EDUCATION: Learning the right lessons?
Iain Duncan Smith, his party and tuition fees
Does it still count as news when Iain Duncan Smith has another go at re-launching the unsteady hulk he still, apparently, commands?
Well, under normal circumstances, probably not — best, really, to avert one’s gaze from the lurching passage down the slipway, the mutinous or simply frightened faces of the crew and finally the inevitable disintegration the moment the vessel makes contact with the sharp tides of political reality. Today’s University of London speech, though, is different for at least two reasons. The first and least remarkable of these, it must be said, is one of timing. Clare Short’s resignation was so predictable, so emetically self-righteous, so adeptly swatted aside and ultimately so thoroughly unimportant as to leave political commentators casting around for something, anything more substantial; making The Quiet Man seem relevant takes some doing, but with her ubiquitous self-justifying whinging, Ms Short has made a fair stab at it. The second reason, on the other hand, is nothing short of remarkable. Put bluntly, Mr Duncan Smith has articulated several unapologetically Conservative policies, even if one has to scrape away an accretion of tendentious language in order to get at them. It is, in other words, an heartening day for Conservatives, as well as a pleasing opportunity for left-wing commentators to get their teeth into real contention. Or to put it another way, even if the Tory ship is riddled with rot and insubordination and is making its uncertain progress under rather strange colours, at least for once it seems to be moving in something like the right direction.
First, though, what about that tendentious language? Mr Duncan Smith called his speech ‘A Fair Deal for Everyone’, which sounds more than anything like a possible answer from a multiple-choice quiz on failed North American social policies of the past century. At the same time it has the additional defect of bearing no relation to the content of the speech itself, which in fact is in large part about providing an appealing deal to a lucky minority of the electorate. Mr Duncan Smith rounded this off by making reference to Disraeli, pledging to ‘rebuild this country as one nation’ — an odd remark from a man who won’t allow the word ‘Tory’ to be used in his presence. Still, it has to be said that however transparent the cynicism or unnerving the inappropriateness of this rhetoric, more than one journalist has already found it woozily persuasive. The BBC’s World At One, for example, portrayed Mr Duncan Smith’s new policies as marking a sharp turn away from traditional conservatism towards more ‘touchie feelie’ values — this, in a speech that, according to the BBC itself, called for ‘patient passports’, increased police numbers, a hotting-up of the war on drugs, education vouchers, lower taxes, and a decrease in the number of students entering higher education. More than anything, I think this comes down to laziness the part of the press-release-reading classes: if John Redwood wants lower taxes it’s Thatcherite, backward-looking and thus inherently doomed, whereas if Damian Green wants a subsidy for middle class aspiration, it’s something else altogether.
The education portion of the speech, as far as it went, was simple enough. Mr Duncan Smith made reference to a proposal, launched in another disconcerting volte face by Tory Reform Group veteran Damian Green, for the abolition of that Daily Telegraph bogeyman, the Office for Fair Access, which was recently set up by the government in order to regulate the relative proportions of state and private students entering higher education. The government had additionally pledged to work for the day in which least half of all British young people would study at university. Mr Duncan Smith explicitly rejected this target. Most eye-catchingly, though, he also promised to scrap tuition fees, returning the responsibility for footing the bill to central government. But won’t this latter proposal, costing an estimated £700 million, raise taxes? Apparently not, since if the university sector is not forced to expand at the rate projected by the government, a savings of £485 million will occur, while shutting down OFFA and related measures will apparently save more than £200 million. It need hardly be said that both the Labour Party and the Liberals have poured scorn on these sums, as circumstances demand they should. That, though, is hardly the point, since as everyone involved must know, the possibility that Conservatives will have to deliver on these promises any time soon is remote in the extreme. Instead, like the references to Disraeli, the compulsory genuflection before the so-called public services and the equally compulsory appeal to opportunity and meritocracy, these proposals are, as much as anything else, symbolic, while the difference lies in the specificity of the audience with whom such symbols might be expected to resonate.
Remember middle class, middle-brow Middle England? Before Cchange & Co. took to denouncing it for its culpable failings (its supposed lack of ‘diversity’, its set ideas, its — well, conservatism) it used to be seen as the bedrock of Tory electoral support, and still — presumably, due to the set quality of its ideas etc — it wearily turns up to sell preserves, knock on doors and generally disport itself in the Conservative interest, no matter how energetic the attempts of an invariably urban, notionally libertarian, unconvincingly cosmopolitan elite within the Party to discourage it from doing so. So if today was remarkable for one thing, it was the frankness with which Mr Duncan Smith tried to repair relations with his despised and abused core vote. Forget the fig-leaf of language, forget Disraeli. All over Surrey, through the green lanes of Berkshire and the more snobbish bits of Kent, middle class parents who have been lying awake at nights worrying about funding yet another year of higher education for young Toby or Olivia are, perhaps, tonight breathing a sigh of relief, confident for the first time in ages that the Conservative Party has any cognisance of the world of fear and aspiration in which they actually live, let alone any desire to help. As for Toby and Olivia themselves, although party modernisers may hope that the policy is aimed at pleasing them, in fact young people are much more comfortable with debt than their parents will ever be. These are grown-up policies, targeted at a distinctly anxious, fee-paying, mortage-holding, tax-averse, grown-up demographic.
And indeed, although concrete information is lacking, I suspect that Mr Duncan Smith’s other proposals — his references to ‘patient passports’, 40,000 [sic] more police, less tax, better value for money in the public services, an ‘asylum quota system’ and more secure retirement — are all aimed at reassuring and reconnecting with this same audience. Now, even at the crass and frankly discreditable level of electoral expediency, one might think this was an unarguably sound strategy. As anyone who has followed the Marks & Spencer share price over the past decade or who watched the demise of Yardley’s will tell you, it’s a foolish retailer who ignores his core market while chasing after someone else’s customers. Yet in recent years, a strand of thinking has developed so prodigiously as by now to have become almost conventional, at least amongst the broadsheet papers. It argues that since Tony Blair has won two elections with large parliamentary majorities (if only a minority of the actual vote), and since at least some of these votes must have come from Middle England, it thus follows that Middle England has — rather suddenly, it must be said — become profoundly and ineradicably Blairite, and thus in order for the Conservatives to ‘win back’ these votes (as opposed to, ‘get out the votes which are naturally theirs’) the Conservatives must adopt Blairite protective camouflage in order to lull the stupid voters into thinking that they are actually just like Blair, but also somehow better. (How that last phrase is to work in practice has, alas, never been made entirely clear.)
For what it's worth, the obvious alternative to this strand of thinking would instead emphasise the unparalleled and enduring success of the Conservative Party between 1979 and 1997, the degree to which New Labour have reframed themselves as small-c conservatives (allowing a rump Old Left to play the party of pantomime Opposition) and the unflattering contrast between Majorite self-doubt (the repeal of the Community Charge, all that ‘classless society’ business, these endless self-flagellating 'relaunches') and virtually anything else going. It would go on to imply that the most unanswerable challenge to New Labour is not an I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-New-Labour ersatz version, but rather, a set of self-confident Tory positions grounded not on time expensively expended in the company of focus groups, but instead on an instinctive sense of what is most desirable for the sort of people who are likely to find themselves within the fold of the Tory Party. It is in this sense that Mr Duncan Smith seems to me to have done a wise and downright helpful thing today. As for the specifics of his proposed educational reforms, of course, it is possible to express mixed views.
Mr Duncan Smith is, I think, right in implying that the infinite extension of ‘access’ to higher education is not, per se, a Good Thing. There are various reasons for this. First of all we might as well dismiss the notion that more education inevitably makes the recipient better off. The harsh truth is that whatever its content, in the language of economics, education still functions as a positional good. So while in a land where, say, only two percent of the population holds a BA degree, having a BA degree is prestigious and probably guarantees all sorts of employment and social status advantages, while in a land where virtually everyone has a BA — well, someone still has to flip the Big Macs, mow the lawns and claim the unemployment benefits. Obviously it matters a bit what this higher education contains, what it costs, who pays for it and what it produces — and indeed, this is the vaguely utilitarian language in which New Labour tends to discuss higher education, along with references to 'skilling' [sic] and economic advantage. Unfortunately such language has at its grammatical heart the conviction that education is both a matter of public, rather than private concern, and that its chief purpose is one of public, rather than private benefit. At this point state funding becomes all but inevitable, bringing in its wake the necessity for state interference. Mr Duncan Smith will disappoint some in his party by what appears, at some level, to be a return to greater centralised funding. Those of us who remember (as Mr Green doubtless does) the struggle for 'loans not grants' in the great days of the 1980s may well see this as a retrograde step. But looked at from another direction, there is also quite a lot to like about the new Conservative proposals on higher education.
In particular, the demolition of OFFA, the implied rebuff to using education as a means of social engineering, the deflation of student numbers and the general blunting of the tools with which the state might hope to shape higher education — these are all to be welcomed. In fact it was only relatively recently that the state showed any interest in education full stop, other of course than in reinforcing its confessional integrity, and it is hard to argue that the result was in any way worse than the incontinent mess of pointless ex-polys and nere-do-well degree-factories that exists today. And it remains the case that the state really ought to stay out of higher education entirely. Even at a utilitarian level, the excuses for such intervention are flimsy to the point of disintegration. It is incontrovertibly the case that the vast majority of higher education is in no sense directly vocational — and how could it be, in a society where people swap between careers more freely than ever before? Nor, as Charles Clarke would be the first to point out, is it really about knowledge for its own sake, which can certainly be acquired as well outside a university context as within it. The reality is both more crude and more complicated. Higher education is about lots of things: a sanctioned coming-of-age experience, a chance to live away from home in a sheltered environment, a social and geographical melting-pot, a launch-pad for social and geographic mobility, a chance to meet enough friends and enemies to last a lifetime, a place in which to get all sorts of mad notions out of one’s system with minimal long-term damage, an opportunity to impress one's future employers with the force of one's application or alternatively, with one's effortless brilliance — and, perhaps first and foremost, a self-defining statement about the sort of person one is, or intends to become.
All these things are, in their own way, potentially desirable at the individual level, and perhaps some of them even are desirable at the social one. But it is a basic Conservative premise that in general people are perfectly able to bring about desired ends without the irruption of the national state into their arrangements, and it is hard to see how any of these ends are so pressing as to constitute an exception to the rule. In other words there seems to me no very good reason why the state should pay for anyone’s education, higher or otherwise. Ideally, the universities should be cut free from the terrible burden of government control under which they labour. They should be free to set their own fees — varied as radically as they like from course to course — and engaging in whatever level of positive or negative discrimination they find compatible with the purposes for which their institution has been founded. Obviously in the short term the harm done in terms of individual lives would be considerable, but it is precisely this harm that would generate the volume of horror-stories necessary to prompt once again the establishment of bursaries, scholarships, prizes and specialist institutions which flourished so notably in the nineteenth century and took so much effort to kill off in the twentieth. It is not hard to imagine a system of higher education in which rich-but-thick socialites subsidise poor-but-clever and perhaps socially mobile swots, in which hard-core and charmless vocational degrees coexist with protracted investigations into Old Norse irregular verb forms or the deconstruction of gender identities in south-west Vanuatu, and in which no one tries to discourage the specialisation, arbitrariness or eccentricity that can matter as much to the strength of an institution as anything more concrete or target-led.
It would be, of course, ridiculous to expect Mr Duncan Smith to go so far, even if he agreed with even ten percent of the vision set forth above, which I don’t imagine is very likely. On the other hand, the policy he articulates is a first step without which none of these further developments would be possible. In suggesting, however indirectly and from whatever amount of personal experience, that not everyone needs a university degree in order to live a happy and productive life, he is acting with greater boldness and resolution than has generally been the case, while in appealing both to the desire for a smaller tax burden and greater family and personal advantage on the part of his most obvious natural constituency, he is doing a self-confident, sensible and recognisably Tory thing, too. The Left, in his own party as well as elsewhere, will hate it, but for many Conservatives his words will ring with a sense of hope all the more poignant for its unfamiliarity in recent years. They’ll love it, and rightly so. The same goes for much of what was said in the University of London speech, and for more that was not said but was richly if obliquely implied. Mr Duncan Smith spoke as a Conservative, and it sounded very good indeed. If this is the sort of approach he intends to following in the run-up to the next general election, he may well actually recapture some votes in the process. If so, let's hope that he, and the Party and its commentators, take away the right lessons.
Arnold Hubbard was born in Saskatchewan. He has endured higher education in Canada, the United States, South Africa and the United Kingdom. He is now a university lecturer living in London.
Arnold Hubbard, May 13, 2003 08:25 PM