Adonis, A Donkey and A Donut

For reasons I can't even being to grasp, this summer has seen UK Higher Education under attack from all directions, and particularly from the Narcissus-like “Architect of Fees”, Labour Peer Andrew Adonis.

He's criticised fees without seemingly knowing very much about them other than headline costs, vice chancellor and senior staff pay (he does have a point - some of them receive ridiculous levels of remuneration), and most irksome of all, academics and their so-called “three-month summer holidays”

Marking? Feedback? Boards? Research? Admin? Preparing? Obviously, these things are all done on a beach over cocktails, or in some Iberian café while the kids argue over which straw donkey grandma would prefer as a present, but at least we in the sector do tend to spend at least a little time trying not to look like, well, donkeys.....

He's followed up his ridiculous accusations of our idleness and privilege for 25% of the year (or more? who knows?) with an attempt to report the Committee of University Chairs to the Metropolitan Police for alleged crimes of conspiracy and cover-up in dealing with Freedom of Information requests after it advised members on how they should respond to Adonis’s enquiries.

It wouldn't have taken much research - maybe he could have asked one of us academics to do it in between rubbing tanning lotion on one another - to find out that most English universities are regulated as exempt charities and that even a cursory look at the law will show that the charge of criminality is utterly baseless.

Joining him now in an ill-judged campaign to undermine the finest higher education system on the planet (not just my opinion - I go all over the world, and academics in foreign institutions are consistent in their praise of it, and puzzlement at what a succession of recent governments have been doing) is something called UK 2020.

This is apparently a "think-tank" run/administered/convened by the Conservative MP Owen Paterson based on “concerns expressed by numerous friends who are parents of university students” which has announced that UK HE operates a “cartel” conspiring to rig fees and ensure that students get poor value for money.

Now if only this set of ignorant buffoons had waited until all we idle academics had come back from our incredibly long holidays, then their report might have got an interested and concerned audience?

We might then have put some effort into preparing for the coming year to assuage our guilt at doing so little, for so much, to the benefit of so few...

Opportunity Knocking

I’ve just had my first door-knocking of the general election campaign, and have to admit that the activist’s introductory claim to be "getting out and about before people got sick of election/campaigning/etc" did elicit a more favourable response than cold callers normally receive on Saturday mornings.

Anyway, as I live in an area where the sitting Labour MP has a marginal majority and favoured Remain in last year’s referendum, but with a local electorate which voted to Leave, the Liberal Democrats appear to have identified an opportunity to position themselves as the natural opposition to the sitting government on the subject of Brexit, or at least that’s what my visitor was trying to claim anyway.

Admittedly, as just less than half of the national electorate voted Remain in last year’s referendum, it is very plausible that a significant proportion of them could well be attracted by a party proposing a clear and coherent alternative to the government’s plans for leaving the European Union, however, as my doorstep conversation confirmed: the Liberal Democrats don’t actually have one.

It’s not a particularly challenging analytical exercise to conclude that the Labour Party’s policy over Brexit is so convoluted that very few, if any, of their MPs appear to understand what it is. Tim Farron’s representatives (this one at least), on the other hand, are up-front in their desire for a second referendum, but when I asked "on what exactly", our conversation got a little more interesting.

Now I don’t know whether the obfuscation is deliberate party policy, or whether someone has decided that a lack of clarity will help to generate local votes, but it turns out that the second referendum promise is not based on whether Britain should leave the EU: it would be on whatever deal the British government eventually strikes. Or in other words, some sort of decision on whether the UK should take the Brexit terms agreed by the government, or remain in the EU until there’s an arrangement in place that the electorate can accept.

I also don’t know (and neither did the person canvassing for my support) whether Article 50 can actually be revoked now our PM has triggered it, and so can’t say if it’s even possible that any popular rejection of a future deal could involve Britain staying in the EU, but if staying is a possibility, what incentive does the EU have to offer any sort of acceptable deal if it wants to keep the UK?

Theoretically, the Liberal Democrats are well-placed to exploit the chaotic "leadership" of the Labour Party, not least with regards to the desires of Remainers, but they really need to rethink their stance on EU membership...