Lifetime Learning

There are a number of irritating features in Gaby Hinsliff's Guardian article on student debt. The first is the framing of a "generational injustice", which plays to the idea that the young are getting a raw deal. This ignores that many young people don't have any student debt, because they never went to college, and nor did many older people. In other words, the issue relates to the difference in treatment of the 38% who currently go on to tertiary education and the 15% of the older cohorts that did so by the early 1990s. The second irritation is the claim that what we now have is a "stealth tax", which is correct only in the limited sense that the Chancellor has frozen the income threshold for repayments (i.e. a form of fiscal drag). It also ignores that graduates may eventually have their debt wiped out, which is not a privilege HMRC extends to other taxes, stealthy or otherwise. The reason why the issue is causing so much angst among the press is precisely because it is seen as an added tax on the non-wealthy middle-classes. Rachel Reeves' comment that it's "not right that people who don’t go to university are having to bear all the cost for others to do so" makes this clear from a (traditional) working class perspective.

As a good centrist, Hinsliff cannot resist the temptation to berate the irresponsible left in passing. Thus she notes that "Last week, the Green party leader, Zack Polanski, called for “a conversation about student debt forgiveness”, echoing a rallying cry among young Democrat voters at the last US election for loans to be written off faster (though he didn’t explain where he would find the billions that would cost)". I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that Polanski didn't bother to explicitly state where the billions would come from because they can only come from taxation. Hinsliff could probably work this out for herself. The "magic money tree" of borrowing against futrure prosperity is not relevant here, despite the routine trope of further education as an investment and the youth of today as tomorrow's fiscal infrastructure. Like state pensions, state education is paid for by current workers (the Chancellor's point). The student loan scheme is anomalous not because it seeks repayment from the beneficiaries, rather than funding the cost out of general taxation, but because it expects future workers to pay for historic costs. Beneath the wails about injustice, you can spot the traditional conservative argument about not "saddling" future generations with debt. 

Hinsliff notes that graduates may face a marginal tax rate of 49% when even the highest rate of income tax is currently only 45%. As she puts it, "why are young people being squeezed proportionately harder in some cases than their bosses?" But it's no secret that the poorer you are the higher the total tax burden, when you include VAT, Council Tax and other indirect taxes. And it's also no secret that the rich can avoid paying the headline rates of income tax by converting income to dividends or capital gains. The Guardian, like other newspapers, has had to tread a fine line here: emphasising the "injustice" without admitting that it is one among many that currently characterise the UK tax system and arguably nowhere near the worst. Hinsliff suggests that "The fairest option is probably to cap how much any student should have to pay over their lifetime, so that loans bear some resemblance to what was borrowed rather than just morphing into a kind of stealth graduate tax." But she immediately dismisses this on grounds of expense, i.e. lower tax revenues, indicating that fiscal rigour still matters more to centrists than social justice. The discussion should really be about how we shift the tax burden onto those who currently pay proportionately less.

So who would those others be? Back in 2012, I noted that the proposed changes to increase the qualifying age for the state pension would be regressive because of variations in longevity (and thus years enjoying a state pension) across socio-economic groups. On average, the richer you are, the more state pension you will get in cumulative terms, regardless of lifetime contributions. A few months later, I suggested that the worries about a lack of skilled employees could be alleviated by applying differential state pension ages based on further education. In simple terms, if you left school at 16, you'd retire at 65; if you left at 18, you'd retire at 67; and if you went on to do a 3-year degree course, you'd retire at 70. This would skew the composition of the working population towards the skilled, which is helpful if you consider the adverse trend in the dependency ratio (the number working who must support those not working). As there would be nothing to stop anyone saving into a private pension, the rich might still retire at 65 or even earlier, but in aggregate across the economy we should see a staggering of retirement dates in line with education.

The moral (or "justice") case for differential state pension ages based on educational attainment is that people who started work at 16 are likely to die an average 5 years earlier than people who started work at 21. This is both a reflection of a person's socio-economic class origins and the greater likelihood that an earlier start in the workplace will have led to a liftetime of manual or routine labour and consequently greater health issues (the result of physically demanding labour, unhealthy workplaces and the long-running effects of income inequality). The fiscal case is that while manual labour is difficult to maintain into your 60s, cognitive or other skilled work is much easier. In terms of productivity, there is no significant falling off and this is reflected in a lower likelihood of a rapid downturn in earnings in the final decade of work, and thus taxes paid. As cognitive and skilled work broadly correlates with educational attainment, it makes sense to defer state pensions for that healthier, more productive and higher-earning cohort. 

That cohort's extra years in work will typically be at above-average levels of pay. The current difference in median salaries for graduates and non-graduates is about £12k per annum: £42k versus £30k. If we conservatively assume that difference generates £2.4k in additional tax from the typical graduate (i.e. at 20%, though many will actually be higher-rate taxpayers), then the 5 years of further education required for a typical degree should recoup a further £12k in revenue if the individual works till 70. At this point you might note that this is significantly less that the £53k cost of tuition fees and maintenance loans for a three-year degree. So how would we bridge the gap of £41k to match costs with income? The answer, once more, is through income tax. The follow-up question is: whose tax? Do we simply raise rates across the board? The answer to that question is no, we raise taxes on that part of the salary distribution where graduates are mostly to be found, which is above £40k.

A graduate tax is cumbersome to administer because it is geared to the persistent person rather than their variable income. The graduate who through career choice or ill-health doesn't earn enough to make repayments means that such a tax would be punitive unless waived below an earnings threshold or written off at the end of a fixed term, which is why the current loan replayement scheme has those features. A far simpler solution is to make income tax more progressive so that those on higher incomes, who will disproprotionately be graduates, pay more. You could do this by lowering the higher rate threshold to a point where it recoups an extra £15.6k over 40 years (that's the difference of £41k but at a 38% rate to match the graduate share of the working population). This would be £47,700 in today's money, which, you'll note, is significantly higher than the median graduate income. One way of implementing that would be to continue with fiscal drag. At 3% inflation, it would take only 2 years for the curent higher rate threhold of £50,270 to depreciate to £47,700.

You could argue that this would penalise successful non-graduates who earn high salaries but who never benefited from higher education, but this is to forget that they will have the option to retire at 65 on a full state pension (worth £60k, i.e. 5 years at £12k per annum in today's money). Also, bear in mind that we're not increasing the burden on basic rate taxpayers, which should please the Chancellor. The difference in tax for a graduate on the median income of £42k would be nil, because they're below the £47.7k threshold. A graduate earning £50,270, i.e. at the current higher rate threshold, would pay an extra £1,028 in income tax a year. Across 40 years, that graduate earning 50k (assuming they stay at the same relative level of income) will pay roughly an extra £41k (in today's money) in income tax. If you add in the extra £12k they can be expected to pay by working till 70, that recoups the £53k spent on their college education. In summary, differential qualifying ages for the state pension, plus an income tax higher rate threshold geared to (but higher than) the median graduate earnings, would allow us to revert to fully-funded tertiary education.

As well as encouraging more students to go to college, and thereby help boost the long-term productivity of the country, putting the burden of student debt onto higher-paid and older graduates (and to an extent on higher-paid non-graduates) has the advantage of going with the demographic flow as the population ages. We are approaching a wave of graduates in their 60s, most of whom incurred no student debts, reflecting the expansion of higher education starting in the 1990s. More broadly, this approach helps redress the bias of the last 40 years that favoured the (now) well-off elderly - who benefited from lower housing costs and better private pensions as well as free education - relative to today's youth. And it does so without penalising poorer older people, who will disproportionately have left school at 16 or 18 and are dependent on the state pension. 

The sketch I've outlined here is simplified and not meant to be definitive, but it does prove, I think, that a fairer and more efficient method of funding higher education is available if we get away from the cursed idea of student loans and view it in terms of working lifetimes and the returns to income arising from higher edcuation. At heart this means reverting to the time-tested principle that today's dependents are paid for by today's workers, whether they be pensioners or schoolkids (no one is proposing student loans for A-levels, after all). The impediments to this are not economic but political, and at their root is both the persistent anti-intellectualism of a public discourse that assumes many degrees are "worthless" and a government culture that prefers universities to operate as commercial enterprises rather than as sites of dissent and crtitique.

Signal and Noise

The government has proposed to "crack down on rip-off university degrees". This means that courses with "poor outcomes" - measured in terms of dropouts, low ensuing employment rates and wages, and high initial costs and student debt - will have their enrollments capped. Inevitably exceptions will be made for strategically important courses, like medicine and engineering, and no one seriously expects the measure to affect the Russell Group. This is clearly about reducing access to higher education in the service of class prejudice as much as reducing costs to the Exchequer, hence the positive reception in the Tory press after years during which columnists who did Classics or PPE at Oxford have insisted that we must do away with "mickey mouse" degrees along with the divisive nonsense of critical theory. Whether this latest initiative will actually amount to much, or is simply another culture war spasm, only time will tell. But what I want to concentrate on here is not the all-too-obvious motivations of a Conservative government in its death-throes but rather the nature of the criticism that has been levelled at it. This has predominantly rested on a dichotomy of the instrumental and the cultural: the claim that the government know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

The state cannot help but think of university education in instrumental terms, specifically the contribution of trained graduates to the economy, just as it necessarily thinks of healthcare in terms of maximising and reproducing the labour force. That this should put it at odds with those who adopt an aesthetic defence - that education is a good in itself - is in no way surprising, but it also does not mean that the government of the day is therefore philistine, as many of its critics have suggested. Likewise it does not mean that those advocating the civilising qualities of study are not free of snobbery and prejudice. One grimly amusing aspect of the criticism has been the emphasis on the democratic nature of higher education: that it should be available to all and that in capping courses we are discriminating against students from poorer and minority backgrounds. But higher education in the UK has never been (and probably never will be) available to all and it remains (and probably will remain) a social hierarchy in which the poor and minorities are systematically disadvantaged.

The suggestion that the government should adopt a more holistic approach, committing to increase gross national happiness rather than just gross national product, sounds nice but it runs up against this very problem: that higher education in the UK is selective and exclusive (consider the regular anxiety over "grade inflation"). The traditional justification for this was that educating a minority of the population in expert roles was a positive contribution to society as whole - more doctors, teacher, engineers etc - with the implicit understanding that progressive income taxation would recyle some of the financial rewards accruing to further education into the public treasury for general benefit, including the funding of future access for the disadvantaged. As tax solidarity has declined since the 1970s, and as the introduction of tuition fees has put a very public price on higher education (albeit misleadingly as the actual cost to the public treasury of training a BSc in Engineering is not the same as a BA in French), the emphasis has shifted increasingly to the idea of societal contribution, and that has served to turn up the volume of attacks on courses whose utility is not instrumentally obvious, like critical studies. 

The irony is that if the government were truly instrumental then it would be pushing for greater state direction of education and explicit planning of courses and numbers to feed into a larger economic plan. But the contemporary state does not do that sort of planning. Consequently, the space is inevitably filled by the market - i.e. delegated, diffuse planning in which price signals (e.g. earnings post-graduation for different courses) are meant to work their magic, even though the evidence to date, for example the way that every university promptly chose to charge the maximum in tuition fees after these were raised after 2010, is that there is no actual market. That universities become businesses and students become consumers is simply the logic of this planning absence but it doesn't mean that either behave as such: the businesses don't actually compete and the consumers don't actually decline inadequate offers and take their custom elsewhere. If a student switches from one course to another, or even to another institution, that isn't taken as a judgement on the supplier but on the consumer.

One reason why the market approach doesn't work in practice is that only a small minority of students have a clear career objective, and they are the ones least likely to respond to price signals. If you're determined to be an electrical engineer and want to study at a particular college, you're not going to prefer another university simply because it is 5% cheaper, and you're certainly not going to switch to studying Russian at that first collge because it's on special offer. Not only do many 18-year olds have no idea what career they will pursue, the uncertainty of the future means that they cannot be sure whether a particular degree will still be as relevant and financially rewarding tomorrow as it is today. Beyond the class prejudice and anti-intellectualism, a lot of the contemporary chat about "low-value courses" reflects the wider anxiety over the future impact of technology on job prospects and wages - e.g. that AI will do away with writing so studying English or journalism is a dead-end. The future is unknowable so we should not expect teenagers to be clairvoyant.

The disproportionate impact of the course cap on poor and minority students is evidence of the failure of the strategy of university expansion that commenced in the 1990s. As William Davies noted, "The wider ideological problem is that, for politicians of all parties in the post-Thatcher era, the education system has carried the burden of sustaining the illusion of a classless society". This burden was always going to be insupportable because of the insistence that the state's involvement be limited to arranging the financing while the higher education market would efficiently allocate resources. Instead of directly intervening to remove the class and racial biases in the admissions process, the state allowed the university sector to continue with discriminatory selection, which has had the effect of creating a "ghetto" of courses (and institutions - i.e. the non-Russell Group polyversities) where low regard was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The government's eventual "crackdown" was baked in from the start.

The conservative antipathy towards universities, particularly in the claims that students are intolerant and academics are pushing divisive nonsense, isn't simply the seasoning of the charge that they are "ripping off" the younger generation. It is rather part of a more thoroughgoing critique that believes universities should not only be elitist institutions but that they should inculcate a particular worldview (the Western canon of literature and art, for example). But this goes against their nominal commitment to the market. If the consumers, i.e. students, want a woke education then that is what universities should provide. Likewise, there is a conflict between the idea that universities should return to a more elitist curriculum and the attacks on the metropolitan elite who were educated in it. What conservatives actually want to do is plan further education, not only in terms of numbers per subject but in the enforcement of norms of behaviour among students: it is a demand for an authoritarian education system, not a tweak in the market. That's the signal; the hysteria over free-speech is simply the noise.

Similarly, the critics of the government are not sincere in their calls for education for all, and few of them would back a genuinely meritocratic approach in which high-status institutions take the brightest and best candidates from across the country rather than disproportionately selecting from private schools. If they really believed in a democratic approach then they would support UBI, giving everyone the choice to pursue further education or training at any point in their lifetime and with any supplier but not obliging them to pursue it in a particular way or at a particular time, unlike the Liberal Democrat's  proposed "skills wallet" and similar schemes do. Likewise a commitment to a more inclusive education system would see the admissions process flipped so that ranking by schools determined access rather than selection by universities (i.e. a "bog-standard" comprehensive in Slough would get 10 places across the Russell Group each year and so would Eton College). What the government's critics actually want to do is maintain the status quo. That's the signal; the hysteria over philistinism is simply the noise.

The Kids Are Alright

The aftermath of England's defeat by Italy in the European Championship Final has highlighted our ambivalent attitude towards youth. For all the praise of the young England players' bravery, there was an appetite for tales of yobbery on the day and racist social media thereafter, with the assumption that this was down to the lairy lads "who have given football a bad name". In fact, the scale of the trouble was relatively small while the online hate reflected the ingrained bigotry of the old as much as a youthful lack of respect or self-control, and much of it clearly wasn't even from football fans. The government made a mistake in assuming that it could extend this disdain for the young to the players' social conscience, not just in the taking of a knee before matches but in the extramural work of Marcus Rashford. The Tories' volte-face this week is not only evidence of habitual opportunism but of a genuine confusion over how to handle a youth cohort increasingly confident in its social and cultural politics - it's "wokery", if you prefer. Demonising football fans is easy, but demonising football players has proved anything but, largely because they (despite being rich) represent their age group as much as their sport. 

While the youth vote was crucial to modern conservativism's reinvention under Margaret Thatcher (the Tories won fractionally more than Labour among 18-24 year-olds in 1979), the dynamics of the property market and the electoral impact of age-sorting between big cities and small towns has pushed the Conservative Party towards an antagonism towards the under-30s since the millennium. But this is not just limited to the Tories. William Davies, in an article that's really chiding Labour for turning its back on the younger voters who flocked to it during the Corbyn years, notes that the angry melancholia that underpins Johnsonism manifests in a resentment: "the attitude to younger generations is also a component, the insistence that the future cannot – must not – be better than the past". This same attitude was on display this week in the BBC recording of a focus group session between Keir Starmer and ex-Labour voters in Blackpool (ex-Labour here means "has voted solidly for the Tories for decades") in which under-25s were derided as lazy. While he didn't agree, the Labour leader failed to challenge this (as far as I can tell from the BBC edit), presumably on the grounds that it wasn't worth having a fight. I think that was a mistake.

Labour is the party of youth, in the sense that its ideological function is to manage labour for the benefit of capital. That includes training the young for the world of work, hence the focus on education and entry-level jobs, but it also involves a normative dimension. This includes not only the overtly disciplinary, such as the party's support for more police officers and "crackdowns" on antisocial behaviour, but also a fear of the disruptive, which manifests most obviously as a reluctance to support extra-parliamentary protest. It also produces a tension over social developments between the conservative instincts of the hierarchy and the progressive enthusiasm of the membership. Feminism, anti-racism and pro-LGBT+ rights have all proved to be touchy subjects. However slowly, Labour did move in the right direction on each and did push public policy towards progressive outcomes. But then it was going with the grain of youth, reflecting the evolution of society. The problem now is that the interests of the young are orthogonal to the route the party believes it must take to recapture lost seats. The same calculation informs the Conservatives, who want to retain those seats. The result is that both parties are torn between celebrating and criticising the young in the service of an electoral demographic that may be nothing more than a figment of the media's imagination.

The recent Education Select Committee report on working class underachievement was used to launch another culture war talking point around the supposedly pernicious influence of the term "white privilege". It's worth noting that in late 2020 the rightwing MP Steve Baker was conceding that white privilege was real, showing just how mutable Tory attitudes are (this week, to reinforce the point, he has suggested the Tories should be supportive of players taking the knee). The Prime Minister and Home Secretary's intervention last month, when they failed to condemn the booing of the England players, was not only a convenient way of distracting the media after the Chesham and Amersham by-election loss, it was also a transparent attempt to divert attention away from the government's poor track record on education, notably the disproportionate impact of lockdown on children from poorer families and the inadequacy of the proposed catch-up funding. It's also worth noting that like the earlier report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (aka the Sewell Inquiry), which downplayed structural racism, the claim in respect of "white privilege" is that we are being misled by language and in particular the language of the young. 

This distrust of the young is not limited to elderly conservatives pining for a mislaid past. Its chief cultural manifestation, the disdain for the "woke" and the claim that the young are censorious enemies of free speech, is as much the response of a liberal intelligentsia troubled by the erosion of its social status and sharing the conservative view that "things have gone too far" (a notable iteration of this is the gender-critical attack on trans rights). For all the talk of Britain as a young country in the 1990s, its rhetorical manifestation was the canonisation of George Orwell, who had died over 40 years before. When a writer like Howard Jacobsen refers to the "monotonous chorus of young people" today he is not merely dismissing their concerns as aesthetically displeasing, he is literally reminding them of their subservient place on stage and their duty to follow the script of others. It is no coincidence that many of the recent "cancellation" rows have centred on authors and academics being held to account by younger critics and students. It's also the case that these rows have been inflated out of all proportion by the media and presented as an attack on the foundations of society. 

At the legislative level, this has given rise to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) bill and the Online Safety bill. The former is the very definition of gesture politics: addressing a problem that is miniscule in scale and trivial in effect, all in the name of a higher principle. Of course this has nothing to do with free speech as such - i.e. the negative freedom that means I cannot be restrained from speaking my mind short of hate speech. Rather it demands a positive freedom that certain people should be allowed to insist on having their views aired in a particular and notably exclusive setting. Just as I cannot insist on The Times or Guardian printing my opinions, I doubt I'll be able to insist on the Oxford Union hosting my rants. In other words, this is legislation that would establish a privilege for a select few. Similarly, the Online Safety bill is concerned with privilege in the form of exemptions for news publishers (i.e. traditional media) and the requirement for platforms to protect journalistic content and the vaguely-defined "content of democratic importance". All speech is equal but some is more equal than others.

In practice, neither bill is likely to make much difference to the existing moderation regime of universities and social media platforms, but they do reserve the right for ministers to intervene in those areas in a way that would be considered intolerable for newspapers or TV. It is likely that this intervention will be selective and aimed disproportionately at the left, if only because the existing regimes already limit far-right "harms" (the reason why far-right-friendly platforms such as Gab and Parler exist is precisely because Facebook and Twitter are relatively successful in their moderation). While Labour has opposed the Higher Education bill on the grounds that it would protect hate speech, they have welcomed the Online Safety bill because it supports the liberal demand for online civility and the tighter regulation of platforms for the benefit of legacy media (a particular concern for liberal outlets, like the Guardian, that cannot necessarily rely on subsidy by the rich). 

A troubling aspect of the search for civility is its discriminatory impulses. One example of this is the growing demand for online accounts to be supported by an offical identity, on the grounds that anonymity shields offenders. This isn't likely to help law enforcement all that much, and it will probably be easily circumvented (the platforms have an obvious incentive to avoid stringent regulation), but it will make it more difficult for the powerless and vulnerable (who bias towards the young) to have a voice. Another is the proposal (floated by Labour and now endorsed by the government) that individuals found guilty of the online racial abuse of footballers should not only be barred by the relevant social media platforms but issued with a Football Banning Order. This is an authoritarian legacy of New Labour that anachronistically preserved the 80s idea of football as the sole locus of objectionable racism, long after the social changes in the game had marginalised it in the 90s. In reality, most of the abusers probably don't even attend games. Racist trolls don't limit themselves to particular spheres of activity.

Given that the young currently vote disproportionately for Labour, you'd imagine the party would be supportive of pro-youth policies, and in many ways it is, albeit policies that are concerned with the socialising of the young as model citizens. However, it is also suspicious of politicised youth - not least those energised by Momentum since 2015 - hence the PLP's current disdain for free tuition fees, which it interprets not just as a subsidy to the middle classes but as encouragement for the critical independence and even social deracination of working class kids. If the public response to the dignified behaviour of England's football players - and in particular Tyrone Mings' calling-out of Priti Patel - tells us anything, it isn't simply that there is an overwhelming majority in favour of anti-racism. It's clear that society at large is more in tune with the views of the young than those of right-leaning, middle-aged newspaper columnists, let alone confirmed Tory voters who think the young are stting on their arses and living off benefits. That Labour appears keener on courting the minority rather than the majority is stupid, but perhaps an inevitable result of the determination to exorcise the influence of a politician who managed to connect with young voters in his 60s.

Liberal Fear

David Goodhart's career trajectory looks like a classic case of youthful radicalism giving way to mature reaction. From soi-disant "old Etonian Marxist" via the technocratic centrism of Prospect and Demos to the careful rehabilitation of the romantic bigotry of Enoch Powell. I have never read any of his books (and have no intention of starting now, though I have read much of his journalism), not least because his ideas are clearly second-hand and unredeemed by any literary or analytical interest. But he is an interesting case study of the broader phenomenon of the progression from firebrand to fogey, not because he has turned into a conservative but precisely because he remains a liberal. The trigger for this thought is the publication of his latest rumination on the state of the nation, Head Hand Heart, where he laments the decline in esteem for manual labour and the persistent undervaluing of care work, both of which he attributes to the privileging of cognitive work and thus the over-investment in education and valorising of qualifications.

The narrative of time disillusioning youth is obviously ancient, but the political form we are familiar with dates from the early-nineteenth century and specifically the struggle between monarchical reaction and persistent republicanism in restoration France. This tension was reduced to a famous epigram by the French statesman Francois Guizot: "Not to be a republican at twenty is proof of want of heart; to be one at thirty is proof of want of head". Variations on this, with socialism and communism substituted for republicanism, would later be attributed to Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Churchill. The irony of Guizot's claim is that it was his own policies as Prime Minister in 1848, specifically refusing to allow any widening of the franchise beyond the propertied elite, that would lead to the collapse of the monarchy of Louis Phillipe and the creation of the Second Republic. A lot of thirty-somethings rediscovered the attractions of republicanism thanks to Guizot.

The relevance of this historical detour is that Guizot was a constitutional monarchist who saw himself as resisting both right and left. Likewise, David Goodhart identifies as a "post-liberal centrist", and in a more emotional register as a refugee from his "liberal, metropolitan tribe". His use of that noun is intended to suggest that the old formations that historically informed politics and culture are now irrelevant, having been superseded by new "value clusters". Though he has gestured vaguely at transitional "inbetweeners", he sees society as fundamentally divided into two opposing camps: "the educated, mobile people who see the world from 'Anywhere' and who value autonomy and fluidity, versus the more rooted, generally less well-educated people who see the world from 'Somewhere' and prioritise group attachments and security". This was the theme of his 2017 book, The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. In its typology, it is clearly a rehash of the work of Jonathan Haidt on the intrinsic differences between conservative and liberal temperaments, but given a topical gloss by the geographical and cultural divisions of Brexit.

Goodhart started out on his own road to Damascus (or perhaps Doncaster) with a 2004 essay in Prospect in which he suggested that racial and cultural diversity was eroding the solidarity needed to support the welfare state (this was later expanded into his 2013 book, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration). I think the timing is significant. Liberalism in practice obviously shifted to the right during the 1990s, but liberal theory also started to lean heavily on communitarianism as a counterweight to the individualism of the neoliberal order. However, lectures about rights and responsibilities remained too abstract for many liberals and the policy consequences, from ASBOS to workfare, too dull and punitive to engender much enthusiasm. What would prove liberating in the wake of 9/11 was the salutary effect of existential fear - the threat to the national community and "our way of life" - hence the many liberal theorists and commentators who talked gushingly about how the attack on the World Trade Center was a clarifying moment.

But that fear was groundless. Al Qaeda proved to be a trivial foe and Saddam Hussein a paper tiger. Later Middle-Eastern iterations, from Muammar al-Gaddafi through ISIS to Bashar al-Assad, have equally failed to live up to their billing. China has little interest in pursuing a new Cold War and the revival of Russia as a threat to the West is risible. Instead, we have gradually turned towards the enemy within, dividing society into hostile and irreconcilable camps, decrying enemies of the people, and inventing phantasms such as elite conspiracies and the woke terror. Though much of this has been presented in the frame of a conservative/liberal dichotomy, it's important to recognise that this anxiety is common to both: QAnon mirrors the belief that Russia engineered both Brexit and Trump; the idea that a metropolitan elite is subverting democracy mirrors the belief that the working class would support a dictatorship. But this equivalence of fear should not mislead us. The kernel of conservativism is not paranoia or mania but the cool and calculating defence of privilege. It is liberal fear that aspires to a universal condition.

The role of race in this landscape is to provide a domestic equivalent for the "clash of civilisations" that we were denied in the early-00s. Goodhart's thesis - that stable societies with generous welfare systems tend to be culturally homogenous and that immigration tends to undermine this and thus citizens' willingness to pay the taxes to support public services - was an example of the importing of a classic conundrum in the sphere of international relations - how can we agree a modus vivendi when our national interests must necessarily differ? - to the field of social policy. There are two obvious problems with this approach. First, in transplanting the "realist" theory that international relations are zero-sum, it assumes that social diversity is destabilising short of full integration (i.e. the subsuming of immigrant identity). Second, it assumes that the native culture was homogenous at the time the welfare state was established and that diversity is a novel challenge that has arisen since. Implicit in this is the belief that the welfare state was largely in place by the 1950s, but this ignores the extension of benefits in the 1960s and the reform and expansion of education in the 1970s. The welfare state continued to grow and develop over time.

We do know that the erosion of tax morale in the UK from the 1970s onwards correlates with increasing immigration, but if this were really causal, you'd expect tax morale to start to erode in the 1950s, after the arrival of the Empire Windrush, and then accelerate during the 1960s. There is no evidence it did. The electoral victories of the Conservatives between 1951 and 1959 were based in large part on a commitment to generous public expenditure, notably preserving the NHS and building more council houses. The 1958 Notting Hill riots, the 1963 Bristol bus boycott and the 1965 and 1968 Race Relations Acts show that race was a salient issue in the 60s, but there was no significant linkage of it to the welfare state. The formal discourse on race concerned civil rights; the informal discourse miscegenation. The increasing reluctance of conservative voters to pay high taxes actually correlates with industrial militancy, squeezed profits (due to international competition as much as wage demands), and the associated inflation of the 1970s. The questioning of the "burden" of welfare then was a class issue. The introduction of a racial dimension is much more recent, dating to the 1990s and the emergence of the "bogus asylum-seeker" in the media.

Having made ethnic diversity the problematic of welfare in The British Dream, Goodhart proceeded to explain Brexit in The Road to Somewhere as an essentially cultural reaction to both the ongoing legacy of that diversity (the desire to defend a rooted identify and ethnic solidarity) and the metropolitan elite's unwillingness to acknowledge the problem. This obviously occludes any material explanation for people voting leave, such as the legacy of deindustrialisation or increasing inequality, unless you imagine that lots of them had read and absorbed the rationale of The British Dream, but it also flattens the motivations of remainers, as if 48% of voters could reasonably be defined as rootless cosmopolitans when even he admits that his definition of "Anywheres" only extends to about 25% of the population. Goodhart isn't crude enough to employ the phrase "race betrayal", but in hitching a dichotomy centred on ethnic solidarity to a referendum, it is pretty clear that this is part of the subtext. If you voted for the EU, you voted against the national community.

One obvious problem with the somewhere/anywhere dichotomy is that most people are a mix of the two. One of Goodhart's favourite stats is that 60% of people have never moved more than 20 miles since they were aged 14, but he fails to note that a large proportion of them are Londoners and other big city-dwellers, including many who would otherwise be viewed in his scheme as anywheres. He also ignores that the inverse - 40% of the population have moved around the country - is not some recent development but reflects a history of significant internal migration since the Agricultural Revolution of the 18th century. The British population has always been relatively mobile, with the ironic exception of the city-born who were less likely to move, or at least only move between boroughs. The people we characterise as somewheres are often themselves migrants or their children. Many "small towns" were created by wholesale transplantation, and often quite recently (e.g. Scottish steelworkers in Corby). 

Of course Goodhart isn't presenting somewhere as simply a synonym of indigenous, but once you acknowledge that the majority of the population combine both somewhere and anywhere tendencies, his dichotomy loses much of its explanatory value unless you assume there is an ethnic correlation. As Jonathan Freedland noted, Goodhart sees ethnic and religious minorities "as the cloud on the Somewheres’ horizon, the blot that has darkened the Somewheres’ previously sunny landscape. It is their arrival that has changed Britain beyond recognition, their presence that has to be dealt with". If the somewhere/anywhere binary is not simply a proxy for native/foreign, is it perhaps just a reductive euphemism for class, with the definition of somewheres serving to unite the otherwise disparate "traditional" working class and comfortable middle-class in a conservative bloc opposed to a "woke" upper middle-class that dominates public life? You'll note that this occludes the actual working class, many of whom happen to be from ethnic minorities, unless of course you believe that a Pakistani-heritage bus driver really is indistinguishable from a BBC producer who went to Harrow.

Goodhart's latest foray, Head Hand Heart, appears to be an attempt to explain why the "Anywheres" were not merely unwilling to acknowledge the problem of diversity but incapable of thinking about it. In effect, he posits a form of false consciousness embedded through the brainwashing of further education. This obviously overlaps with fashionable nonsense about cultural Marxism, but it also means that he provides an excuse for liberal refugees like himself: I was misled by groupthink into supporting liberal shibboleths about the progressive value of multiculturalism. The title suggests a more determined attempt to avoid a crude binary this time round, but his argument is still a simple opposition of graduates and the rest, with the latter subdivided by gendered occupations. This gendering suggests a further step towards conservative orthodoxy, valorising the traditional family and womanly virtues, but Goodhart misunderstands that these ideals were always promoted as being untainted by the market, not a subdivision of it. His is a liberal interpretation of conservativism that strays towards caricature.

That Goodhart doesn't quite get conservatism is evident from some of the reviews. For example, David Willetts, who Goodhart credits with stimulating his original interest in the relationship of diversity and welfare, suggests that universities are far more somewhere than anywhere: "Universities are exceptional among modern institutions in having geographical names. They are somewhere. They stay in the same place for centuries. They are crucial to the local economy and civic life and are the best anchor for a town facing the gales of globalisation. The university is the institution where the tensions Goodhart identifies are most often played out. He worries about students moving out and moving up, but he forgets that the university, with its staff and its services, remains rooted in a town, bringing people in and keeping some of them there. The evidence is clear: universities help towns and cities retain home-grown graduates; cities without a university are least likely to attract back students born there after they have graduated."

Despite his own background, Goodhart appears to have a poor grasp of the sociology of British upper and middle-class life. For all the romance of heritage, landowners have historically been anywheres, owning and moving between multiple properties across often great distances. Speaking a foreign language, wintering abroad and being au fait with international culture were the characteristics of the aristocracy, rather than the middle class, until well into the second half of the twentieth century. The impact of Elizabeth David and Terence Conran on middle class taste was only a little ahead of the exposure of the working class to foreign culture through cheap package holidays to Spain, and most sociologists would agree that there has been greater shared cultural capital between the classes over the last half century. The chasm of sensibility that Goodhart imagines depends on extrapolating the preferences and social capital of a much smaller minority, the actual metropolitan elite, to the larger graduate population, and flattening the heterogeneity and variety of the actual working class (which now includes many graduates).

This highlights the shallowness of Goodhart's thinking and his tendency to ignore actual sociology for the ephemera of opinion polls and journalistic commentary, where anxiety about "white loss of identity" is considered as real as myths about campus assaults on free-speech. That shallowness is also evident in his notion that people (or jobs) can be neatly put into one of three boxes. The vast majority of jobs combine cognitive, manual & social skills, not one to the exclusion of the others. Think of a butcher, a nurse or a car mechanic. The history of industrial relations in the UK is of the refusal of manual workers to be limited by the definition of hand, displaying both head (strikes, go-slows etc) and heart (solidarity) in opposition. The contemporary undervaluing of care work has nothing to do with the dominance of heart in the roles, or the disproportionate employment of women, and everything to do with the exploitative structure of the care sector.

Despite his reactionary gestures, Goodhart hasn't become a conservative and evidence of this is the importance he places on fear. For a true Tory, the strong emotion of fear is very much subordinate to more stable ideas such as hierarchy, duty and caution. Goodhart's pessimistic liberalism is founded on the fear of the other as a threat to enlightenment values and its origins lie in the reaction to 9/11. As Corey Robin put it in Fear: The History of a Political Idea, "At moments of doubt about the ability of positive principles to animate moral perception or inspire public action, fear has seemed an ideal source of political insight and energy". The failure of liberal interventionism in Iraq did not dissipate that fear, it simply redirected it to the domestic sphere in the form of an anxiety about diversity. The failure of neoliberal economics in 2008 did not lead to the triumphant return of material politics, let alone socialism, in part because that simmering fear could be leveraged to divide society along the lines of culture and values. Brexit and Trump are conservative epiphenomena of that debilitating liberal fear.

Though Goodhart presents the welfare state as vulnerable, what he actually fears is not the privatisation of the NHS but the undermining of liberal values. His focus on diversity is not simple bigotry but the belief that multiculturalism entails relativism and that this will ultimately erode those values. In expanding his critique to higher education, he isn't railing against strawmen such as postmodernism or no-platforming but suggesting that the goods of academia can only be preserved if they are rationed and their pursuit limited to those who possess a native sympathy for the enlightenment that underpins them. It is clear that the values Goodhart really wishes to preserve are not those of small town conservatives, just as it is a liberal elite, albeit one that is more sensitive to somewheres, that he still envisages attending Russell Group universities once the former polytechnics are converted back to vocational colleges. In desiring parity of esteem for hand and heart, he is hoping to better preserve the head. Figuratively, he wishes to ensure that the mind of the body politic is focused and self-aware and to that end it must be motivated by a fear of its own dissolution.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

What difference would it have made if Jeremy Corbyn had become Prime Minister just before Christmas? The bumptious Matt Chorley at the Times recently imagined a Corbyn-led government as both dithering and hyper-interventionist but above all "crankish", which is another way of saying that he is still suffering nightmares about it. Of course, what he really feared was not Carry On Social Democracy but opportunistic "disaster socialism", in which crisis provided the excuse for radical change to the social and economic order (this is clearly projection by those who relish disaster capitalism). Ironically, this concept enjoyed a brief vogue last year among British liberals and the soft-left who wished to dismiss the assumed utopianism of Lexiteers, though it has been revived in the US in a more positive way lately to suggest that the pandemic might nudge the country towards a better social safety net. Amid the stale jokes and gratuitous insults, Chorley did at least concede a good point: that we have even less idea of what a Starmer-led government would look like.

Jeremy Corbyn in Number 10 is obviously a counterfactual, but it's one that allows us to think about what a Labour government might have considered the outer limit of the possible: how far it could have pushed the Overton Window under propitious circumstances. This is useful in that it may provide a benchmark against which to measure Labour's offer at the next general election. I have no doubt that the offer will be more modest, and not just because of Keir Starmer's emphasis on competence (i.e. a change in personnel rather than a change in policy), but the gap between the two provides the basis for a critique of substance rather than form. An important caveat with this counterfactual is that a Corbyn-led administration might also have been less radical than expected, not just because of resistance by the establishment and likely sabotage by the PLP, but because of Corbyn and McDonnell's own caution and desire for consensus. But that's boring. Instead, let's imagine that they followed their instincts in full and that they specifically saw the Covid-19 crisis as an opportunity to advance the recognisably socialist policies that would give Matt Chorley night-sweats.

As a "new broom", any non-Conservative goverment would probably have paid more attention to the national risk register and contingency plans on taking office after a decade of Tory mismanagement than the Johnson regime did, if only as part of an audit of the previous administration for the purpose of easy point-scoring. This means there would have been a decent chance that some of the holes in the planning would have been spotted earlier (the first reports from Wuhan were on 31st December, the first WHO bulletin on 5th January) and that rectification might have been initiated some weeks before March (e.g. buying ventilators and replenishing PPE supplies). It's also worth noting that senior public health officials operate in a political field. It's not pure science. We saw that with their willingness to indulge the nudge unit and "herd immunity" in the early communications, which was a concession to Tory ideology and the assumed preferences of Number 10. In contrast, I suspect they would have assumed a Labour goverment to be more supportive of a strict public health approach and would have advised accordingly. This means there would be have been more likelihood of an earlier lockdown.

A Labour government might have insisted that all care home staff remain in situ and isolated with residents. This would have made sense in terms of shielding and reducing infection (we now know that agency staff moving between homes was a key vector in the spread), but it would also have highlighted the failings of the care sector. It would have disrupted the agency labour market, required increased staffing to allow rotating shifts and prompted calls for state support as care homes at the margin of profitability became unviable. This would have intensified the "crisis in care" that has been developing over the last decade and allowed a Labour government to accelerate its plans for a National Care Service. Consistent with this approach, a Labour government might also have had the good sense to rule against elderly patients in hospital being returned directly to care homes in the early stages of the pandemic rather than being tested and quarantined in the under-utilised Nightingale hospitals.

Responsibility for test and trace could have been immediately assigned to local government and existing regional public health bodies. The "world-beating" app would have rightly been relegated to an adjunct of the programme. This would not only have marginalised outsource providers like Serco and inexperienced figureheads like Dido Harding, it would have provided the foundation for a more thorough devolution of power from Whitehall. That the Health Secretary, Matt Hanock, wants even more private sector involvement in public health going forward, despite the failures to date, shows the sort of nerve that you would hope (absent the failures) a Labour government would display, but in the opposite direction. This devolution could be extended to local job guarantee schemes, to provide useful (but non-coercive) work and training during the developing recession, and an expansion of local authority resources and responsibility for workplace inspections in respect of both employment rights and public health and safety (those Leicester sweatshops).

The GCSE, BTEC and A-level mess could have been avoided by awarding grades based on teacher assessment and then allocating university slots pro-rata across all schools, so that a "bog standard" comprehensive got as many places per capita as Eton in the first pass. Russell Group universities could have been obliged to set quotas on offers between state and independent schools, so the latter would only get 7% of the "cream". This would have met the ostensible goal of the infamous algorithm - to ensure student demand matched the supply of places - while also making a real contribution to social mobility. It would, of course, have marked a radical departure from the systemic bias of the past and thus relatively disadvantaged private schools, but a reforming Labour government should relish that. Having made such a change, it would be palpably unfair to then revert back to the old system next year. Indeed, the smarter parents of the privately-educated would be looking to transfer their 16 and 17-year olds to the state sector. The independent school sector wouldn't disappear overnight, but it would probably rapidly shrink to focus on pre-14 education.

Though the Conservative government did act to provide business and income support, the manner in which it did so produced lots of omissions and anomalies that have led to individual hardship, particularly for those in the more "flexible" sectors of the economy that the Tories have historically lauded. The design of an across-the-board taper for the furlough scheme means that we are now facing the prospect of rapidly rising unemployment and poverty in a matter of weeks, affecting all sectors. The obvious opportunity for a Labour government would have been to cut the Gordian knot of wage support by introducing a universal basic income (and associated tax clawback for the employed) as a temporary measure. The cunning plan would be to allow this to run on naturally until the recession was over, rather than terminate on a specific date, which would inevitably lead to calls next year for it to be made permanent and for the rump of Universal Credit to be disassembled into separate, contingent benefits.

One reason for a UBI would be to make the churn in businesses easier. Rather than committing to propping up firms, a Labour government could argue for reduced state support for capital in favour of increased support for labour, the better to facilitate exit and entry. Failing firms could fail gracefully, while freed-up labour would have the confidence to reject poor quality and precarious jobs and could instead opt for further training or explore freelancing. Ceteris paribus, this should lead to an improvement in national productivity, though that may be initially obscured by the effects of the recession and the changes in working practices that the pandemic appears to be triggering. However, such an approach would also provide a more flexible and forgiving environment for those changes to work through and would also help maintain aggregate demand. A UBI would require reform of the taxation system were it to become a permanent feature, but that could be deferred for a couple of years to allow the principle to be established.

Just as the Second World War made salient both Beveridge's "five great evils" and the potential for change, so the pandemic has shone a brighter light on the vulnerabilities of the health and care sectors, the inequities of education and the precariousness of the economy, while also revealing that there is a magic money tree after all. Things could be different and the political battle leading up to the next general election is likely to focus on whose vision of change or continuity catches the electorate's imagination. For all the revolutionary talk of the sunny uplands of Brexit and the "levelling up" of the North of England, it has become apparent over the last 8 months that the Conservatives remain the party of entrenched privilege and social neglect. What is less obvious is whether Labour is still the party of reform and progress outside of neoliberal technocracy. In particular, you have to wonder why Keir Starmer isn't taking the opportunity afforded by the pandemic to build a public consensus for the sort of radical change that pushes beyond the 2017 and 2019 manifestos (National Broadband now appears a quite modest idea).

One of the characteristics of Labour's 1945 manifesto was that it was comprehensive, even if it was light on detail in many areas. At the time, this was seen as entirely appropriate to the circumstances: the UK needed root-and-branch reform and it was the broad thrust of policy that energised voters not the minutiae. In 2019, the party's manifesto was dismissed as over-stuffed and incredible. This was not just an unflattering comparison with the Tory's sketchy offer of "Get Brexit done", but a conservative lament against comprehensive change: a view apparently echoed by many in the Labour party, including the soi-disant "soft left". Where the two differed is that the 1945 version could skip the detail because much of it had already been publicly discussed, for example by the 1942 Beveridge Report and the plans for the NHS. Labour failed to adequately prepare the electorate between 2017 and 2019, but the pandemic has perhaps now achieved more in this regard than any number of reports and social media memes could. The question is, will Starmer build on this or will his critique remain "I would have done the same, just more competently".

Privilege and Merit

The news that Virgin Trains is to stop selling the Daily Mail is a pretty obvious distraction from season ticket price rises and the scandal of the East Coast franchise, however it does incidentally highlight the class association of the railways in popular discourse. It is important to note that while Virgin Trains offered the Daily Mail for sale to standard class passengers, it provided complimentary copies to first class passengers. The howls from Northcliffe House about "censorship" do not reflect the loss of the paltry revenue stream arising from the former, but the ending of the tacit endorsement entailed by the latter. In other words, this is about the loss of privilege rather than the denial of a human right and one that challenges the newspaper's claim to pre-eminence among the UK's middle-class readership. In claiming that its staff objected to the Daily Mail's content, Virgin Trains has endorsed the liberal activism of Stop Funding Hate (changing the world one informed purchase at a time), while stopping short of suggesting that its employees might have a say over its own offerings, such as its rip-off "free" Wi-Fi. In so doing, its implies that the Daily Mail may be less representative of "decent" opinion in Britain, which is an affront to the paper's self-image.

One point made with dull regularity when the annual price rises come round is that railways are a middle-class subsidy. This is true but irrelevant. So are roads and universities. Pretty much any public good tends to be exploited more effectively by the middle class, from the NHS to national parks, but that's not a sufficient reason to argue against public investment. The question should be whether the subsidy produces outcomes that benefit all. Railways bring wider gains for the economy and society than those that accrue to actual travellers. They allow for city agglomerations that enable larger and more specialised industries, which produces more jobs and higher average pay. The increased demand for rail travel over recent decades reflects the increasing proportion of service and professional jobs within the economy plus the related rise in property values in city centres. The result is more and more people needing to travel in from the suburbs or satellite towns. This is exacerbated in cities like London by the Green Belt, which obliges commuters to live further out, and by premium services like HS2 that seek to extend the outer limit of the commuter zone. Compared to the subsidy of the Green Belt, public spending on suburban rail travel is relatively modest.

One reason for emphasising the middle-class nature of rail travel is to suggest that the cost of nationalisation would disproportionately fall on the working class (and emblematic white-van drivers in particular) in the form of higher taxes, though as ever this avoids the broader question of incidence and the shift from wealth and income to consumption taxes. Public ownership of the railways is not a panacea, though it still has significant advantages over the use of private operators. What ultimately matters, as we saw in the 1970s and 80s, is the level of investment. The attraction of rail for both operators and financiers is the same: a natural monopoly with a guaranteed income stream. But a monopoly almost always under-invests, hence rail privatisation leads to a de facto state railway parasitised by rent-extractors focused on branding and public relations (hello, Richard Branson). The franchise model is particularly unsuited to railways because few operators can realistically bid, so there isn't a competitive market, and the strategic importance of rail transport means the state will always be on the hook, which allows private operators to bale out when their profits are threatened, as we have repeatedly seen in the UK.

The argument for introducing market discipline - that competition between suppliers will lead consumers to reveal their preferences - simply does not apply to railways. By dropping the Dail Mail, Virgin Trains is cannily giving the impression of a working market in which low sales have revealed its customers distaste for the paper: it has been judged on its merits. The same sort of thinking appears to lie behind the creation of the Office for Students, which has been in the news lately. The introduction of variable tuition fees has not led to the appearance of a dynamic price signal, largely because guaranteed student loans and earnings-related repayment mean that buyers aren't actually price-conscious (and accelerated two-year degree courses won't change that). Likewise, competition has not led to market exit by poor suppliers because supply, at the level of the individual college and within the limitations created by an annual buying round, is not elastic. University access remains a game of musical chairs in which some of the chairs are in a hard-to-reach annex. Like many other regulators, the job of the OfS will be to simulate competition in order to justify rent-extraction and to institutionally favour privileged suppliers such as Oxford and Cambridge.

The furore over Toby Young has been hitched to a variety of current phenomena, from Harvey Weinstein to campus free-speech, but the central argument concerns merit. To his liberal detractors, Young lacked both specific qualifications for the job and a reputation for probity and public service sufficient to be seen as one of "the great and good". This criticism not only elided the antagonistic purpose of the OfS but ignored the lesson of his father, Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy: that all elites are self-perpetuating and merit is consequently less objective than we imagine. The younger Young's defenders (wisely) did not try to big-up his unimpressive work with free schools but instead lauded his free-thinking and "caustic wit". His supposed merit was his iconoclasm, which shows how merit can easily be interpreted to suit any agenda. Young's role as the little boy confronted by a naked emperor was intended to help improve the higher education sector by forcing it to "think outside the box", but that necessarily entailed criticising the academic and public service elite who have defined the boundaries of that box up till now.

Coincidentally, Young's appointment came shortly after the resignation as a government advisor of Andrew Adonis, the meritocrat's meritocrat, which perhaps created a contrast that was a little too stark for (liberal) public taste. Indeed, you have to wonder why the suddenly-available Adonis wasn't considered as a last-minute candidate for the OfS board role, even if anything other than chair (a role he allegedly lobbied for) might be beneath his dignity. Not only is he impeccably neoliberal and well-versed in the sector but he went out of his way to criticise "fat cat" vice-chancellors last year. I suspect the answer is that Adonis might take the brief to introduce competition, as opposed to merely simulate it, too seriously. His claims that university expansion was a mistake and that the sector operates as a price cartel were perhaps a little too iconoclastic (not to mention questionable) at a time when the government was more interested in beasting "snowflake" students as part of a misbegotten culture war. Both Young and Adonis have been left without plum jobs, but I doubt they will lose the privilege of having their fervid opinions relayed by the UK press, from the Guardian to the Daily Mail.

The Office for Fuck's Sake

There are many reasons for criticising the odious Toby Young, but the crudity of his language (aka "caustic wit") is not one of them. He is, after all, a paid entertainer. If Frankie Boyle had got the gig with the new Office for Students, rightwing criticism of the Scottish comic's language would be equally beside the point. Likewise, Young's history of making derogatory comments about women or working class kids isn't a good look for someone who is supposed to further the interests of all students, but it isn't particularly germane to his role on a body that will be acting as a competition regulator for universities. As should be obvious from the makeup of the rest of the board, which has been successfully obscured by the focus on Young, this is a typical neoliberal agency intent on the further marketisation of higher education. There will be gender and class bias, but this will be structural rather than the result of Young's powers of persuasion. The reason why he is unsuitable for a position on the board of the OfS in its own terms is that he lacks any relevant experience of business or competition regulation. Being a journalist or setting up a free school are irrelevant achievements in this context.

Young is dim enough to perhaps not realise when is being played. The timing of the announcement of the appointment, one minute into the New Year, looks less like an attempt to bury bad news and more like a calculation that booze and the bank holiday would quickly drive the debate onto Twitter, which in turn meant that wider press coverage tended to be about the ensuing outrage rather than the remit of the OfS or the business-heavy composition of its board. If Young were to step down, this would be treated by many as a moral victory, while the OfS itself would get a free pass. The battle won, the war lost. You can see a similar dynamic at work when a Berkeley professor uses Twitter to explain how Donald Trump manipulates the media agenda through Twitter, thereby ignoring the more substantive damage being done in Congress. The Tories appear to have decided some months ago (I'm thinking specifically of the spat between Jeremy Hunt and Stephen Hawking) that they have little to lose in adopting an antagonistic media stance and much to gain in terms of distraction. The elevation of Toby Young is clearly part of a wider strategy.

The root problem here is liberal morality. A good example of this came on the same day as the OfS board announcement when John Harris penned a piece in the Guardian titled "Take it from the insiders: Silicon Valley is eating your soul". Harris imagines that the tendency of tech titans to restrict their own childrens' exposure to social media is a telling admission of their product's toxicity, like a beer baron insisting that his kids be shielded from alcohol, but all it really indicates is a retreat from a public social network to a reserved space of privilege (I doubt the kids are sitting bored at home). That liberal critics emphasise the supposed addictive properties of social media (Harris wheels out the trusty "dopamine hit") is just the usual criticism of the mass as weak-willed and incapable of self-control and thus of a piece with articles on New Year resolutions and detoxing. Thirty years ago the same articles were being written about the malign effects of television and the need to restrict childrens' viewing time. A hundred years ago children were being criticised for always having their noses in books.

Having diagnosed the problem to his own satisfaction, Harris espies a solution: "There is a possible way out of this, of course. It resides not in some luddite fantasy of an army of people carrying old Nokia phones and writing each other letters, but the possibility of a culture that actually embraces the idea of navigating the internet with a discriminating sensibility and an emphasis on basic moderation". That last word is being used in a dual sense: as an act of self-censorship and as advocacy of a middle way. What Harris doesn't explain is how we are to acquire a "discriminating sensibility". Playing Snake on a Nokia 3310, perhaps. If Facebook is increasingly creating a walled garden that shuts out the world ("let us discriminate for you"), Twitter remains much more of a public space open to riotous assembly, but it is one in which propriety and judgement are becoming ever more prominent, hence the increasing number of users who feel the need to broadcast their decisions to block or report others. This performative curation of one's own filter bubble looks suspiciously like a bigger dopamine hit than making a sarky comment beneath a blue tick mark's tweet.

Eric Posner of the Chicago Law School published Twenty Theses About Twitter last July. He starts by suggesting that "People sign up for Twitter for two reasons: to obtain information and to exert influence", but then goes on to show why this is a false prospectus. There are better sources of information and Twitter is a poor medium for making a case sufficient to change someone's mind. Posner's central thesis is one of self-indulgence:

7. Twitter’s real function is to enable people to obtain validation for their beliefs.
8. People send tweets with a single overriding purpose: to get the tweet "liked" or retweeted.
9. When your tweet is liked or retweeted, you enjoy a dopamine surge.

This may sound like a reduction of humanity to the status of lab rats, but Posner is no behaviourist. What he is suggesting is that the risk/reward dynamic of Twitter is so different to the "real world" of calculating utility maximisers that the online persona can undermine the offline:

16. In the non-virtual world, successful people take care to keep up impressions, for example, they avoid making controversial statements to friends, colleagues, and strangers except when unavoidable, and even then do so in a carefully respectful way.
17. In Twitter, the same people act as if their audience consisted of a few like-minded friends and forget that it actually consists of a diverse group of people who may not agree with them in every particular on politics, religion, morality, metaphysics, and personal hygiene.
18. Without realizing it, people who use Twitter damage the image of themselves that they cultivate in the non-virtual world.

In effect, Twitter is a drug that corrodes human capital through the collateral damage it does to social relations, much like cocaine. Of course this theory only holds for those people whose Twitter ID reflects their public persona and whose real world human capital is significant. While economic liberals like Posner stress the dopamine hit, which is essentially a transactional model that leaves the idea of preference intact, cultural liberals are more likely to focus on the corrosive effect of anonymity, hence the lasting popularity of the Ring of Gyges as a trope in modern analyses of the disinhibition that the Internet enables. The one focuses on a lack of self-restraint, the other on the circumvention of social constraint. To put it another way, Posner thinks the reward (the hit) is too cheap in the short-term and the delayed cost (damage to reputation) is being excessively discounted, while cultural liberals see anonymity as a form of free-riding. What they share is a belief that the price of social media should be higher, even though its nature (the need for data at scale and the reliance on advertising) demands that the service be provided free. Twitter is a pure market because it enables the expression and ranking of almost any individual preference, but it is "irresponsible" because it does so by undermining the price mechanism.

The low cost of entry of social media is a leveller in the sense that a "speech-act" of a nobody has the same form as that of a celebrity or professional commentator. In the offline world this is rare outside of public meetings - i.e. heckles - which is why such events are carefully managed, if not avoided. But just as the speaker at a lectern or in a pulpit has a structural advantage, so Twitter creates a hierarchy of regard through the number of followers and likes. A consequence of this is that holding others up to ridicule becomes a powerful tool for the powerful, on a par with having a column in the Spectator, but as the case of Toby Young shows, Twitter still retains the potential to empower "the mob". While many "nobodies" have helped excavate Young's more objectionable tweets, the press coverage on the outrage has inevitably concentrated on disobliging comments by other "slebs" or credentialled experts. And so the game goes on. Toby Young is obviously a charlatan and a fool, but that makes him all the more suitable for the role of a patsy. He must by now have twigged that he is the sacrificial offering for the inauguration of the OfS, so presumably he has also secured a suitable pay-off. I expect him to feature in a future honours list.

Payback Time

Less than a fortnight before she called the general election, Theresa May claimed that Labour's proposed policy to fund free primary school meals through VAT on private school fees was evidence that a government led by Jeremy Corbyn "would bankrupt Britain". Not much thought seems to have gone into that response, considering that Labour's proposal was cost-neutral and the amount in play was tiny, which perhaps reflected that the Prime Minister's mind was already elsewhere. Since the election, the debate on education policy has jumped from the wisdom of scrapping free school lunches and reintroducing grammars to scrapping tuition fees and reintroducing the education maintenance allowance. Support among Tory MPs for taking food out of the mouths of babes appears to have waned while some, such as Damian Green, are admitting that tuition fees are an "issue". That said, veterans of the coalition government that raised fees from £3,000 to £9,000 in 2012 are firmly resisting any backsliding, largely on the grounds that free tuition represents an unfair subsidy. As Michael Gove put it: "If you don’t benefit from a university education, you shouldn’t have to pay additionally to support those who do".

The premise behind this is that non-graduates do not benefit from the education of graduates. This is obviously wrong in particular - a non-graduate may directly benefit from the ability of a graduate doctor or nurse to save their life - but it is also wrong in general. There is a strong correlation between average educational attainment and national GDP, and strong evidence that graduates are not just more productive themselves but that they help raise productivity among non-graduate co-workers as well, thereby producing higher incomes all round. While the state obviously pursues an ideological agenda through education, and religious indoctrination is still a factor in school and curriculum management, the primary objective of modern government is to ensure that students have the skills demanded by industry. That increasingly means analytical and data manipulation skills, hence the expansion in further education since the 1990s. A secondary objective is to cajole university research, through systems like the Research Excellence Framework, towards areas that may ultimately be of benefit to the national economy. The UK's investment in R&D remains low, relative to other developed nations, which means that the higher education sector (which accounts for about a quarter of the total) is critical to any future above-trend growth in investment. A coherent and comprehensive industrial strategy would seek to expand this.

While Secretary of State for Education during the coalition years, Gove emphasised economic value as much as the development of moral fibre, even going so far as to insist that all schoolkids should learn to code while wearing ties. That might sound like a joke, but it is representative of Gove's ambition to reconcile the old instrumentality of "traditional intellectual disciplines" (learning Latin will get you a job on a broadsheet) with the new instrumentality of "modern technological innovation" (learning computer science will get you a job building apps). In reality, further education largely inculcates general skills (chief of which is how to pass as middle-class) and thereby provides a series of signals to employers in respect of socialisation and pliability. The instrumentality can be over-done. Just as it is foolish to praise the often anti-intellectual culture of the traditional British university, so it is idiotic to pretend that we're now teaching every child to code (if they're interested, they'll teach themselves). Of course Gove is a journalist, not an educationalist, as is Jo Johnson, the current Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation. Johnson minor echoes Gove: "Abolishing tuition fees & funding unis out of general taxation would be regressive, benefiting [the] richest graduates".

What this populist spin highlights is a confusion among Conservatives as to the dynamic behind the growing unpopularity of tuition fees and student debt. Gove believes that the ressentiment of the non-graduate can be deployed in defence of the status quo, forgetting that many non-graduates have children who already have (or are resigned to acquiring) hefty student debts. Similarly, the Tory media struggle to see past free tuition as anything other than a bribe to secure the youth vote. The issue for new graduates is not simply the quantum of debt but the sense of being trapped: either stuck in a low-wage job and so unable to pay down the debt at all or seeing a portion of a modest pay packet disappear every month to service a capital amount that barely seems to shrink. And that feeling of intimidation spreads from children to parents, particularly those used to fretting about money. This is not something that upper middle-class parents like Gove (despite his more humble origins) are likely to properly appreciate. They either have the spare cash to pay up-front and so avoid the need for a loan, or they can be confident that their child, who graduated from Oxbridge rather than an ex-poly, will soon be earning enough to pay off the loan within a couple of years. For some, funding an unpaid internship is more of an issue. Telling poorer students that they may never have to pay the debt back if they don't earn enough over the next 30 years is not much of a consolation.

Given the likelihood that tuition fees will continue to rise ahead of wages, and that interest rates on the debt will probably remain in advance of inflation and may even rise further (the government is now busy selling-off the loan-book in tranches), the looming spectre of future student debt is beginning to worry parents with much younger children. In part this is because of those parents own experience, having either "got in under the wire" and enjoyed the last of free tuition and 100% maintenance grants in the 80s or been among the first to incur a (then modest) debt in the 90s. If we date the cultural impact of student loans from 1998, when tuition fees were first introduced and most maintenance grants were converted to loans, then we are about to see the first generation of kids applying to university whose parents will include some (if very few) that still have outstanding loans from their own college years. The post-2012 point is that the number of still-indebted parents will grow as fees increase over time and full repayment becomes more difficult. The occurrence of inter-generational student debt could turn out to be significantly bigger than that of inter-generational, long-term joblessness (that famous chimera).

This goes back to a point I made in an earlier post: the "Thatcherite denial of society places increased stress on that traditional redoubt of conservatism, the family. The fairness of distribution between the generations becomes a point of potential conflict within the home (all too often a literal struggle over property ownership), rather than a social conflict negotiated through politics in which the family's interests are largely common. A likely reaction to this is for more of the older generation to become politicised, in the sense of deliberately pushing the issue of distribution back into the social sphere, as the best means of advancing their offspring's interests without familial grief". While housing as a point of friction has the potential to be ameliorated through inheritance, the only solution to the psychological burden of student debt in families of modest means is for parents to help pay off their childrens' loans early. Telling them that they're wasting their money and should be comfortable with long-term debt falls on deaf ears in an environment where paying down the national debt is considered a moral necessity. I'm guessing, but I suspect parents who do this are disproportionately non-graduate Daily Mail readers, not graduates who read The Financial Times. 

In other words, the Tories "divisive" stance on this issue is probably alienating many of their natural supporters. The claim that non-graduates gain no benefit from the education of graduates jars with common sense and sympathy when that graduate is your own child. Just as the "intergenerational conflict" around housing obscures class - it is the children of social housing tenants who face the greatest barriers to getting a foot on the property ladder today - so the graduate/non-graduate dichotomy obscures age and the generational watershed that occurred with the expansion of higher education in the 90s. The Tories recast tuition fees in 2012 as an aspirational mortgage secured against talent, but austerity has made many parents a lot less confident about their children's future income prospects, and that's on top of the continuing class and gender inequalities of employment opportunity and pay. If the dementia tax was popularly interpreted as a demand for the payback of house price windfalls, student loans are now being interpreted as debt bondage but without the upside of a lottery. The Tories' problem is not just that they cannot easily articulate a "socialised" tuition funding system but that their policies are hurting families, and they seem largely oblivious to this.