EcoLogics

A short note to say that the news that Peter Mandelson is planning to slash spending on training for young people should come as a surprise to no one. New Labour’s educational policy—which is to say, its ‘skills’ policy, for education has long since become a bad word in New Labour circles—is premised on a species of consequentialism that is particularly susceptible to the wayward fluctuations of neoliberal politics.

Before the banking crisis, companies such as Carter & Carter successfully lobbied New Labour politicians for state ‘donations’ in the form of corporate welfare payments, and money flowed from the state into the bulging coffers of the burgeoning private FE/HE sector. But now that vast sums of state money have disappeared down the sinkholes of banks such as Lloyds and RBS, the claim will increasingly be that there is no money to be had for anything else—not even for projects that were once the darlings of New Labour’s ‘train to gain’ variety of clientelism. (Expeditionary wars such as those of Afghanistan or Iraq will continue to be excluded from the accounting because they make money for the merchants of death, and, like the Trident nuclear subs, have the cover of the sacred for British politicians who still cannot let go of a ‘glorious’ past).

EcoLogics wonders: what will happen in this brave new world of alleged scarcity to stalwart defenders of the New Lab skills faith such as Howard Newby? Will they now be busy stroking the Conservatives, in the hope of securing the continuation of the political conditions required for an on-going spirit of creation in higher and further education?

Whatever the case, the upshot is that a badly misguided, if not corrupt policy will be replaced by a return to good ‘ole Thatcherite slash—and—burnism. And like the Tory grandees who were ousted from power in 1997, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the rest of the New Labour nomenclatura will be voted out, but will also retire to corporate adviserships, the writing of ‘memoirs’, and perhaps the odd bit of TV presenting for the BBC or ITV, à la Michael Portillo.

The future is bright, isn’t it?

This blogger’s first reaction to the news that Mandelson is banging on again about ’student consumers’ and university courses that need to provide ‘economic benefits’  was to stifle a yawn almost as big as Mandelson’s ego. Vision? What vision?

But then this sequence of ideas crossed EcoLogics’ bloggerly mind:

1) Mandelson, like the rest of the British neocons before him, is saying that education is a matter of consumption. Ergo, education is a commodity like any other, and can and should be given a price.

2) If education can be commodified, then so can anything else–including, of course, politics. Politics, and by implication politicians like Mandelson, can and should be given a price.

3) Here’s the deal: What’s your price, Peter? And how should we calculate your exchange value: by way of what lecturers and students would be willing to pay for you, or what oligarchs have been willing, or will be willing to pay for your invaluable services?

The possibilities for corruption, if you really stick to New Labour’s partitura, are endless.

Here’s a pub quiz question for moral philosophers: what does New Labour have in common with Jeremy Bentham?

Anyone answering ‘panopticism’ will only get half the points.

It is indeed true that New Labour politicians are keen as mustard on encouraging people to believe that they are being spied on as a means of exercising social control. We have only to think of the slogan used by Capita, New Labour’s darling donor, as part of its lucrative TV licensing franchise: ‘It’s all in the database’.

But the preferred answer is that both New Labour and Jeremy Bentham are consequentialists. Simplifying somewhat, consequentialism is the ethical theory that the rightness or wrongness of actions depends on the actions’ outcomes.

This is the ethics that has underpinned New Labour’s assault on our civil liberties: the open-ended detention of individuals in Belmarsh prison, the party’s tolerance of the police ‘kettling’ policy, its efforts to hold on to the nakedly authoritarian ‘control orders’ (really house arrest without charge), and the maintenance of DNA evidence of people who have either been cleared by the courts, or have never actually been accused of any wrong-doing are all examples of this ethics. If the infringement of civil liberties has ‘good consequences’ such as the eventual capture and conviction of a criminal, then all is well—or so the New Labour argument goes.

This populist ethics is also part of what governs New Labour’s higher educational policy. This week the Guardian published news that the government is to stop funding ‘pointless’ university research, and that from 2012 onwards it will force academics to prove that their research is relevant to the real world. It is not just any ‘relevance’ that will suffice; academics will have to demonstrate that their research influences the economy, public policy or society in order to secure the largest research grants.

To the unwary reader this might not seem like such a bad idea: surely state money should be invested in research that ‘makes a difference’?

Beyond the ethical issue outlined above, the problem with the policy is that it dissimulates, via vintage New Labourese, a rather more devious strategy.  What will really matter is not whether the research influences public policy or society, but whether private corporations can use the research to make money. The policy is, in fact, another crude expression of New Labour’s economicist utilitarianism, a subset of its more general consequentialism. What New Labour really intends is to further restrict—we might just as well say ‘constrict’—British universities’ fast vanishing relative autonomy by forcing them to dance to the tune of UK Plc. Several weeks ago, George Monbiot put the matter into stark relief when he began an article asking the following questions:

Why is the Medical Research Council run by an arms manufacturer? Why is the Natural Environment Research Council run by the head of a construction company? Why is the chairman of a real estate firm in charge of higher education funding for England?

After the public dissemination of this and other similar critiques, Hefce will fool no one when it disingenuously attempts to hide the government’s market fundamentalism with an appeal to the need to ‘influence’ public policy or ‘society’.

The dilemma that now stares at the increasingly reactionary New Labour party is that the consequences of its own actions will not, of course, always be the intended ones. For all its scheming consequentialism—perhaps Machiavellianism is now a better term—the New Labour nomenclatura faces many years in the political wilderness. It members will have to watch with impotence as the Tories take over, and do more of the same.

Perhaps New Labour MPs know this so well that they are falling over themselves in an effort to promote policies that might secure fat corporate ‘adviserships’ of the kind taken by Tony Blair with J P Morgan and Zurich. EcoLogics imagines a political scene in which the proverbial rats are hastily jumping over the side of a sinking ship—the ship of truly social policies—and into the waiting jaws of corporate sharks such as the ones that are providing patronage for politicians ranging from Alan Milburn to David Blunkett.

A brief post about news that are depressingly predictable: the CBI is calling for students to pay more for their degrees via the double whammy of a hike in tuition fees, and full market rates on their student loans. The CBI is also calling for New Labour to give up (or rather, ‘suspend’) its ‘flagship target’, to get 50% of 18 to 30-year-olds into higher education.

EcoLogics has two comments to make. The first is that this is the CBI that is led by the same man that New Labour anointed as the head of its review of higher education (the Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration), published back in 2003. Richard Lambert was one of two neoliberals (our home-grown equivalent of the US ‘neocons’) chosen by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to restructure the UK’s educational system along the lines that this blog has critiqued. The other was Lord Sandy Leitch, currently a director of the Lloyds Banking Group, and the head of the Leitch Review of Skills. Like Leitch, Lambert is a creature of the UK’s big business sector: he worked as an editor of the Financial Times until he became a darling of New Labour; thereafter he served for a period as a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee before becoming the DG of CBI.

It should come, for this selfsame reason, as no surprise that Lambert has spotted and seized the opportunity to further the real agenda of his, and Leitch’s proposals for higher education, i.e. completing the process of back-door liberalisation and privatisation that New Labour embarked upon soon after it came to power. There are two main interests behind this process: creating a market for businesses like the failed Carter & Carter, which was once the New Labour Train to Gain darling; and ensuring that universities lose what is left of their relative autonomy, such that they serve the purposes of business, and business only. Lambert may argue that these are ‘emergency measures’, but anyone who has read the essays in this blog (or who googles ‘New Labour’s Skills Policy’) will know that the writing was on the walls, or rather, between the covers of the Lambert and Leitch Reviews.

There is, it increasingly seems, nothing more useful for the consolidation of neoliberal objectives than the excuse of the banking crisis, and the fiscal ‘restraints’ that will come in its wake. This excuse was the one that allowed Gordon Brown to look the other way when the bank of his pal (and campaign supporter) Lord Leitch proposed to swallow up HBOS in a move that should have been blocked by competition laws. It is now what allows Lambert—himself, rather ironically, the symbolic head of Warwick, one of Britain’s posher universities—to suggest the blanket elimination of the tattered remains of New Labour’s supposedly ‘social’ policy for higher education.

The second comment involves Wes Streeting, the head of the National Union of Students. EcoLogics seems to recall that this New Labour insertee and politician–in–the–making has been a rather staunch advocate of neoliberal changes in the governance of NUS. Will Lambert’s bid to end any pretence of a progressive New Labour agenda for HE now come to haunt Streeting and the increasingly right-wing NUS? Do university students across the UK know what interests Streeting actually represents?

By way of a postscript, here is a quote from another EcoLogics article, which may help readers to get a sense of the extent of the penetration of HE by big business, but also, of just how tightly woven New Labour’s political world is:

“EcoLogics… suspects that the group of most influential corporations is actually rather smaller than expected, and involves a great deal of collaboration, to not say economic and political incestuousness. Part of what allowed Carter & Carter to grow in the spectacular way that it did prior to its CEO’s death was an injection of capital from Bridgepoint [the private equity company behind Alan Milburn's efforts to privatise part of the NHS]. At the same time, the skills policy that Carter & Carter would have benefited from was authored by Lord Sandy Leitch, one of the Lloyds Banking Group’s leading directors, who in turn is said to have given money towards Gordon Brown’s virtual leadership campaign. Brown, for his part, looked the other way in regard to questions regarding competition law when Lloyds embarked in its fateful takeover of HBOS. It is, in this sense, not difficult to imagine that, as the title of this post suggests, New Labour’s world is in some respects rather smaller, or at least rather more tightly knit, than one might have thought, and thus perhaps rather more precarious than many might assume. What would happen if any of these players (or one of their employees) were to blow the whistle on the New Labour government?”

Media Studies is once again under attack by the Conservative Party. If you believe David Cameron, the field of media studies stands as a symbol of all that is wrong in contemporary education. Media Studies is the ‘original’ Mickey Mouse subject, the ‘soft’ alternative par excellence, a pointless subject if ever there was one.

As Media Studies experts in journalism would point out, there is nothing newsworthy in this latest attack—nothing newsworthy, that is, if we stick to the conventional criteria for the word ‘news’. Tory politicians have been attacking Media Studies for the better part of two decades, with anti-media studies hysterias coming and going in much the way that a variety of other moral panics have. The Tories nonetheless know that, when it suits, Media Studies-bashing is likely to mobilise public opinion as much on the right as it is on the left of the educational divide.

The differing, and not-so-differing reasons why Media Studies-bashing is something of a national sport are instructive. Those on the right tend to see Media Studies as a sign of the decay in educational standards. By this account, Media Studies exemplifies a drift not just towards educational ‘naffness’, but towards that evil that is social relativism. For their part, many on the left identify Media Studies with philosophical postmodernism (what many academics would dismiss as a radical variety of social relativism), and assume that anyone doing research in the field (if, indeed, the word ‘research’ can be used to describe someone studying the media) is likely to be wasting precious research grants in order to make much ado about nothing.

Two things unite otherwise different perspectives. First, there is a horror over the perceived erosion of the sacredness of education, and higher education in particular. It is interesting, in this sense, that so little is said by comparison about what is arguably a far greater threat to that self-same sacrality: Brown, Mandelson, Newby et al’s efforts to vocationalise higher education.

Second, whatever their political ideologies, many of the critics tend to be either die-hard empiricists, or hard-core positivists, or amusingly, a mixture of the two. All that really matters in that academic world are empirically-verifiable facts, and facts that can be counted using what tend to be automatically regarded as more ‘objective’ techniques such as surveys and  databases. But of course, as any Tory or New Labour pollster knows, a number can lie far more easily than an epithet can.

This blogger is interested in the contradictions that emerge in what remains an extraordinarily one-sided debate. For starters, the party that specialises in slagging off Media Studies has in its ranks some of the most avid students of public relations, a discipline which some might confuse with Media Studies, and which could itself certainly be accused of social relativism. By this account, David Cameron is a living Media Relativist, if by this we mean an Alan Milburn-like chamaeleon who changes political colours at will to reflect (or deflect) the rising and falling tides of mass-mediated public opinion.

For their part, those who oppose Media Studies as a ‘postmodern’ discipline would do well to reflect on the history of their own discipline. There are few university fields that have not had to fight a struggle to gain the respect of peers in older disciplines, or indeed the seal of approval of the Church or of one or another state institution. Equally if not more importantly, there is no field that can dispense of mass communication, and of mass mediation when it comes to engaging with public opinion both beyond and within the own ranks.

We might note, by way of an extended metaphor, that Galileo Galilei’s success was as much a matter of his heretical theories as it was of his ability to favourably position his work in the Medici court by way of a very astute form of mass communication. As noted by Adrian Johns in his excellent The Nature of the Book, the Medici court identified iconographically with the figure of Jupiter, and so Galileo named his Jovian satellites accordingly in Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger, published in 1610). The ‘Medicean stars’ were the centerpiece of his new book. Some difficulties arose when Galileo was informed that his choice of the name ‘Cosmian’ (after the Medici patriarch, the absolute prince, Cosimo II de’ Medici) would not meet approval. However, a combination of last minute changes, distribution to key princes and cardinals throughout Europe, and the eventual support of the Medici court guaranteed a positive response. Alas, this same logic later worked against Galileo when his ally and patronage broker in Rome, Campioli, fell from grace and so failed to secure a positive reading of Galileo’s later Dialogo Sopra i Due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems).

This story reminds us of the fact that the politics of mass communication have been a key aspect of academic study for centuries. But it also reminds us of the importance to academia, and to politics more generally, of signs — that is to say, of symbolic forms of the kind that Media Studies engages in academic study. It might be objected that academics no longer have to name their stars after the wealthy, but that would be to miss the more general point. As  Bruno Latour has shown, far from being a quaint matter of naming heavenly bodies in the 17th century, the business of constructing and interpreting signs remains an essential aspect of any form of scientific practice.

EcoLogics thereby suspects that if Media Studies attracts the opprobrium that it does, it is for reasons that are quite different from those bandied about by right-wing politicians, and some left-wing academics.

First, there is, paradoxically, a conflation of what positivists would describe as the subject and object of research. Put more simply, in the minds of some of the critics, the researchers have somehow become identified with what is being researched, and so Media Studies is confused with the media. In the minds of those who both hate and use the media, Media Studies may thus be equated with the unclean.

Second, invectives based on a hate of semiotics (the study of signs) overlook the importance of semiotics to the own field; a contempt of Media Studies may thereby be a way of dealing with what Freudian psychologists have long described as the return of the repressed. We live immersed in, and determined by signs—though of course not only signs—however much we may be dismayed by this fact.

The third motivation for the attack is perhaps the most odious: some on both the right and the left fear that the study of soap operas and reality TV shows, computer games and a variety of everyday forms of communication is a sign of the vulgarisation of academia. The word ‘vulgarity’ would of course never be used in public, but there can be little doubt that part of what is at issue is a class-based politics of distinction: why should academics study popular culture, i.e. the things enjoyed by working men and women?

From this perspective, it should come as no surprise that the UK’s latest educational cri de coeur comes from none other than the Conservative Party—the party which is now trying to style itself as the PPP (the People’s Progressive Party), but whose leading members historically tried to keep working men and women from obtaining formal education in the first place. Funny how history repeats itself: imagine what would happen to politics as we know it today if everyone in the UK was forced to take, as part of the national curriculum, courses that taught them how to be critical vis-a-vis the media…

Updated July 23, 2009

Despite everything that’s happened, I don’t think many people grasp just how raw, how explicit, the corruption of our institutions has become — Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times

You have to hand it to New Labour. Its professional liars, commonly known as spin doctors, are the best in the business. They have not only acquired all of the skills of their Conservative tutors, but have developed lying into such a high art that it is now necessary to distinguish between New Labour’s plain lies, e.g. the reasons given for going to war in Iraq, and what might be described as the party’s ‘meta-lies’. Meta-lies are lies about lies, or lies on the back of lies; to paraphrase the old joke about turtles and the universe, with New Labour it’s lies all the way down.

Yesterday and today we have been treated to a good example of the second type of New Labour lying. The EcoLogics lie detector went off at approximately one minute past midnight on Saturday, when the Guardian’s website published an article by Alan Milburn rather lengthily titled ‘The UK is an unequal society in which class background too often determines life chances’ (the article appeared in the Observer as well).

To a naïve reader (if there is such a thing these days), Alan Milburn was representing the depressing facts of the UK’s class divide: ‘in the decades since the second world war’, social mobility ‘has slowed’, and that it is now necessary to do more to improve people’s ‘life chances’. Enter, stage left, the man who was once the former trade unionist-cum-working class leader-in-waiting, proclaiming the legacy of the Labour Party:  ‘The postwar Labour government’s towering achievements – full employment, universal education and a new welfare state – helped millions of people, me included, to realise the new opportunities brought by social and economic change’.

To a critical reader, or a reader not suffering from news amnesia, it’s difficult to decide what is more astonishing: Milburn’s efforts to pass the buck for the disastrous consequences of New Labour’s policies to a hazy process that has supposedly taken place ‘over the decades’; or Milburn’s truly chamaeleonic ability to change political colours at will. In the aforementioned article, he is so beguilingly full of praise for state intervention that one is almost persuaded that one of New Labour’s most manipulatively rightwing politicians has finally exorcised the Hydra of neoliberalism from his body.

We will come to the substance of Milburn’s higher education lie in the second part of this post. First, let us remember who Alan Milburn is. In an article recently published in the Guardian, Seumas Milne named names in the revolving public-private door that is a New Labour cabinet post. The relevant bit is worth quoting in some length:

…former health ministers have done particularly well. The ex-health secretary Patricia Hewitt earns more than £100,000 as a consultant for Alliance Boots and Cinven, a private equity group that bought 25 private hospitals from Bupa. After leaving the department, her predecessor, Alan Milburn, worked for Bridgepoint Capital, which successfully bid for NHS contracts, and now boasts a striking portfolio of jobs with private health companies. When I rang Milburn yesterday to ask whether he saw any conflict of interest in his directorships, he swore and hung up, but later emailed to say he had “always followed the proper processes laid down for former ministers”.

Other articles in the press have noted that Milburn has five paid roles in addition to his parliamentary work, including posts with PepsiCo and Lloyds Pharmacy. The ‘They Vote For You’ website—what an ironic title that has become—suggests that Milburn has certainly been loyal to his masters in the private healthcare business: he is listed as having voted ‘very strongly’ in favour of Foundation Hospitals, the same hospitals that Unison, the leading trade union for the sector, has described as leading ‘to increased inequalities between NHS services and the extension of charging’. Aside from the betrayal of the trade union (something that Milburn might actually treat as a kind of badge of honour), EcoLogics wonders how Milburn would square his undermining of the NHS with the statement quoted earlier: ‘The postwar Labour government’s towering achievements – full employment, universal education and a new welfare state – helped millions of people, me included…’ Alas, when one rereads the statement, one realises that a major ‘old’ Labour achievement that Milburn hasn’t singled for praise is the NHS.

EcoLogics can imagine Milburn jumping up to argue that he includes the NHS within the welfare state; but a similar omission occurs in a piece that Milburn wrote in May for the Independent. On the eve of the leadership jousting that preceded New Labour’s electoral disaster in early June, Milburn apparently felt compelled to beat his chest vigorously, shouting as he did that New Labour had better not betray Blairism. In one passage that betrayed Milburn’s enthusiasm for neoliberalism, Milburn snarled that ‘those licking their lips at the prospect of an end to market capitalism…risk gorging prematurely on a beast that has life still in it.’ ‘Government intervention to stabilise and stimulate the global economy must not become the foundation for a wider creeping programme of nationalisation in which the state assumes responsibilities that properly belong either to markets or to citizens.’

The careful omission of the NHS occurred in a passage in which Milburn nonetheless changed his colours from the deepest blue to a very pale pink:  ‘…when it comes to social change it is inconceivable that disadvantage can be overcome without the state or politics playing its part. Poor people are hardly able to spend their way out of poverty. If Britain is to become truly socially mobile they need help with education, housing, training, childcare and employment.’ Either Milburn doesn’t believe that being healthy is an integral part of one’s ‘life chances’, or our chamaeleonic politician decided not to change his colours completely; it may well be that he felt it would be wise not to upset Bridgepoint Capital et al. The news in the wake of the MP’s expenses scandal that Milburn is set to stand down at the next election (will he really go?) would appear to confirm where Milburn’s allegiances—and vulnerabilities—lie.

Seumas Milne noted that it was perfectly true that Milburn had indeed ‘followed the proper processes laid down for former ministers’. EcoLogics believes that there is now actual corruption on an unprecedented scale in the very highest levels of New Labour (how paradoxical that New Labour has decided to reinstate direct rule in the Turks and Caicos Islands, on the grounds of corruption). That said, practices such as Milburn’s probably belong to the category of what this blog describes as ‘virtual corruption’: practices which are legal, or have been made legal, or form part of that fuzzy logic commonly described as ‘not illegal’. The genius of New Labour’s lying machine, and of Milburn’s changing hues, is that both have served to conceal until recently the sheer extent to which the party’s politics are driven by money—the money of corporations such as Bridgepoint Capital and PepsiCo. While New Labour’s corruption bears comparison with that of Saramago’s ‘Berlusconi Thing’, this is still not evident to many, perhaps even most people in the UK. It is easy to forget that the man who lied for Berlusconi is no less than the husband of New Labour’s own Tessa Jowell. We might say, in this sense, that the epigraph by Krugman applies as much to the U.S. as it does the U.K.: people do not appear to have realised the extent of what Milne aptly described as the ‘culture of corruption’. While the MPs’ expenses scandal may have dented public confidence, it came nowhere near uncovering the extent of the corruption that was first revealed, and so aptly symbolised from a social health and politics perspective, by the Ecclestone Affair.

The reality is that the New Labour Party’s political, economic and moral corruption have gone so far that they almost guarantee that anything that a New Labour politician says about almost any subject is an untruth, even if only by dint of omission or lived contradiction. So it is that we have Alan Milburn saying very earnestly one moment how much he venerates the welfare state, even as at another moment he swears at a journalist who dares to suggest that Milburn is, as he most certainly is, a part of the culture of corruption that is gradually chipping away at what is left of that same welfare state.

*   *   *

To conclude this post, let us now return to the subject of higher education. In 2005, a study published by Sutton Trust/LSE researchers found that social mobility in the UK and the US was the lowest of any of ‘advanced’ [sic] countries. But whereas it was ‘stable’ in the US’s case, in the UK it was worsening. According to the researchers’ website, ‘Comparing surveys of children born in the 1950s and the 1970s, the researchers went on to examine the reason for Britain’s low, and declining, mobility. They found that it is in part due to the strong and increasing relationship between family income and educational attainment’ (emphasis added). I challenge any reader to provide evidence that this has nothing to do with the neoliberalism of both societies.

This study begins to show, on the one hand, just how misleading it is to represent, as Milburn has, the problem of social mobility as one that is ‘decades old’. No doubt it is a long term problem and process; but what is at issue is whether things are getting worse under New Labour, and the LSE/Sutton Trust quote certainly suggests that they are. On the other hand, even though  this study may have provided particularly good evidence of the link, it has long been known that education and social mobility go together. Despite this, New Labour, with Alan Milburn voting enthusiastically, have been happy to introduce tuition fees, and most recently to privatise the student loan system. Worse, at some point, companies like the failed Carter & Carter realised that there was money to be made in higher education, and a process of backdoor privatisation began, with the help of New Labour ministers and its acolytes in some of the universities. Some of the private firms running further education colleges—again, with New Labour backdoor assistance—have also wanted to cash in on the symbolic capital associated with higher degrees. This process has, and almost certainly will continue to contradict any New Labour politician’s claim that the party stands for greater access to higher education.

This blog has offered several critiques of this process, and so won’t repeat the analyses here (see for example, the three-part Lord Leitch’s Levers, or the posts about Howard Newby). It suffices to say that privatisation is the big lie in Milburn’s sudden enthusiasm for higher education, and so-called ’soft skills’; given New Labour’s policy history, and indeed its on-going practice of subordinating higher education to the interests of big business, it is extraordinarily cynical to come out now, as Milburn has, in defence of higher education as a way of solving Britain’s ossifying class divides.

That said, it does seem that there is a rethink underway, and indeed some might even argue that there is reason to celebrate, rather than criticise. EcoLogics is, and will remain, deeply sceptical; no sooner had Gordon Brown claimed that neoliberalism was dead than he installed Peter Mandelson at the heart of government. We have every reason to believe that Mandelson, the Secretary of Secretaries, is now calling the shots, and one has to ask what his role will be in a project that flatly contradicts what is, by his own account, his ‘intensely relaxed’ relation with the ‘filthy rich’.

EcoLogics notes in this sense that the apparent policy u-turn has been announced at the same time that Mandelson has admitted that there will be no more money to cover university teaching costs for a further 10,000 places whose tuition fees and grants will be funded by New Labour. Though welcome, 10,000 new places are not as much as they might appear to be when it is calculated that the actual increase in demand thanks to the economic depression is likely to be closer, by some accounts, to 50,000. It also raises the question about New Labour’s much vaunted intervention in the economy to help us out of the economic depression; if there was any single measure that could have been planned for, and paid for, it was this one. To be sure, part of the money for the extra places will come at the expense of the loan holiday period given to students after they graduate. Moreover, the places will be in the maths and sciences—again, welcome, but hardly the ’softest’ of skills. So what New Labour appears to be giving with one hand, it is taking with the other.

Here is, however, one slightly hopeful thought: there may yet be another way in which the Chamaeleon metaphor may be appropriate: as the elections approach, members of New Labour nomenclatura will have their separately mobile eyes roving this way and that, attempting to discern the wishes of the different electoral groups, and will doubtless be changing their colours from dark blue to pink, and back again to woo the voters. Perhaps someone has finally figured out that without the vote of liberals and the ‘soft’ left, New Labour is as good as dead.

If this is what’s happening, it’s a case of far too little, far too late. Beware, though, of being zapped by the elastic tongue of Milburn and his New Liberals.

Update July 23, 2009: Does this post’s reference to the ‘art’ of New Labour lying seem unfair? Have a look at what’s going on with Miliband’s claims about bucking the energy market in this article about the sit-in at the Vesta wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight.

Update November 5, 2009: Mandelson is at it again: after you read this post, you may wish to see the more recent Putting a Price on Peter Mandelson

“In the 21st Century, our natural resource is our people – and their potential is both untapped and vast. Skills are the key to unlocking that potential.”
Sandy Leitch, in press release about the publication of the Leitch Review of Skills, 2006

“As one commentator puts it graphically, universities are ‘the coalmines of the 21st century’”
Tony Blair, in speech on higher education, 2004

Anyone in Higher Education who assumed that New Labour’s skillification of higher education was for the newest universities only is in for a shock. Following New Labour’s disastrous results in local and European Parliamentary elections, Gordon Brown has eliminated the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills in its entirety. All of the defunct department’s functions have been delegated to a new department titled ‘Business, Innovation, and Skills’. The new ‘super-department’ is headed by none other than Peter Mandelson, aka ‘The Prince of Darkness’, Frequenter–of–Russian–Oligarchs (and not just Russian oligarchs), and the man who was so naughty even by New Labour’s high moral standards that he was forced to resign not once, but twice from Tony Blair’s cabinet.

This is the man who has now penned an article extolling the virtues of the Open University. On one level, staff and students at the OU have every reason to be proud. Mandelson is right to say that the OU is a remarkable institution. However, on another level—the level that New Labour actually conducts its politics—the OU, and indeed the directors, academics and students of other universities should be worried, very worried.

As always with New Labour, and with Mandelson in particular, one has to interpret what is said knowing that it matters far less than what is not said. For every phrase that appears extolling the virtue of one thing, the reader has to assume that what is really at stake is quite a different thing, an unacknowledged policy which will be put in place under the cover of that which is officially stated.

* * *

In this case, praise for the OU will act as cover for two processes. Mandelson does acknowledge the first one en passant when he invokes the New Labour mantra: ‘The huge and growing global market for education’ (emphasis added). As EcoLogics has noted in several other posts (see for example, New Labour’s Assault on Higher Education), one of the main forces behind New Labour’s policy for higher education involves nothing less than a back–door (and now not–so–back–door) dynamic of privatisation. One whose motivations are no less corrupt than the ones that have driven Mandelson’s efforts to hand over the Royal Mail, despite protestations to the contrary, to the Dutch giant TNT (and this, remarkably, via another Dutch company, the investment bank UBS).

What does this have to do with the OU and distance education? A clue may be found in the following passage in Mandelson’s article:

‘In recognition of the OU’s expertise in this area, the prime minister has confirmed a further £12m (£7.8m contributed by the Higher Education Funding Council for England) to continue to develop the OU as a national resource, so that other UK institutions can collaborate with it and benefit from its experience of providing distance learning in the UK, and increasingly, around the world.’

Read, the knowledge and expertise that the OU has acquired over the last 40 years will be made available to all those who are seeking, or will eventually seek, to transform their universities—and perhaps not just their universities—into businesses that specialise, or at least capitalise, on distance education—i.e. new versions of the failed Carter & Carter, the automotive repair company turned skills provider that was once the darling of New Labour’s Train to Gain project.

This proposal—and the broader idea of using the neoliberal wand to turn higher education into money—might sound like a good one until the reader asks just who is to gain, and indeed to gain the most, from the skills training (the word ‘education’, by the way, is out, and the term ’skills’ is in). One thing is pretty clear: it won’t be the students who will have to pay through their nose, and who, if New Labour has its way, will have to take whatever courses their employers say they must take as part of the vocationalisation of higher education proposed by the Lambert and Leitch Reviews.

*   *   *

The second process, the second motivation lies in the transformation of higher education into yet another instance of New Labour’s Amazonia. Lest EcoLogics be branded a Luddite blog, EcoLogics believes that the internet, and indeed distance education can be a fantastically good things. The problem arises when both become another way in which New Labour effectively gives away public services to its friends in the private sector, and does so in a way that ends up exploiting people. The expression ‘New Labour’s Amazonia’ refers to New Labour’s efforts to model public sector institutions—including higher education, it now seems—on the business practices of Amazon. As EcoLogics noted in a post published late last year (New Labour’s Amazonia), New Labour ministers are planning to force GPs to improve their performance by posting patients’ comments about them on an NHS website. Health Minister Ben Bradshaw told the Guardian that he wanted the site to do for healthcare what Amazon has done for the book trade. Like Amazon, GP’s should start posting ‘customer’ feedback, ‘warts ‘n all’.

It was no coincidence, that post argued, that less than two weeks before Bradshaw & Co leaked their proposals, the Times revealed that Amazon has a draconian policy when it comes to disciplining its workers—not least on matters relating to its workers’ health. According to the newspaper,

‘Amazon…employing thousands of casual workers in Britain to fetch and package items under arduous conditions. An investigation by The Sunday Times at Amazon’s enormous warehouse in Bedfordshire has found that workers were:

– Warned that the company refuses to allow sick leave, even if the worker has a legitimate doctor’s note. Taking a day off sick, even with a note, results in a penalty point. A worker with six points faces dismissal.
– Made to work a compulsory 10-hour overnight shift at the end of a five-day week. The overnight shit, which runs from Saturday evening to 5am on Sunday, means they have to work every day of the week.
– Set quotas for the number of items to be picked or packed in an hour that even a manager described as “ridiculous”. Those packing heavy Xbox games consoles had to pack 140 an hour to reach their target.
– Set against each other with a bonus scheme that penalises staff if any other member of their group fails to hit the quota.
– Made to walk up to 14 miles a shift to collect items for packing.
– Given only one break of 15 minutes and another of 20 minutes per eight-hour shift and told they had to notify staff when going to the toilet. Amazon said workers wanted the shorter breaks in exchange for shorter shifts’.

What on earth, the reader may ask, does this have to do with higher education? EcoLogics suggests that what is really at stake in Mandelson’s hagiography of the OU is a proposal to transform higher education into an Amazon.com–like provider of ‘knowledge and skills’. Even as students are increasingly forced to learn in the work place—the Train to Gain ethos, which is designed to produce more malleable employees—lecturers will be forced to come up with so many ‘products’ that can be bought and sold on the internet, in much the way that their own books are via Amazon.

This too, might sound like quite a good idea until academics stop to think about the nature and volume of the work that will be required by distance education—distance education that will happen, in some cases, even as ‘normal’ classes and marking take place. As is already beginning to occur in many institutions, there will be no extra pay, no adjustment for the duplication of the workload. On the contrary, it will be disingenuous to expect anything other than the gradual institution of the work controls employed by Amazon. Academics may not have to ask for permission to pee, but you can bet your bottom dollar (Amazonian dollar, that is) that there will be performance related pay that hinges on the number of modules produced, student evaluations, etc. etc.

In the same way that the Tories tried to turn parents against teachers, EcoLogics can well imagine that New Labour will tell students to ignore the complaints of academics. Why shouldn’t academics become virtual pack mules like the rest of ‘us’ (e.g. like Mandelson, who has done so badly from his shift from elected, to non-elected politics).  In fact, New Labour’s (Higher) Amazonia may well mean that all but the wealthiest or most privileged of students will be forced to wave goodbye to what many describe as ‘the best years of our lives’: a time when they can learn face–to–face in the space apart that is, or was, higher education. A time when they can meet people from all walks of life (well, some walks of life) even as they reflect on what they want to do with the rest of their own life. Many have in the past, and will in future continue to elect to use that space as a way into Mandelson’s world. But in future, those who choose to question the economic fundamentalism of neoliberals like Mandelson may well have to do so via their isolated, yet less–than–private computer screens. Not during late night chats with fellow students about the meaning of life, let alone in debates with other real students in a real classroom. Whether by design or by ‘mission creep’ or both, it is this challenge, the real university challenge, the challenge to the status quo, which New Labour is strangling. Unsurprisingly given the Orwellian nature of its authoritarianism, the Party has decided to call this suffocation ‘The New University Challenge‘.

*   *   *

The comments that follow Peter Mandelson’s article in the Guardian pretty much say it all. Deano30 says ‘Keep this man away from this revered institution. He will contaminate it as with other revered institutions that have come his way. The OU is no place for Toad of Toad Hall’, and ‘Please please go away – you will be out of office soon. Have you no conscience? We must have something of value that is unsullied at your hands.’ For her part, IndependentLady says

‘The best thing the Prince of Darkness could do for the OU would be to reverse the decision not to provide funding for equivalent or lower level qualifications. The OU (and other institutions like Birkbeck) is one of the few places that allow people to change careers and develop new skills without them having to leave work or put off their dreams of change. The ELQ funding change is a nonsense when this government keeps bleating on about making the UK workforce highly skilled. Every time one of them says lifelong learning, I want to throw up. […] Put the funding back and let people change direction when they want to, rather than when they are forced to, but can’t afford it. […] Then leave them alone.’

Howard Newby is to Higher Education in the early 21st century what Richard Beeching was to our country’s railways in the 1960s.

Earlier this year, Newby tried to close down three departments at Liverpool University (Politics and Communication, Philosophy, and Statistics). He used the excuse of the latest RAE results, claiming that the departments were not doing well enough in terms of their research achievements. Following Newby’s announcement, students and academics across the UK could almost hear the sharpening of knives amongst like–minded vice-chancellors. If Newby could so blithely close down three departments, then surely other neoliberal VCs could do the same.

Alas, staff and students at Liverpool opposed the move with such unexpected vigour that Newby was forced to regroup, and to review his draconian measures. Now EcoLogics understands that Newby has been forced to back down. According to the Times Higher,

In an email to staff, the vice-chancellor, Sir Howard Newby, says that closure will no longer be recommended, provided that the departments show progress.

“As a result of the formal reviews of the eight units of assessment in which the university was in the lowest quartile nationally in the RAE, each affected department has been asked to prepare a recovery plan. These specify clear targets for research output and improving research performance that will be monitored by faculty deans and academic committee,” the message says.

“Provided these plans are accepted by the departments concerned and by academic committee, we will recommend them to senate and the university council. Assuming demonstrable progress is made towards achieving these targets, the option of closure for the School of Politics and Communications studies, the departments of philosophy, and statistics, will not be pursued.”(1)

Staff and students at Liverpool, and in universities up and down the country, have much to celebrate. The students at Liverpool who made their threatened courses count should be particularly commended for having faced down Newby and his knowledge exchangers. They demonstrated to university communities across the country that it is possible to stop the neoliberal juggernaut, provided that you believe strongly enough in the principles of universitas and educere, and are willing to make your views public. Universities in the UK need not go the way of our railroads—and indeed of so many other public services that are now the cosiest of baskets for some of the fattest cats in the land.

It will of course be important to remain vigilant over the coming months and years. While the neoliberalism that is behind the policy of knowledge exchange is now utterly discredited, the social network that promoted Newby and his followers to key positions in places such as Liverpool University will continue to be very keen on privatising higher education in the UK. The absence of anything like a credible discourse will not prevent the people involved from trying more of the same at other institutions.

This week, however, is a time to say a big ‘Hip Hip Hooray’ to and for Philosophy, Politics & Communication Studies, and Statistics at Liverpool University…

References

1) Times Higher Education, ‘Liverpool lifts threat of closure from three departments’, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=406558&c=1, accessed May 20, 2009.

This week George Monbiot posted a warning in the Guardian about a dynamic that some academics have been denouncing for years. Monbiot revealed the extent to which research in British universities is being co-opted by private corporations, with the active support of the New Labour government via the research councils.

While the research councils are playing an important role in this process, there are other ways and levels in which the cancer of neoliberalism is spreading throughout the sector.

EcoLogics posted an article about this phenomenon back in August 2007 (The UWE Experiment) which revealed the leading role that one vice-chancellor and university—Howard Newby at the University of the West of England—took in promoting the neoliberalisation of British higher education, from within. Following the scandal with Carter & Carter, Newby moved on to Liverpool University, a university that was formerly led by Drummond Bone, who himself played an important role in the Council of Industry and Higher Education (CIHE). At Liverpool Newby attempted to close down the departments of philosophy, politics, and communication studies, arguing that they were failing to perform to the standards expected of a Russell Group university. This blogger joins all those who believe that Newby’s decision to target the mentioned areas had rather more to do with Newby’s efforts to silence opposition to his neo-liberal project.

Now CIHE describes its mission in terms of ‘a high level partnership between leading people from a wide range of businesses, universities and colleges. The Council leads in developing an agreed agenda on the learning issues at higher education level that affect our international competitiveness, social cohesion and individual development’(1). The last two aspects of the aims are arguably an example of the kind of ‘humbug’ described by Monbiot when he assessed New Labour’s claim that the Haldane Principle still holds(2). For a real sense of CIHE’s agenda, readers might wish to recall its chief executive’s words in a Times Higher article in the summer of 2007: in the article, Richard Brown threatened that if universities did not embrace New Labour’s ‘skills revolution’ (the turn towards teaching, learning and researching so-called ‘economically valuable skills’) ‘then the private sector will continue to take this market. Universities have to decide how much of a loss that would be’(3).

In fact, New Labour’s ‘cultural’ revolution for higher education (as the Times described it) was and remains what EcoLogics has described as the skillification of higher education. Skillification refers to the process whereby universities are forced to go down the road of the kind of vocationalisation that is part and parcel of the changes denounced by Monbiot. In effect, anything in higher education that is not regarded as being ‘economically valuable’ is left to wither on the vine of business-led funding (be it teaching, or research). If this process has been a long time in the making, under New Labour it has taken such a radical turn that the policy now arguably entails the elimination of the difference between higher education and further education. In this context, full universities are being encouraged to teach the kind of courses that were once only offered by further education colleges, even as those institutions (FE colleges) are being given a chance to become institutions of higher education. The door has even been opened for private institutions to set up universities (for more on this process, see EcoLogics’ ‘Unlocking the Business of Higher Education‘).

If this process has had its advocates within some universities, it has also been powerfully imposed by the leading government agencies in charge of regulating higher education. Newby himself began to impose this policy during his tenure at Hefce, but skillification was transformed into the official New Labour dogma via two key reviews: the Leitch Review of Skills, which covered all of the different educational levels but, remarkably, was led by one of the UK’s finance and insurance barons (Sandy Leitch, of the disgraced Lloyds TSB jefatura); and the Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration, which was led by Richard Lambert, the man who is now the head of the CBI, the Confederation of Business Industry.

This pincer movement from above and from within some secondary institutions in the sector has been bad enough. However, if the movement has prospered, it is for reasons that go beyond these forms of political agency. It is clear that, even if many leading figures in higher education still defend the principle of higher education’s autonomy, they adopt stances that, in one way or another, make them accessories to New Labour’s backdoor (or is it now a police-style dawn raid via the front door) imposition of a neoliberal model. Ecologics has in mind, for example, the remarkable outbursts of Lord May, the president of the Royal Society, and Lord Krebs, the principal of Jesus College Oxford, who recently accused Greenpeace of being hijacked by a ‘political agenda’(4).

EcoLogics is not a great admirer of Greenpeace, but this attack was a bit like saying that the Royal Society and Jesus College have been hijacked by an educational agenda. First, only a die-hard positivist can claim that environmental activism should be ‘free of politics’. Second, at a time when New Labour has implicitly politicised just about every sphere of British social life along neoliberal lines—the politics of claiming that a fictional ‘free market’ is king in every social sphere—it is hardly surprising that a growing number of non-government organisations are having to fight back in ways that seem, and increasingly are, explicitly ‘Political’ (with a capital P).  Third, at least one of the critics (Krebs) has played a role in government that closely aligns him with New Labour’s pro-GM foods stance, itself very much a function of a neoliberal ideology that prioritises technological innovation and the resulting business opportunities over fundamental issues of democratic accountability. It is no secret that New Labour has used every trick in the political book to impose GM foods on a public that is quite rightly sceptical about the foods’ real value. Krebs’ infamous suggestion during his time in the government Food Standards Agency, that organic foods have no demonstrated health value, was itself a textbook example of a narrowly positivist mentality. Krebs’ point, taken in and of itself, might be logical, but it could only be made by overlooking the much broader politics of organic foods. Paradoxically, what mascaraded as a non-political, non-partisan stance was arguably the most political, and partisan stance of all.

The above is a long way of saying that part of the reason why New Labour’s ‘skills revolution’ is prevailing in HE is that many academics within the field have adopted, no doubt with good intentions, what is itself a naively depoliticised understanding of their own work in academia. Nicholas Maxwell, an emeritus reader in the philosophy of science at UCL, hinted at this point when he suggested that

“I think scientists themselves are partly to blame for the current situation. They take for granted a defective view of science which holds that the content of science is made up of just theory and evidence. If government tried to interfere with this, there would be an uproar. This view places aims of scientific research outside the intellectual domain of science, so that when government interferes with aims, there is no uproar.

A more adequate view of science would recognise that the intellectual content of science is made up of three domains: theory, evidence and aims – the latter making highly problematic assumptions about metaphysics, values and use, and thus requiring sustained scientific discussion, by scientists and non-scientists alike. If such a view prevailed among scientists, there would be outrage at the influence government, industry and defence at present quietly exert over choice of research aims”(5).

Alas, these and other critiques may be a case of too little, too late. What is required now is nothing less than a full-scale mobilisation of academics and students against New Labour’s neoliberalisation of higher education. Contrary to the logic of arguments such as those propounded by May and Krebs vis-a-vis environmental activism, such a mobilization must be a political one in two ways: it must be political with a small ‘p’ in that it must defend the policy that higher education can and should remain relatively autonomous from government and from business (EcoLogics refers to the concept of relative autonomy developed by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron). But if, as now seems crystal clear, that policy can only be defended by engaging in politics with a capital ‘P’, then academics and students must be prepared to engage in very public protest, and to make it clear to both New Labour and the New Conservatives (who have styled themselves in the image of Tony Blair) that academia can vote in the hundreds of thousands against any party that tries to further undermine the autonomy of higher education in the UK.

One place to start might be a letter-writing campaign to the local MP. Famously busy and overworked lecturers who are loathe to actually print, and mail a letter might bear in mind that MP’s now have their own websites. But in the end, the most active opposition to the process must develop within the universities and colleges themselves. Here we have much to learn from the students at Liverpool, who used Facebook and other media to mobilise against Newby. Indeed, perhaps the first test of the kind of mobilization that is required will take place at Liverpool University this June, when that university’s senate decides whether to accept Howard Newby’s plans to impose New Labour’s ‘cultural revolution’ on the institution. In Liverpool as in many other universities, students and lecturers may discover that the battle must start by demystifying managerial directives that appear to be justified by the latest RAE.

As EcoLogics has noted in other posts, the stakes could not be higher for the sector. Until the time of New Labour, the predominant model for universities was premised on the twin concepts of ‘universitas’—a ‘whole’ education—and ‘educat’ or ‘educere’—the Latin roots for the word education, which refer to a process of ‘leading out’: leading out of prejudice, and today we might add, of social deprivation and explicitly ideological relationships. While New Labour might wink and nod in the direction of these values, there can be little doubt that the real logic of their reforms is to reproduce from within universities the boundaries and ideology of the UK’s private corporate sector. It is no coincidence, in this sense, that the wealth gap in the UK has worsened under New Labour, to the point that we now have inequality at levels not seen under Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher or Major(6). Nor is it a coincidence that New Labour appears to have jettisoned the very word ‘education’ in favour of ’skills’: there is, for example, no longer a Department of Education in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Increasingly, all that matters is business: not just ‘business in general’, but increasingly, the business, in the narrowest, neoliberal sense of the term, of higher education.

Anything less than a categorical rejection of this process will continue to open the door, if only by degrees, to further inequality, and to the kind of process that is today leading to the closure of the departments of politics, philosophy and statistics at Liverpool. The process started at UWE, and has continued in Liverpool; what institution, whose course and whose job will it be tomorrow?

Update: For news of the outcome of the attempted closure of departments at Liverpool, see Howard Newby, Higher Education’s Dr Beeching, has been stopped.

Notes

1) http://www.cihe-uk.com/aboutus.php, accessed May 14, 2009.

2) http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/12/captive-knowledge/, accessed May 14, 2009.

3) ‘Embrace Leitch or lose out to FE, sector warned’, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=209662&sectioncode=26, accessed May 14, 2009.

4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/13/green-movement-hijacked-politics, accessed May 13, 2009.

5) http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/13/letters, accessed May 13, 2009.

6) http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/may/07/inequality-poverty-labour, accessed May 13, 2009.

Anyone who is still not quite sure about the main driving force behind New Labour in the wake of last year’s banking debacle might wish to read George Monbiot’s post, Mandelson’s Fifth Column. In it Monbiot reveals the extent to which Mandelson’s Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) is acting to further the neoliberal agenda that has always been at the heart of New Labour’s political project.

EcoLogics wishes to highlight one aside in Monbiot’s post, which reminds us of the extent to which Howard Newby’s knowledge exchange is an integral part of New Labour’s agenda. Monbiot notes that a document published by Mandelson’s BERR states that, as of April 2009, all grant applications to UK funding councils must describe the ‘economic impact’ of the research. This is what the document, titled ‘New Industry, New Jobs’, actually says:

‘Stable, ring fenced Government funding and support for our science and research base provides an essential foundation to support economic growth in the short, medium and longer term. We will continue to protect and raise investment in science and research in the years ahead.
3.10 The science base this creates is a key resource for the high-tech companies and start-ups that will grow into the world-beating businesses of the future. Encouraging closer ties between the UK’s growing pool of scientific and engineering researchers and industry and private investors is now key to ensuring that we are able to benefit economically from groundbreaking science.
[...]
3.12 As well as delivering on this and other Innovation Nation commitments:

• we will work with the research funding bodies to create a stronger framework to drive up the economic impact of the research they fund. From April 2009, grant applicants to all Research Councils will have to set out the economic impact of their proposed research;
• the Higher Education Funding Council for England will consult later this year on a new Research Excellence Framework (REF) that will take better account of the impact research makes on the economy. Decisions on the REF will be announced early next year and will create incentives for changed behaviour from that point’

(http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file51023.pdf, p. 14)

EcoLogics wonders what would have happened to the HE sector in the UK if such an economistic discourse had always been used to evaluate research proposals. It goes without saying that there would have been no research in vast swathes of the humanities and the social sciences. But what about ‘blue sky’ research projects in the natural sciences? And what about research whose main function is to critique existing research?

Campaigners at Liverpool University may wish to reflect on the fact that when they oppose Newby’s efforts to impose the New Labour agenda on their university, they effectively oppose New Labour, i.e., the UK government. This point is made to give a sense of the scope of the challenge, but also to suggest that the time is ripe to remind staff and students that Newby, or at least his managerial policies, are an integral part of a party machine that is as discredited as it is corrupt.

By way of a postscript: remember the words that were penned by Gordon Brown back in November 2008, and which said in The Observer that “Today we are seeing not just the collapse of failed institutions but the collapse of a failed laissez-faire dogma. In this first financial crisis of the global age the old free market fundamentalism, no matter how it is dressed up, has been found wanting.” Wanting indeed.

Update 12 May, 2009: George Monbiot has himself now written a post on this subject, noting the extent to which the people heading the research councils are captains of industry. See his post in the Guardian at

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/12/captive-knowledge/