The Conservative manifesto released yesterday came as no surprise. It merely reinforced the tax cutting agenda but raised the question about how the plans would be funded. The further cut to National Insurance follows the planned path to abolishing it altogether. In the meantime, we cannot expect any relief for hard pressed students and universities more cuts are planned. It’s amazing that a Conservative administration has alienated most of the Higher Education establishment whilst failing to see that the current problems are the government’s own fault. The manifesto does not offer hope or a solution.
The offer from the Conservatives is centred on skills and apprenticeships. The simple idea is to deter young people from university and channel them to employers and training with the promise that “Our plan to give young people the opportunities and skills they need”. This will be achieved by aiming to,
“Fund 100,000 high-quality apprenticeships for young people, paid for by curbing the number of poor-quality university degrees that leave young people worse off”.
Even that rings hollow when the boast is,
“The Conservatives have prioritised apprenticeships after they were neglected under Labour”.
The evidence doesn’t stack up. The number of apprenticeships has been declining for over ten years under a Conservative administration along with funding cuts to colleges (Figure 1). There should be an admission of failure surely.
Undermining universities.
This simple statement sums up the ongoing strategy.
“We believe in giving young people the best possible start to their adult lives and going to university is not the only route to success”.
It undermines years of effort to improve social mobility through widening access to university. It is raw ‘social engineering’ aimed at preserving the well-off elite that the rest serve.
In a further admission of a previous failed policy the strategy goes on with an overt threat to the existence of institutions who went along with earlier plans now abandoned.
“We will fund this by changing the law to close university courses in England with the worst outcomes for their students. Courses that have excessive drop-out rates or leave students worse off than had they not gone to university will be prevented from recruiting students by the universities regulator. This will protect students from being missold and the taxpayer from having to pay where the graduate can’t”.
And they they put the boot in with no concession to inadequate student funding, excessive hours in part time jobs and a huge expansion in numbers with too few resources and staff.
“And we will work with universities to ensure students get the contact hours they are promised and their exams get marked”.
It’s frankly insulting and destroys the wider reputation of UK Universities. Maybe that’s the plan as part of a strategy to deter foreign students. That seems to be going well and could lead to the collapse of some institutions. This can’t help much if the plan is to attract the most talented students.
“We will increase all visa fees and remove the student discount to the Immigration Health Surcharge to raise more money for public services”.
A time-bomb has been primed.
Many young voters might not have realised the significance of the further 2% cut in National Insurance to them. It is another reckless step as,
“A further downpayment on our long-term ambition to abolish National Insurance”.
This move will ultimately bring down the welfare state and the ‘social contract’ that has existed since 1947. The state pension would ultimately collapse leaving a vacuum that could only be filled by private pension funds and employer contributions. The aim obviously. But this move takes the prize.
“Cut taxes to support the self-employed by abolishing the main rate of self-employed National Insurance entirely by the end of the Parliament”.
While for most graduates entering the job market there may seem to be a short-term gain, the longer-term loss would be catastrophic. The self employed would not pay while their state pension is still protected. How many employees would accept paying National Insurance into a fund that protects pensions for those who did not pay in.
The overall impression is one of despair at an overt ‘social engineering’ project that sets back years of social mobility efforts and removes the chances for many talented young people simply because they cannot afford it. Gone are the failed efforts of social mobility and levelling up set out in earlier manifestos of 2017 and 2019. The Sutton Trust summed up the Conservative social mobility offering as,
“There is little sign of any such vision in the 2024 version”.
The author, Mike Larkin, retired from Queen’s University Belfast after 37 years teaching Microbiology, Biochemistry and Genetics.