You’d have thought ministers would have wanted to celebrate the UK signing the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. After all, it’s been a while since there’s been any good news and the country could do with some cheering up. All we get to hear is how Rishi Sunak isn’t meeting any of his five priorities. Surely he must be getting a bit fed up with a life of continuous failure.
I mean, how often does the government get to boast about agreeing a deal that could boost GDP by as much as 0.08%? Just an accounting error away from actually costing the UK 0.08%. Imagine the excitement of joining a trading group on the other side of the world and paying for the privilege! That’s the kind of Brexit bonus we can all get behind.
But let’s be positive and assume we rake in the full 0.08%. Days of plenty. Then we’d only need another 50 equivalent international trade deals to offset the 4% hit to GDP that most economists have forecast as a result of Brexit. Suddenly it all makes sense. Decades of negotiation and a lifetime of red tape to get back to a slightly worse position than when we were part of the EU. That’s what I call a win. Big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams. Meet me in the land of hope and dreams.
Curiously though the government chose to ignore this apotheosis of post-Brexit nirvana. Presumably it thought the UK was not prepared for a collective spontaneous display of ecstasy. So it had to look elsewhere to fill in the grid for the dog days of summer.
Something to make it look like a government that wasn’t really doing anything actually had a vague sense of direction. Even if it was going round and round in circles. If Sunak had any sense of dignity he’d have put himself out of his misery months ago. But no, we creep on at this petty pace from day to day till the last syllable of recorded time. Or recess, as we call it.
Which is how the education secretary, Gillian Keegan, came to be in the Commons on Monday afternoon to give a ministerial statement on higher education. Anything to fill the time. And Keegan can do that better than most as she has an unshakeable belief in her own talent. No one thinks more highly of Gillian than Gillian. Even when she hasn’t really got anything of value to say. Especially when she hasn’t really got anything of value to say.
Keegan began by bigging up UK universities. They were the best in the world, she said. But some of them were letting the side down by offering “low-value” degrees. Students were being offered a promise of a better tomorrow only to be badly let down. The irony that this was precisely what her own government has been doing for years rather bypassed her. So maybe it had all been a cunning ploy on the universities’ behalf to prepare their students for the real world. Rack up tens of thousands in student debt only to be broke for the rest of your life.
But it wasn’t entirely clear how Keegan was choosing to categorise the degrees she wanted to cap. Or cut entirely. She mumbled something about 66 universities running “substandard” degrees but she couldn’t clarify just how she was judging them to have failed. She couldn’t say what rate of dropout was unacceptable or what level of starter salary was acceptable for a graduate. Presumably all health and social care degrees will be axed as most staff in that sector will never earn much more than minimum wage. And we could probably lose most nursing degree courses as well on the same grounds.
The shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, called this out for what it was. Culture war politics. There was always going to be a higher dropout rate among students coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. That was the price of levelling up and increasing access to higher education. And social class was the biggest factor in determining which graduates went to to the best paid jobs. Take Rish! himself. By every metric – including the ones he had set himself – he was a total failure as prime minister. Did that mean that Oxford should cut PPE from its degree course offerings? Come to think of it …
“We want quality over quantity,” Keegan protested. People should be encouraged into apprenticeships. University wasn’t for everyone. But the number of apprenticeships has fallen by more than half since the Tories have been in government. A number of Conservative MPs voiced their approval. It was perfectly acceptable for other people’s children to become bricklayers just as long as theirs didn’t. And it was quite wrong that some universities were deliberately employing extra stupid academics to run useless degree courses for students who were certifiably thick and wouldn’t have a prayer at a decent college.
Not all Tories saw it quite the minister’s way, however. They weren’t prepared to be dragged into a fight not of their making. Peter Bottomley observed that many people training for a religious vocation could expect to earn next to nothing. Did that make their courses a waste of time? Kit Malthouse stood up for philosophers and poets. Keegan sneered. She has a totally transactional view of the world. Vicars, imams and poets are all a waste of space. What the world needed was more Goldman Sachs rejects.
The Liberal Democrats’ Munira Wilson pointed out this was all a load of nonsense. There were no parameters and in any case the Office for Students already had the powers to restrict numbers on courses it didn’t think offered value for money. So Keegan had merely announced something that had already been announced.
“Ahem,” said the education secretary. “Not everything I’ve announced has been previously announced.” She couldn’t say exactly what was new though. Not that any of it mattered. This had all been largely symbolic anyway. Performative politics. A statement about a statement. Of something that would probably never happen. Maybe two courses would be capped or cut in five years’ time if the Tories won the next election. Much like those 40 hospitals that were never getting built.
Come the end, Tory Brexiter James Duddridge rose to make a point of order. The whole of Brexit was at risk because some packages were being checked at the Northern Ireland border. The country was asleep at the wheel. “Government whips suggested I take a week’s holiday,” he cried. The whips had a point. Parliament should have stopped weeks ago.
Depraved New World by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £16.99) is available to pre-order. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
