes legislation, but then enacts and polices it. Despite the notion that the civil service and the parliamentary committee system should attenuate any partisanship in government, the fact remains that in Britain a government with a large majority can ram through pretty much any policy it pleases. It can also appoint just about anyone it deigns to fulfill leading political and para-political functions. Unlike the U.S., where top officials are often vetted by congress, in the UK any figure from the head of a quango like HEFCE to the head of a review such as the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding can be appointed—we might as well say anointed—with little or no extra-executive oversight.

Of course, British or indeed European courts may eventually thwart the most authoritarian or undemocratic legislation. But the examples of David Blunkett’s semi-secret DNA database, the Guantánamo-like system that prevailed at Belmarsh Prison during much of Tony Blair’s prime ministership, and more recently the so-called ‘control orders’—in reality, a form of indefinite house arrest without charge—show what a British government can get away with. In this context, the oft-repeated invocation of the need for a ‘strong government’ is actually a way of agreeing with a system that is arguably only an election away from a kind of dictatorship.

The government-led policy reviews are no exception to this political culture. The idea behind such reviews is that new policies should be developed by way of committees able to consider the various policy options with all due rigour. The reviews are supposed to conduct their business at arm’s length from government, and in a manner that consults the wider civil society. But under New Labour, these principles were often jettisoned, and replaced with a kind of rubber-stamping dynamic. It is my belief that, by way of this modus operandi, the party’s allies (some might prefer the term ‘cronies’) were offered the symbolic capital associated with a review in exchange for railroading the government’s preferred policy. A detailed analysis of this tendency is beyond the scope of this post; however, for a proper contextualisation of this argument, you may wish to have a look at my analysis of the Leitch Review of Skills.

Of course, it might well be argued that this kind of political patronage has long been a feature of the UK’s political culture. I would not disagree ; while I point repeatedly to examples drawn from the New Labour era, it would be a mistake to assume that the culture in question only applies to that party. We have only to consider, for example, the way in which many of Thatcher’s privatisations were reviewed to realise that a similar dynamic took place in the pre-New Labour era. That said, I’d like to suggest that we are now dealing a political culture that involves at once an intensification of long-term tendencies, and a qualitative shift towards an even more radically undemocratic form of political representation. That form involves what is best described as a plutocracy.

*   *   *

When we look back at the appointments of the heads of most of the different reviews of education, a few similarities stand out. One of these is the utterly arbitrary nature of the nominations: from Lambert to Browne, passing through Leitch and Sainsbury, none of the heads was an expert in education or higher education. The individuals’ claims to fame were almost entirely to do with their business acumen; to paraphrase the old joke about turtles and the universe, with New Labour it was business all the way down.

While Blair, Brown and Mandelson spoke euphemistically about the importance of ‘listening to employers’, in my opinion there was only one kind of ‘employer’ that really mattered: the kind of globe-trotting, cost-cutting, employee-sacking, if not union-busting and ethics-jettisoning executives who both courted, and were courted by the New Labour troika, and by their pusillanimous nomenklatura. Again, a similar kind of ‘employer’ was courted by the Conservatives before New Labour was elected to power, and a strong case can be made that the LibCons are at it again. I suggest that it is these managers, and their backers in and beyond the boardrooms of vast multinational corporations that constitute the core of the plutocracy that I have just referred to.

The notion of plutocracy refers to government by the wealthy, and this leads me to a third similarity across the mentioned heads of reviews. All might well be described as belonging to that category legitimated by Peter Mandelson, the ‘filthy rich’. If in doubt, consider the salary ‘packages’, and/or the estimated worth of Their Lordships Sandy Leitch, David Sainsbury, or indeed, John Browne. Even Richard Lambert, the outgoing head of the ‘lowly’ CBI, would most likely have obtained a ‘package’ that would have placed his earnings at a level many times that of the UK’s national average.

Now it might be argued that a handful of chairs of reviews does not constitute evidence of a plutocracy. This would be a valid criticism were it not for the fact that there is plenty of other evidence that this kind of political system is on the rise in Britain and in its mentor nation, the United States. We might point, for example, to what is daintily described as the social ‘background’ of most of the LibCon members of cabinet. But perhaps the best evidence is the result of a more systematic analysis, and comes from a surprising source: as early as 2005, a couple of CitiCorp ‘global strategists’ suggested in an internal report that the U.S. and Britain had become ‘plutonomies’, a term for what I take to be an extreme form of plutocracy.

The ‘internal’ report provided by the economists (or at any rate, attributed to them), has found its way into the internet, and it makes for interesting reading:

‘We… posit that:

1) the world is dividing into two blocs – the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest. Plutonomies have occurred before in sixteenth century Spain, in seventeenth century Holland, the Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties in the U.S. What are the common drivers of Plutonomy? Disruptive technology-driven productivity gains, creative financial innovation, capitalist-friendly cooperative governments, an international dimension of immigrants and overseas conquests invigorating wealth creation, the rule of law, and patenting inventions. Often these wealth waves involve great complexity, exploited best by the rich and educated of the time.

2) We project that the plutonomies (the U.S., UK, and Canada) will likely see even more income inequality, disproportionately feeding off a further rise in the profit share in their economies, capitalist-friendly governments, more technology-driven productivity, and globalization.

3) Most “Global Imbalances” (high current account deficits and low savings rates, high consumer debt levels in the Anglo-Saxon world, etc) that continue to (unprofitably) pre- occupy the world’s intelligentsia look a lot less threatening when examined through the prism of plutonomy. The risk premium on equities that might derive from the dyspeptic “global imbalance” school is unwarranted – the earth is not going to be shaken off its axis, and sucked into the cosmos by these “imbalances”. The earth is being held up by the muscular arms of its entrepreneur-plutocrats, like it, or not.’

I leave it to readers to investigate in more detail the ins and outs of the ‘global strategists’ representation of the matter. Here I would simply note that a number of questions might be raised vis-à-vis the strategists’ (presumably economists) account. Is it that the earth is being held up, or held down, by those ‘muscular’ arms? And how can the plutocrats be so confident that that the ‘global imbalance’ known as climate change won’t suck the life out of our planet? The CitiCorp’s economists appear to have been cheerleading what was a nakedly self-interested ideology and its concomitant practices.

I nonetheless find it convenient to refer to their account because it constitutes an acknowledgement, however uncritical, of the  reality of what can only be described as a new form of dictatorship: a dictatorship that does not appear to be a dictatorship, and which indeed must not be mistaken with the kind of authoritarian system associated with a Videla or a Pinochet (though as I have noted in past posts, Pinochet’s Chile was the ‘laboratory’ for Chicago School-brand neoliberalism). Today’s plutocracy, in its ‘plutonomic’ form, is a dictatorship that gets it way not so much by way of secret police (though they are also employed), as by way of vast private and corporate networks and resources that can be weilded, à la BP or News Corp, to secure just about any vested interest.

Another advantage of using the CitiCorp report is that it provides evidence of the way in which the plutocratic (or ‘plutonomic’) elite have now cast aside any pretense of accountability, and are operating according to an agenda that involves a gross inequality.

I do not use any of the above words lightly. According to the same economists’ account, ‘…the top 1% of households in the U.S., (about 1 million households) accounted for about 20% of overall U.S. income in 2000, slightly smaller than the share of income of the bottom 60% of households put together. That’s about 1 million households compared with 60 million households, both with similar slices of the income pie! … the top 1% of households also account for 33% of net worth, greater than the bottom 90% of households put together. It gets better (or worse, depending on your political stripe) – the top 1% of households account for 40% of financial net worth, more than the bottom 95% of households put together.’

We would need to recognise that divisions or at least tensions, contradictions and any number of ambiguities are likely to arise within any such system. Some divides may occur, for example, along national lines, or indeed along the lines of declining and nascent, or simply competing industries. The return of Karl Rove in Washington  D.C. reminds us of the importance, within the plutocratic sphere, of party-political divides. The blatant sexism that continues to pervade top management in most countries may constitute its own source of contradiction. A full account would also need to explain the history of ‘plutonomy’, and the space in which any coordinated and coordinating interventions emerge (Davos? Bilderberg?). Such an investigation would also need to explain the role of formal financial institutions (IMF?) as well as of informal financial ‘alliances’ of the kind that have wrecked Ireland, Greece, and now it seems, Spain. Last but not least, it would have to be acknowledged that the plutocratic (or ‘plutonomic’) system might face significant disruption and even resistance in a variety of contexts.

But after recognising these and many other complexities, it seems clear that the top managers in what seems increasingly like a global plutocratic ‘coalition’ now have virtually all of the instrumental power in the U.S and the UK. I say ‘instrumental’ power because of course, it would be grossly simplistic to suggest that the people in question have all the power. But when it comes to engaging in the instrumental mobilization and application of economic, cultural, and perhaps even symbolic power, these are the people who can bring huge amounts of pressure to bear not just on a single politician, but on whole parties, countries, and their governments. This is only partly a matter of being able to pull ‘levers’—unsurprisingly, during the New Labour era this became one of the favourite metaphors in transnational ‘corporatese’. In addition to actual political corruption, the plutocrats may be able to mobilise vast legal and other epistemic resources which can thwart state opposition when a ‘quiet word’, a propaganda campaign such as BP’s, a stated or unstated threat, or indeed a bank transfer, fail.

It might be argued that this conception is simplistic, if not ‘conspiratorial’. It is simplistic as outlined in this post (more detailed accounts will be forthcoming), but not for the reasons that a neoliberal critic might invoke. Such a critic might suggest that the corporations in question, and by extension their leading executives, only really provide goods and services for ‘Joe Public’ (and presumably ‘Jill Public’). According to this view, it might, for example, be argued that the actions of executives like John Browne do no more than reflect the wills, at one remove, of hundreds of millions of consumers who want, or even demand, this or that product—be it a hydrocarbon-based fuel source, or the plastic toys (themselves made from oil) in pound shops. The eponymous Digby Jones, well known for the unemotional nature of his interventions, put the point succinctly when he suggested in the context of his attack on Cable that businesses are ‘just a reflection of society’.

But aside from the fact that, strictly speaking, ‘Joe Public’ is a convenient abstraction, it is one thing to say that there is a demand for oil-based (or any other) products, and another to say that there is a demand for the provision of the goods regardless of the economic, social, or environmental costs. Given the choice, it is difficult to believe that most people would not prefer the kind of ‘ethical’ business culture that Browne claimed to develop, but which his actual policies arguably contradicted. There is also the question of just how the demand for a product may be stoked by those most interested in profiting from it.

Alas, that is now a somewhat academic point to debate. Consumers don’t elect CEO’s of corporations, and equally if not more importantly, today even the widest alliance of social groups in the most powerful country on Earth may be thwarted by any one of the gigantic corporations at the core of the plutocratic coalition. If in doubt, have a look at the historical precedent established by the Exxon Valdez disaster, in which BP played a role (as I write this post, Exxon executives have still not been brought to book for that disaster, and the corporations lawyers are still working, successfully, to further reduce the original fine).

Alternatively, consider the way in which the Obama administration has been forced to provide ‘cover’ for BP’s Macondo disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. If, as now seems likely, BP will perform yet another Houdini with respect to this spill of spills, then how not to conclude that executives like Browne, and the networks they can mobilise, have become virtually unassailable ‘masters of the universe’?

I use the last term only partly in jest. The point is emphatically not to suggest that the political system in question is made up of a just a few super-powerful and wealthy individuals; instead, it is to suggest that individuals in positions like that of Browne (when he was BP’s CEO) now have an ability to mobilize networks and resources that can neutralise, or indeed co-opt, those of the most powerful nation-states. Indeed, it seems likely that increasingly coordinated groups of managers like Browne may be working formally and informally to produce the kind of intervention that led to the catastrophic ‘disciplining’ of centre-left governments in Greece and in Spain. In this context, to suggest that individual citizens (notice how nowadays most politicians seem to prefer the term ‘consumers’) are the real ‘kings’ (sic) amounts to a form of extreme naiveté, to not say ideological inversion.

*   *   *

I suggest that it is this utterly undemocratic, indeed reactionary form of political representation that is now heading towards a university near you. By way of an admittedly unprovable hypothesis, I suggest that it was this kind of a system that led to Browne’s selection as head of Britain’s review of higher education funding. Browne is arguably a plutocrat’s plutocrat; if my analysis in the previous part of this series reveals anything, it is how far he was willing to go to advance what was, in my opinion, an essentially ‘plutonomic’ ideology, which BP arguably attempted to mask with talk of ‘ethical’ business.

In my view, this hypothesis might also shed light on the manner in which Howard Newby proceeded in the University of the West of England, and then at Liverpool. Again, given the nature of the politics at stake, the hypothesis would be very difficult to research, let alone prove. It would require the very best investigative journalists, and would need to research in historical and sociological detail what must be a process full of complexities, if not contradictions. Here it must suffice to suggest that, if my hypothesis is valid, then at some point, a ‘coalition’ of plutocrats appear to have realised that there was big money to be made in universities. But they must also have realised that universities provided one of the last havens for the production of discourses capable not just of critiquing plutocracy (or plutonomy), but of thwarting it by way of free higher education, and free speech. According to this interpretation, the two motivations came together, however ‘spontaneously’, to produce the far-reaching policy of ‘skillification’ and academic censorship that we now have in the UK. As of 2009, the UK is a country where ‘blue skies’ research in the sciences, and especially the critical human and social sciences is being neutered by an extremist pragmatism (if the Pope can call atheists ‘extremists’, then we can use the term for the knowledge exchangers, too): from Mandelson onwards, all state-funded research must serve, and indeed ‘prove’ especially economic functions if it is to qualify for support.

As I began to  note earlier, the new coalition government has done nothing to repeal this principle. On the contrary, Vince Cable, the once critical Lib Dem business spokesperson, appears to be a firm advocate of the policy. He is also an advocate of uncapped tuition fees, despite the noise that his party made about the matter prior to the elections, and despite the latest efforts to transform tuition fees into a kind of ‘graduate tax’.

It would almost be comforting to think that this entirely a ‘top-down’ process, and that the universities are the victims of a government policy in the service of a James Bond-like conspiracy. But this is far from being the case. Beyond Howard and Sheila Newby, a number of media have noted that a significant proportion of the UK’s vice-chancellors earn salaries that place them, if not in the top 1% of British households, then certainly in a percentile that not far from that figure. Over the last few years, many of these wealthy administrators have been only too happy to echo calls for what seems set to become a fully privatised system of higher education. Even Nigel Thrift, the vice-chancellor of Warwick University who was once better known for his research about ‘non-representational’ theory, gave a speech in 2009 that could be read as a plea for  multinational alliances amongst universities of the kind seen in aviation sector (Thrift used the example of Air France and KLM).

To be sure, this advanced neoliberalism is not only found amongst the highest university managers. Many of the British academics who earn rather less than their managers, but who still take home comfortable salaries appear to have been persuaded that there is no alternative to the lifting of current restrictions on tuition fees. From the late 1980s onwards, a veritable cadre of middle managers, many of them still practicing academics, have felt compelled to operationalise policies that have slowly but surely made way for the kind of skillification that I have described in many other posts. If there is one thing for which the plutocratic ‘coalition’ can be admired, it is the remarkably astute way in which its members have succeeded in overcoming, by way of a mixture of smallish carrots and very big sticks, any opposition to its increasingly hegemonic rule.

*   *   *

If this hypothesis has any validity, then we can expect Browne to propose a series of changes in the funding regime that will take the best universities—or at least, those that are perceived as having the most symbolic capital—in the direction of the kind of exorbitant fees that only the very wealthy can pay. ‘Lesser’ universities will set their own fees accordingly. If the mythical ‘market’—read the plutocracy—has its way, then in Britain all universities will charge fees that reflect their real, and/or perceived place in the hierarchies established by the league tables of mass media (many of them the proxies of a handful of the leading plutocrats.)

This possibility is not a matter of mere speculation. The media have already reported that the Browne review appears to be predisposed to increase students’ tuition fees, and all of the noises we’re hearing sound very much like the softening process which Dem Tories have used for the rest of their proposed slashing and burning. According to an article published last May in the Sunday Times,

‘Lord Browne, the former chief executive of BP, wants to remove the current £3,225 limit on fees. Leading research universities could charge students an estimated £7,000 a year while fees for science undergraduates could rise to £14,000.

Browne’s committee recognises this cannot be done immediately, but universities would be allowed to increase fees well above the inflation rate each year — possibly by as much as £1,000 — as they moved towards a free market.

Previously, it had been thought the review panel, expected to report by late summer or autumn, would recommend an increase in the fee cap to £5,000-£7,000. But one source said last week that Browne, appointed by Lord Mandelson, the first secretary of state, was “hawkish”.

Another added: “He wants the cap off altogether, but he will go by tiers. I’m pretty certain he will not go to a free market straight away.”’

If this article is accurate, then Browne’s review (read Mandelson’s and Cameron’s review), as coupled to New Labour’s overarching policy of skillification, will arguably have the effect of killing not two, but three or more birds with one boulder of a financial stone.

First, many of the teaching jobs may eventually be eliminated by way of ‘consolidations’ (cue Nigel Thrift’s Air France + KLM comparison). But, seemingly outlandishly, the jobs may also vanish thanks to a series of ‘automatizations’. One of the planks of what I have described as the skillification of higher education involves a much-vaunted shift to distance education, and this shift celebrates a growing role for modular, and increasingly automated ‘delivery vehicles’. Again, this point would require a separate article in its own right. But if a course is designed in such a way that it can be delivered and assessed by computers, then surely it will be delivered and assessed by computers? From a plutocrat’s perspective, there is, presumably, no reason why a lecturer should be treated any differently from a bank teller. And if bank tellers have been all but replaced by ATM’s, why shouldn’t lecturers be replaced by IBUC’s (internet-based university courses)?

Second, this self-same skillification will pressure the teaching side of higher education to offer more and more courses that provide ‘economically valuable skills’. Whatever space there still exists for critical theory, for critiques of capitalism, in short for all those ‘elite left’ practices reportedly so despised by Tony Blair and other leaders in the plutocratic coalition, are likely to shrink and shrivel, at least within the increasingly corporate universities. We may reach the point where radical poetry or critical philosophy courses will eventually become ‘non-fundable’—or worse, their lecturers may be branded as ‘domestic extremists’. In my opinion, we’ve been served early notice in the examples of philosophy and politics at Howard Newby’s Liverpool University, and also philosophy at Michael Driscoll’s Middlesex.

To be sure, the pressure will not only come from the teaching side of higher education. If students are going to incur a huge debt, then many will feel that their education had better be instantly exchangeable for economic capital, and lots of it. From this perspective, Browne’s ‘recommendations’ may well produce another life-time financial prison for those who are not able to make plutonomy ‘work for them’. The Times rightly noted the irony of this point when one of its headlines reported that ‘Lord Browne, worth £45m, tells students not to fret about loans’. (I’m aware, in quoting this headline, of the apparent contradiction to my overall argument; but as I noted earlier, we mustn’t forget that there may be some significant contradictions, or ambiguities at the heart of the plutocratic ‘coalition’.)

There are, of course, precedents for this kind of ‘imprisonment’. If a first wave of neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher succeeded in exchanging social protest for visits to the DIY stores by selling Britain’s council houses, the current ‘third wave’ of neoliberalism may well have an analogous effect. Tony Benn decried a similar logic when the Tories introduced the brilliantly named ‘top-up’ loans. Anyone still independent (or ‘foolish’) enough to rebel will have to think twice before defaulting not on one, but on two life-long mortgages: one for the home—if they an acquire that increasingly difficult-to-obtain luxury—and another one for higher education.

The last point leads me to a third, even more grievous consequence of the emergent plutocratic order, which involves social class. It is no secret that access to university plays a key role in determining one’s ‘life chances’. While trying to increase access to higher education is not a guaranteed cure for deep social divides, it seems very clear from the research that the opposite is true: that restricting the access in uncritical, capital-based ways is a recipe for deepening class divides. Indeed, this very week research has been published that suggests that the panacea recommended for this problem by the neoliberals will not work: according to research conducted by the Office of Fair Access, bursaries provided by Cambridge and Oxford are failing to attract young people from the poorest homes (but for an example of government spin, compare, if you will, the Guardian’s report of these findings, with Offa’s own account).

Although we’ve known about this danger for quite some time, New Labour, and now Dem Tories are doing their best to dissimulate this fact. There is, however, a particularly bitter twist to the newest political medicine, known by the brand name of Austerity: a plutocratic higher ed system is likely to exclude not just working class and lower-middle class students, but even ‘middle-middle’ and perhaps also upper-middle classes who once thought they had the right to go to the best universities if they had good enough grades. I wrote a post some weeks ago about how middle-class-ness (in the sociological sense of the term) is now itself under threat, and no better domain than to watch its erosion than in higher education.

Any readers inclined to think that this is yet another ‘gloomy leftism’ might wish to return to the fabled words of the CitiCorp economists quoted earlier: ‘the world is dividing into two blocs – the plutonomies, where economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few, and the rest’. The question now is what, if anything, can be done to stop this dynamic from gaining even further momentum.

Bjørn Lomborg’s u-turn

According to the Mayo Clinic, the following are three symptoms of narcissism:

• Believing that you’re better than others
• Believing that you’re special and acting accordingly
• Expecting others to go along with your ideas and plans

BPP, Apollo Global, and the Private Universities (or, The Lib Con Part 2)

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.

The first of the new private universities: how the Tories have come full circle

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&sectioncode=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&sectioncode=26, accessed 26 July 2010.

Financial Scandal, Corruption, and Censorship: Part 6

Conclusions: Financial Scandal and Neoliberalism

…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 sixth 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

In this, the final post in the Financial Scandal series, I’d like to return to some of the issues which motivated me to write the series in the first place. What are the implications, both present and future, of my analysis for the relationship between financial scandal, corruption, and censorship in Britain? In particular, what are the implications for the neoliberal politics which this blog has critiqued?

Neoliberalism is a discourse of market fundamentalism: the most zealous advocates of neoliberalism—better known as neo-conservatives—attempt to reduce everything to ‘the economy’, and this on the basis of a model that conceptualizes the economic in terms of a peculiarly idealised marketplace: one in which individuals are at once driven and controlled by greed. In this world of macho predators, competition amongst alleged economic equals results in the fabled ‘invisible hand’ that produces at once ‘free’ and ‘stable’ markets. By this account, such markets are not only the most ‘efficient’ way of conducting business, but if Milton Friedman is to be believed, the markets go hand in hand with democracy. According to Friedman and his many followers, democracy can and must be conceived in ‘free’-market terms: to be free is to be free to buy and sell things in an ostensibly unfettered marketplace, and vice-versa: a democratic economy is one in which individuals are ‘free’ to buy and sell whatever they please. The role of government is paradoxically to police a freedom thus conceived. In Friedman’s now infamous terms, ‘…the scope of government must be limited. Its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow-citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets.’

Alas, it doesn’t take a degree in sociology or critical theory—the very subjects that are now amongst the first to be threatened with closure by neoliberal managers in some of the UK’s foremost universities(1)—to realise that this discourse is utterly ideological: as many people have discovered, so-called ‘unfettered’ markets are actually those in which the dominant private corporations and their managers—popularly known in Britain as the fat cats—are able dictate terms not just to individuals, but to entire nations (witness what has happened with the financial markets in the case of Greece and Spain, and what happened with Rupert Murdoch in the case of the UK). As Adam Smith himself recognised, an unregulated market is one that eventually results in less competition, not more. Indeed, in so far as some individuals, organisations or social networks become disproportionately powerful, this selfsame power contradicts the other fundamental(ist) tenet of neoliberalism: that the economy is purely economic, in the sense that it is entirely separate from politics and culture.

If the economy is always purely ‘economical’, how can we explain what many believe is a link between Alan Milburn, Capita, and New Labour’s NHS policies? Or indeed, how can we explain any analogous link between David Blunkett, Entrust, and New Labour’s ID card proposals? (In the U.S., the example that comes to mind is that of Dick Cheney, Haliburton and Iraq)

In my view, the answer to these, and countless other questions seems obvious: as certain individuals, corporations, and/or social networks accumulate more and more profits, they are bound to attempt to exchange some of their economic power for political, cultural and symbolic power. In so doing, they are bound to use that power to attempt to modify legal and other market conditions in order to further increase their economic capital. There is, from this perspective, an inexorable link between economic, cultural/political, and symbolic forms of capital. In so far as this link remains unregulated, or is regulated in ways that serve the interests of those with the most capital, then there is likely to be a snow-balling dynamic that eventually spreads throughout more and more social and cultural spheres. This process not only contradicts the very discourse of neoliberalism, but is likely to lead the agents of neoliberalism to transgress moral or legal thresholds that they themselves claim to observe—the boundaries of what counts as morally or indeed legally acceptable behaviour.

It is here that ideology—which I define with John B. Thompson as meaning that serves to develop and then sustain durable relations of domination within and between social groups(2)—may play a key role. On the one hand, a variety of forms of everyday practices—media, DIY, etc.—may serve an ideological role in so far as they help to keep people preoccupied with matters that distract them from the overarching political process, or at least lessen the pain of neoliberalism’s harshest prescriptions. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to assume that we are simply ‘duped’ or ‘distracted’; many of us may realise that there is a fundamentally ‘unfair’, if not corrupt social order, but may still be persuaded that there is ‘something in it for us’, or worse, that there is no alternative. Then again, many take an active part in furthering the ideological relation by demanding lower taxes, rejecting the very principle of public services, expressing their support for expeditionary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth.

If ideology may work to dissimulate social inequality, financial scandals may work to puncture the ideological ‘spell’, or at least to contradict any easy adherence to the predominant forms of rationalisation. A manager may argue that it is necessary to shut down railway lines or to close university departments, and this for reasons to do with economic scarcity. S/he may also attempt to make the case that such closures further the cause of managerial efficiency, the long term survival of an organisation, etc. Arguments such as these may be greeted with some scepticism, but by and large, are likely to be accepted, however grudgingly, by all but those most directly affected by a proposed closure.

If, however, it is alleged, or indeed it becomes known that the manager stands to benefit personally and financially from such policies, then moral outrage may ensure, and, in more ways than one, the proverbial cat may well and truly come out of the bag: the ‘fat’ cat may be exposed as having a vested interest in pursuing policies to real or alleged problems that might have alternative solutions; and the lion of public opprobrium may be released in so far as localized groups, and social groups at one remove become aware of the arbitrary nature of an ostensibly ‘economic’ form of management. One may have difficulty understanding the complex nature of what I have described as the ‘nocturnal’ connections between politics and the economy, but no critical pedagogy is required to explain a manifest conflict of interest, let alone crude financial corruption of the kind commonly associated with financial scandals.

I further believe that it is in this context that censorship, and indeed Britain’s extraordinary libel laws, come to the fore. In so far as New Labour’s, and before it the Tory’s neoliberalism advanced the kind of market fundamentalism I outlined above, then the risk of financial conflicts of interest, if not of a culture of corruption has arguably increased exponentially. A government that is predisposed to accommodate big business, or a political party whose leading members declare, as Peter Mandelson famously did, that they are intensely relaxed with people becoming ‘filthy rich’ may promote, however inadvertently, corrupt and/or fraudulent practices. When all that matters, or appears to matter is money, then why should social regulations be allowed to stand in the way of making more money?

While some of the media of mass communication may have a vested interest in concealing any ensuing transgressions, others may be keen to expose them. In this series I have suggested that, in the context of Ernest Marples and Richard Beeching’s railways, a ‘quiet word’ was apparently enough to silence the most powerful media; in the context of Peter Mandelson and Howard Newby’s higher education, and in contemporary politics more generally, a growing army of bloggers has proven more difficult to silence. Indeed, unless some legal means may be found that can operate to silence the critics, then moral or legal trangressions, real or alleged, may develop into internet-based forms of mediated scandal. As I suggested in Part 5, this then alters the dynamics of scandal in a variety of complex and far-reaching ways.

It thus comes as no surprise that Jack Straw allowed extraordinarily authoritarian libel laws (by Western standards) to prevail in the UK until the dying days of his tenure as New Labour’s Justice Secretary. These laws meant, amongst other things, that the British Chiropractic Association could sue Simon Singh for critiquing its practitioners’ claims regarding the power of their spinal manipulations (see Simon Singh’s account of how the attempted censorship took place in his case). But they also meant that this blog had four posts temporarily removed simply because they mentioned the possibility of a conflict of interest involving Howard Newby and the private training firm Carter & Carter (see Parts 4 and 5 of this series; see also When the Exchange of Knowledge is Threatened).

As Jack Straw rather belatedly—some might say, cynically—recognised, the political economy of the British libel laws, as reflected in the fees commanded by lawyers, means that they are skewed in favour of the very wealthy. From this perspective alone, far from being just legal instruments to stop defamation, the laws work, in practice if not in principle, as a weapon of mass silencing: unless a critic is very wealthy, or unless s/he is so disempowered (or otherwise empowered) that s/he stands little or nothing to lose from a libel trial, then only a very brave, naïve or foolhardy person (the boundary between these is not always clear) would dare to take on the corrupt minister or the powerful manager. The implications of this state of affairs for Britain’s democracy are difficult to overstate.

Looking towards the future, it seems clear that unless David Cameron’s much vaunted ‘Liberal Conservative’ coalition prevails in its stated aim of rolling back over a decade of New Labour authoritarianism, then it may well be that we will witness, sooner rather than later, a transition from what might be described as the New Labour, to the Chinese model of censorship. It is, in my view, no coincidence that Friedman’s economic model was first tested in Pinochet’s Chile, or indeed that Margaret Thatcher sent her own Cecil Parkinson to Santiago to look and learn from the Pinochet economic team: as Parkinson explained in El Mercurio, Chile’s leading newspaper at the time, the Chilean ‘economic experience’ was ‘very similar to what we are trying to develop now in Great Britain’. Asked about the differences between the two countries, he almost wistfully suggested that ‘Chile could impose a policy and a speed of application of that policy which just isn’t possible in this country’(3).

If or when the mentioned transition occurs, it may be necessary to speak of the ‘early internet’ era, i.e. a period when it was still possible, despite some risks, for individuals to engage in an honest exchange of knowledge, that is to say, to speak up and out against corruption and populist authoritarianism, as well as to communicate about all manner of things both economic, and more–than–economic.

1) At Liverpool, Howard Newby tried to close philosophy, politics and communication. Middlesex is now threatening to close its highly regarded philosophy department.
2) in (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
3) Quoted in the Latin America Bureau’s (1983) Chile: the Pinochet Decade. London: LAB, p. 16.