If so, Frankie’s got some cultural observations on left-wing academics. Also, how this links to Cambridge’s growing pains!
Above – did you come to the conference for the free drinks reception with canapes at the end?
Actually, it reflects something that has been troubling me about the public policy processes ever since I joined the civil service back in 2004 – and continued long after exiting in 2011. The meetings and conferencing industry alone was worth nearly £40billion in 2019. That was more than the total output of the UK agriculture sector which in the same year had a gross output of £27.3billion.
Given how much it costs to put on so many of those events – more than a few of which are paid for by public sector organisations (and thus the taxpayer), do the benefits from all of those conferences justify the expenditure? Some yes, some no. During my civil service days I noticed a pattern of conferencing organisers trying to get me to agree to speak at future events that they would then build a programme around. At first I was flattered, but pretty soon I started questioning what I, my employers, and the taxpayer were getting out of me not being in the office – alongside all of those other public sector workers who would inevitably be targeted in the sales pitches.
The over-centralised structures of governance in the UK amplify the polarisation between the governors and the governed.
I’ve lost count of the number of small grant funding programmes announced by ministers where my kneejerk reaction involved wondering why they didn’t devolve all of this to local government rather than trying to micromanage it all from central London. I’m still not convinced of the merit of opening up civil service ‘campuses’ and central government departments outside of London if it doesn’t involve the actual devolution of funding and powers/decision-making, and cross-departmental working. All they’ve done is created new departmental silos in places other than London. Furthermore, the question of which functions could be devolved to local government were not considered in sufficient detail.
“What about left-wing academics?”
Depends what you mean by the term. Is it the subject area that an academic is researching and teaching? Or is it the party political and philosophical beliefs of individual academics irrespective of their area of academic expertise? In the case of the latter, the Cambridge physicist Dr Alex Wood of Emmanuel College, Cambridge was one of the most left wing councillors in Cambridge during the early-mid 20th Century as Leader of the Cambridge Labour Party.
In terms of the public policy field – or ‘public policy industrial complex’ given how large it has become, public policy institutions – ‘think tanks’, come in a variety of different forms. Some are explicitly Political in the viewpoints that they wish to promote. Their access to, and ability to lobby ministers irrespective of who is in power means that the calls for transparency in who funds them are never far away. And all too often it is the rightwing think tanks that are found wanting when it comes to who their donors are.
That aside, the Westminster public policy bubble is a socially exclusive environment.
Because so much power resides in Westminster and Whitehall, that’s where anyone seeking to influence government policy and get the law changed will gravitate towards. We see it reflected here in Cambridge where local government institutions are so enfeebled that the University of Cambridge and the well-connected larger business groups have the ability to bypass local councils – not that those councils have the staff resources and research capacities to engage with them on an equal basis.
The concept that the very people who are having policies made about them being frozen out of the policy-making processes remains a disturbing one for me. Yet in order to deal with it, the sort of economic and social changes are too radical for most of the politicians in Westminster – in particular a 4-day week, universal basic income, and the radical devolution and empowerment of local government. For a critical mass of the public to be in a position to engage, dealing with the cost of living crisis, freeing up their time, and making the places/institutions where decisions are made more geographically accessible are essential (but not the only) features needed.
The rise of the executive class in academia / growth of the professional managerial class
I somehow stumbled on this (extended) book review about Dan Evans’ book ‘Nation of Shopkeepers’, which highlights the author’s attempt to unpick what is now feels like (to me at least) a less clear cut understanding of who is in which class – and who this matters to. I normally ‘shut down’ like Monty Python’s peasant – mainly because such exchanges seemed to involve some very well-read but very ‘intense’ person (even more intense than me!) telling me who and what I was, without knowing much about me at all. There were some things in the piece that chimed with my working and lived experiences.
“One of the great cons of the New Labour era was the promise of a white collar, “knowledge economy” career for everyone who earned a degree.”
This for me went beyond ‘New Labour’ and was the whole premise of what was for me a culturally middle-class upbringing in 1980s/1990s South Cambridge: ‘If you did well in your exams and did not ‘rock the boat’, behaved yourself, went to church and did good deeds, in return you would get…‘
…and FW Bruce’s review of Mr Evans’ book highlights that cultural mindset:
“‘We worked hard at school so we deserve good careers, a nice home and fancy car; we do not deserve crappy jobs like the lazier working class kids.’”
The problem as many other writers have stated, is that our education/school system as designed is inevitably biased towards academia and away from the traditional trades. The long overdue raised profiles of apprenticeships today stands in stark contrast to the messages we got in the mid-1990s. Looking back, the reason I went along with it enthusiastically was because I was outwardly successful in that structure – with nothing else to compare it to at the time. (Even though I was a complete mess emotionally inside).
That social mindset was something I came across again in the civil service
One of the fault lines within the civil service was the class divide between the Fast Streamers – many of whom were inevitably from privileged backgrounds, and working class civil servants in lower grades. Hence The Government’s recent policy announcement regarding internships. Yet the mindset of ‘I worked really hard at school/college/uni and got the top grades required so therefore…‘ was something I noticed when other Fast Streamers were pressed on the poor working relationships that ultimately resulted in the rank and file civil servants’ trade union, the PCS Union (which I was a member of throughout my civil service years) passing a motion at their annual conference calling for the abolition of the Fast Stream due to it being socially divisive.
What I found later on to be even more striking was the almost contractual feel of ‘the bargain’. Especially for those who, as far as they were concerned had fulfilled their side of the bargain in the form of top exam results.
“They were promised not to have to work that crappy supermarket job and they are angry and disappointed that, actually, they have to after-all. They were promised the new-build house but their minimum wage job, that they do not deserve, has blocked access to it.”
What’s sobering now looking back at the 1990s was that I don’t recall any of the adults/teachers making the case for the collective and shared improvement of where we lived. (Ours was a generation not taught anything about politics, democracy, and the rule of law due to changes brought in by Thatcher and Major’s Conservative Governments – no I haven’t forgiven them!) Council housing had become a pejorative term in some circles – the term ‘sink estates’ popping up frequently in the media in that decade. (Why on earth would a government choose to run down state assets *that people lived in* like that? Knowing that it would create additional healthcare costs).
This all makes me wonder what responses will come from the generation of graduates under 45 who are carrying over huge levels of debt. Especially those that responded to those promises but on reflection were sold a dream that was exactly that – only a dream.
Worse still, the continued rise in automation in retail combined with the implosion of the high street has taken away so many jobs that were done both by working class people and also teenagers from middle class backgrounds, where the latter got their first experiences not only of dealing with the general public, but also for many, working locally and becoming familiar faces in their communities – especially if you were on a checkout.
The omnicrises
Not just one set of crises, several sets of crises happening all at once.
From an academia perspective, Prof Glen O’Hara of Oxford Brookes University is keeping track of which universities are announcing job losses and in what fields. He also published a paper on the future of UK Universities on 13 Aug 2025 here.
“Overall, UK higher education now faces a very bleak future, continuously retreating in the face of very limited public sympathy and, therefore, political interest.”
In the abstract, Prof O’Hara mentions the government policy changes (I think post-2010) where restrictions on home student numbers were lifted – creating a competitive environment that inevitably benefited (on paper) more established institutions with stronger brands.
This, combined with universities being encouraged to recruit international students in the face of ministers in the same government fanning the flames of the toxic politics of immigration policy has created a host of housing-related problems in university cities as investors take advantage of the greater profit margins and lower costs associated with student flats (which are also exempt from contributions towards social housing need). This combined with local government austerity means that for a number of towns and cities in the UK, developers have a commercial incentive to build to meet demand from higher education over those in chronic housing need. Most recently in Cambridge, Newnham College postgraduates were referred to homelessness charities as the college ran out of rooms. Mindful that Newnham College is also a women’s college, I find the situation astonishing. But the rapid expansion of postgraduate numbers has been the policy of the University for a number of years.
“This Memorandum of Understanding1 sets out the targets agreed between the University and Colleges collectively for growth in full time postgraduate student numbers over the period 2016-17 to 2021-22. Further work is underway on part-time student numbers with the intention of producing an addendum to this Memorandum.”
One of the results of this is postgraduates being unable to afford to live in Cambridge – as Apeike Umolu wrote for Varsity back in March 2025 here.
Did University executives have any discussions with Cambridge City Council about the growth in student numbers, and the impact that this was likely to have on the city’s chronic housing crisis? (Noting that more students also means more visitors (family, friends) creating greater incentives on AirBnB-type conversions.
Thus we come back to that situation where the institutions that undertake research including on housing problems (The University of Cambridge’s Dept of Land Economy has its own housing unit – the CCHPR which has been commissioned by local councils in the past) are also the ones contributing to the very problems they are researching due to the policies of those at the top of their institution.
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The Cambridge Town Owl 