Higher-education policy is where you can see the trick happening: the brazenness of Tory retrenchment policies in the field of social mobility being phrased as an inevitability, when they are surgically ideological. The creation of the funding deficit in British higher education was a calculated decision by this government, as the £4bn saving generated could have been recouped many times over by pursuing corporate tax avoidance, or imposing a small levy on financial transactions. Our flatlining economy has benefited not one jot from the government’s determination to farm 80 per cent of university teaching costs out to the private sector and triple student fees.
Instead, vice chancellors and their industry partners are being encouraged to remodel our university system into a profit playground funded by the financial aristocracy for the quasi-exclusive enjoyment of its children.The strategy is Machiavellian in its opportunism, Trojan in its deafness to criticism. The academy is being rebuilt to reward enterprise rather than enquiry, offering its services at cost not to the most able, but to those most able to pay.
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