Conservatives would rather keep the country poor and stupid than accept their failure

Why the right will allow universities to collapse

Conservatives would rather keep their country poor and stupid than admit they could ever make a mistake. Readers who are astonished at the lack of remorse for the suffering brought by Brexit, should consider how runaway prejudice is now threatening higher education, whose success is a precondition for economic growth.

Many universities are close to going bust. Far from trying to defend successful national institutions, parts of the right welcome the possibility of their decline and, in some cases, their destruction.

A study by ITN in November found that a quarter of universities are making a loss. Over the entire sector losses now total £2 billion, a huge increase from the £200 million from the year before.

A recent report by Price Waterhouse Cooper concluded that “there are significant risks to the financial sustainability of both individual universities and the sector as a whole.”

The government has not increased fees for domestic students since 2017. They are now worth around £6,000 per student, per year in 2012–13 prices, the accountancy firms said. To put that figure another way, funding per student is at its lowest level in over 25 years.  

Conservative ministers will not bail out universities with grants from the central government. Meanwhile they view international students, whose full-price fees keep the academic show on the road, with a weird chauvinism. They treat them as immigrants, not as visiting scholars.  

A few weeks ago Rishi Sunak stopped international graduate students from bringing family members to the UK, adding that the policy was “delivering for the British people”,  as if he expected a grateful nation to applaud him for stopping the advance of an invading army.

The result was so predictable you might have set your watch by it. Vivienne Stern, the chief executive of Universities UK, which represents more than 140 universities, warned last week that large numbers of universities are at risk of falling into financial deficit because of the decline in international student numbers.

Potential students listen to the UK government, realise they are not welcome here, and take their business elsewhere.

I have never understood why the government classes foreign students as immigrants. I am sure most Conservative voters don’t think of them as immigrants either.

Given that the government views them with suspicion, however, it could compensate for the loss of revenue the decline in foreign student numbers brings by increasing taxpayer subsidies to universities

But it won’t do that.

Or it could increase tuition fees British students must pay.

But it won’t do that either.

Advanced economies need higher education. Conservatism in its moment of failure has embraced an anti-intellectual conspiracy theory, and decided that the UK can manage with less of it.

British youth are being brainwashed by woke academics, the theory runs. Far from making the nation richer, universities are producing useless gender studies graduates, who go out into society to spread their subversive beliefs.

Better to keep the young ignorant and remove their chances of advancement than allow universities to continue as they are.

The parallels with Brexit are striking. Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Conservatives in general have given up pretending that their promises of a global Britain finding its lost glories will ever become true. Instead they say that, even if we suffer economic decline, Brexit is still morally improving. Like cold showers and long walks in the rain it is character building.

We must welcome Brexit because it delivers self-government and sovereignty, even if we are poorer as a result.  Likewise in education, universities can fail because the political effect would be morally advantageous to the country even as it makes the country poorer.

 “The collapse of our universities is one of the best things that could happen to Britain,” wrote Michael Deacon of the Daily Telegraph. We needed more engineers and doctors and fewer sociologists, he continued.

Well, all right, then. How are we to find more engineers and doctors if Conservatives allow universities to collapse? The Telegraph cannot even ask the question let alone answer it.

Before I go any further I do not want for a moment to deny that woke  or identitarian ideology exists, I have written about it at length, and stand by what I said. It is equally true that dissident academics, in particular gender-critical feminists, face attacks on their freedom to work and argue.

It is a disgraceful comment on university life that these attacks on intellectual freedom flourish. Yet they remain isolated cases.  The Conservatives have created an Office for Students and a free speech tsar to protect intellectual freedom on campus.  

And I am pleased to say the officers and tsars do not have a great deal of work to do because, as anyone who visits universities or interviews academics knows, that while there are individual instances of injustice, there is not a woke version of the red terror running through campuses.

The UK is not the US. Indeed the single fastest way to improve national discourse would be for everyone in public life to repeat “this is not America” ten times each morning before breakfast. 

On the contrary, for all the undoubted cruelty of cancel culture, the true enemy of freedom and prosperity ​remains the radical right.

The “woke” did not deliver Brexit, after all.  Liz Truss was not a critical race theorist.

​I accept it's not a competition but it remains the case that the  ideas represented by the Daily Telegraph are a greater threat to the UK than the ideas represented Guardian, however avidly left-wing activists like to pose as revolutionaries who threaten the status quo.

This is not a justification of the behaviour of the worst of the left but a statement of observable fact.

Finally, Conservatives might reasonably complain that graduates are more likely to vote for centre-left parties, and that this is evidence of indoctrination. Leaving aside the interesting argument that liberal-minded people are more ​likely to apply to university in the first place, as things stand in the UK very few people, graduate or not, are willing to vote Conservative.

The latest YouGov poll found that ​the party's support stood at 10 percent of people under 50​. You can walk into any office or factory and find that the working-age population is revolting against a right that has done so little for it.

The right is reacting to rejection by retreating into a fantasy. The British are a pure people, it insists, and their purity must be protected. For their own good they should be denied the opportunities the EU and further education offers them.

In 1937 Bertrand Russell anticipated their delusions when he  wrote one of his best essays The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed.

He noted that instead of accepting that oppressed people should be freed to live normal lives, politicians of all stripes imagined that their suffering made them virtuous.

He explained that: