On Monday, as part of their ongoing fabricated culture war, a desperate Conservative government declared an incoherent assault on “rip-off” degrees. But there is no one left in the duffer-stuffed Conservative government clever enough to defend the idiotic soundbite that is “Crackdown on Mickey Mouse degrees!” And hasn’t Mickey Mouse suffered enough, being painted over by Robert Jenrick, without having his educational opportunities taken away from him too?
The task of eating a half-baked policy pie full of untested opinion goulash live on TV on a Monday morning fell to the hapless MP for Harlow, education minister Robert Halfon, a man who occupies so many contradictory positions as to appear almost without corporeal form, like a Happy Shopper bag swirling round and round in a gust of wind in a bin store behind one of those adult shops on the A1.
In 2013 Halfon voted against same-sex marriage, but in 2019 he voted in favour of same-sex marriage, but only in Northern Ireland, which didn’t seem any more gay than the rest of the UK last time I visited. Presumably, Halfon doesn’t mind what people get up to as long as it’s behind an informal trade border, and in the privacy of their own island, or quarter of an island in this case.
Halfon also voted remain in 2016, so well done to him, but then said he would vote leave in a second referendum, the twat, making him perhaps the only person, faced with the evidence of Brexit’s catastrophic failure and disastrous impact on Britain’s future prospects, to decide to support it having previously opposed it.
To be fair, Halfon’s been good on school meals and utility company profiteering, in the same way as a stopped clock is right twice daily, but is clearly cannon fodder in the Conservatives’ War Against Intelligence ™ ®. Indeed Halfon folded like wet toilet paper in the face of an uncharacteristically tenacious grilling from Susanna Reid on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. (And this toilet paper that is the same as Robert Halfon also has some diarrhoea on it, in case you are wondering. And it is a cat’s diarrhoea too.)
So forensic was Reid, that Richard Madeley just sat back, the foolish mouth that has been the source of so much unintended joy tightly shut, as he enjoyed the spectacle, like a ruddy-faced farmer who’s just set his jack russell terrier on an enfeebled rat.
The Conservatives’ assault on Mickey Mouse degrees hinged on the idea that people should do “good” degrees. But those charged with explaining the policy had been sent into the field without any clear idea of what the word “good” actually meant here, a simple error that anyone who had done a good degree should have picked up on.
“What we’re trying to do is make sure that those who do degrees have good outcomes when they finish their university degree,” Halfon opined. “Would working in a shop be a good outcome for someone who had a history degree?” asked Reid, stalking her prey like a bearded pard in a medieval bestiary. “It might be,” Halfon answered. “It depends what the progression in the shop is. Is there a progression to higher wages in that shop, depending on what job it is that you are doing? We want good progression, we want good earnings and we want good skills.”
Reid smells victory. The word “good” has been bandied about meaninglessly and carelessly by the fool Halfon. Is a “good” job only a job that pays well, or is it possible to dream of a better world where value is not innately tied to money? Not so long ago, the idea was you were privileged to attend a university because you were now one of Thee Ancient Custodians of Knowledge Charged With Enlightening Thee Worlde Beyonde, saving humanity from sliding back into the dark ages. But then Blair said “The more you learn, the more you earn”, made education a business transaction and ruined it. Reid’s furrowed face, clever like one of those tiny velvet monkeys that figure out how to open a Kinder Egg that has fallen out of an Italian aircraft, suggested she appeared to consider making this case. But her eyes were on a bigger prize.
“So people getting higher and higher wages would be the definition of a good outcome,” Reid began, as Halfon surely sensed doom bearing down on him like Catherine the Great’s horse, “and yet you as a government are saying don’t go and ask for higher wages because that’s going to wreck the economy … because it fuels inflation.” Halfon tried to Sunak his way out of it, answering a different question to the one asked – “Well I am aware that we have a very difficult economic challenge. That’s why we have put £97bn on helping people with the cost of living, giving every family over around over [sic] £3,000 a year” – but stopped short of saying his main priority was to stop the boats.
This current crop of Conservatives will never understand the idea that education, and indeed culture, can have an abstract value beyond the financial. The 12 Conservative culture secretaries who have bulldozed their way through the last decade include such oafs as Michelle Donelan, Nadine Dorries, Oliver Dowden, Matt Handcock and Sajid Javid, the last of whom actually acted to protect ticket touts reselling publicly subsidised seats at a profit for personal gain because they were “legitimate entrepreneurs”.
Meanwhile, in April, the Financial Times reported evidence suggesting “A growing number of voters are graduates and they are becoming less likely to back the Conservatives, threatening to redraw the country’s electoral map”. Is it any wonder they don’t want anyone to know anything, to understand anything, to think?
Stewart’s Basic Lee show’s ongoing tour dates are here. A fun-size ™ ® version of the show is at The Stand’s New Town Theatre in Edinburgh from 11-20 August
