Sunday thoughts: Is HE expansion the new council house sales?

On Friday, John Harris published what I thought was a very thought provoking hypothesis:

He was responding to analysis of the local election vote breakdown which suggests that, once again, areas with higher proportions of graduates were more likely to vote Labour.

I wanted to make three quick observations on this hypothesis. Firstly, is it transformative, or is it merely correlation? Secondly, and implied (I think) by his tweet, was it a deliberate element of strategy by New Labour in the early 2000s? And thirdly, what might the medium term consequences be?

Firstly, I think this pattern is reasonably well established now. For example, in their breakdown of how Britain voted in the General Election in 2019, YouGov show a clear split by education level….

which repeats a pattern from the 2017 General Election….

and from the Brexit referendum in 2016:

The House of Commons library has also shown that in ‘student seats’ — those with large numbers of students resident in them — the Conservative vote underperformed compared to nationally:

….and that, contrary to what is sometimes expressed, this isn’t just a function of age. Looking at similarly ‘young’ seats with fewer students, the same trends aren’t shown:

I think it’s now reasonably well established that, at least for the last five or six years for which we have national, local, and referenda data, this pattern now holds. I want to sidestep the tiresome debate around “intelligence” and “are you saying only stupid people vote Conservative / Leave” [in short: no, clearly not, and almost no-one engaging in this debate on either side is doing so in good faith].

Let’s go back to John Harris. If there is something about education levels that drives a systematic shift in voting behaviour (and a recent fascinating paper from Ralph Scott suggests that there is something about the university experience which does make people “more liberal”, to use his title), might this have been an element of the debates around expansion of HE in the 2000s, similar to Thatcherite selling of council houses?

To explore this, I looked up in both Thatcher and Blair’s own autobiographies, their reflections on these policy shifts.

On council housing, Thatcher says this:

“I believed that the state should continue to provide mortgage tax relief in order to encourage home ownership, which was socially desirable. (Far better and cheaper to help people to help themselves rather than provide housing for them). The state also had to provide assistance for poorer people with housing costs through housing benefit. But as regards the traditional post war role of government in housing — that is building, ownership, management and regulation — the state should be withdrawn from these areas as far as fast as possible. That was the philosophical starting point for the housing reforms….”

[Thatcher, Downing Street Years, page 599–600]

I think it’s reasonably clear from the passage above, plus much of the rest of the book, that philosophically, giving people autonomy from the state was more likely to make them vote Conservative. There’s some discussion of value for money in the reforms, and some discussion of the role of the state, but at its heart is a philosophical shift.

On Blair’s HE reforms, by contrast, it’s much harder to say. He notes that the major inspiration for the funding reforms after the 2001 election is:

“Shortly after the election the challenge for our universities became clear. I has come to the view then — and believe this even more strongly today- that the future of developed nations such as ours, relying heavily on human capital, depends on having a vibrant, dynamic and world class higher education system. However, like so much else we can’t rest on our laurels. I looked at the top fifty universities in the world and saw only a handful in the UK….it was not by chance or dint of size; it was plainly and inescapably due to their system of fees.”

[Blair, The Journey, page 499]

Here, by contrast, I think it’s pretty clear that Blair is first and foremost thinking in policy terms. (And to give him credit, has kept fast to this thesis for almost 20 years, as his Institute’s most recent report shows).

Which isn’t to say there is no politics. Turning Labour into New Labour was never far away from Blair’s mind, and elsewhere in the chapter he discusses:

“I used to tell them (Brown and Balls, who were arguing with him over top up fees) that [having a traditional Labour approach to public services] was fundamentally and dangerously to misunderstand both the intellectual and political basis of New Labour. All round the world, governments getting re-elected were refashioning their state and public services to make them more accountable to consumers and users. In other words, my argument was that these reforms were cutting with the grain of what people wanted……politically, I tried to explain that the whole purpose of my period as leader was to create a permanence in New Labour that meant I would not be an exception”

[Blair, op cit, page 502]

In other words, yes this was a political reform. But it was a political reform designed to appeal to (for shorthand) those who were already educated and more affluent — those who had voted Labour in 1997 but not before. It was not a reform designed to create more Labour voters, other than by continuing to show their credentials as a government that could be trusted by them. Nowhere in the chapter is there any sense, from the time or in retrospect, that an expansion of HE fees, and an expansion in student numbers, would lead to more Labour voters.

Instinctively, this makes sense to me. Even now, with several elections’ worth of data points, the belief that one’s education level is a reasonable proxy for how one is likely to vote (particularly when combined with age) is not universally recognised. At the time of New Labour in the early 2000s, the dominant proxy was felt to be class / social status. Blair and New Labour had won by appealing to the “middle class” voters in addition to their “working class” base. If anything, given that graduate status at the time led pretty inexorably to higher income, and higher income voters traditionally voted Conservative, if pushed one might have expected HE expansion to lead to more Conservative voters. This, perhaps, explains Blair’s fervour that the party must continue to show graduate voters that they can be trusted with New Labour (even after two successive huge election wins).

So I agree with Harris that the expansion was transformative; but I don’t see the same level of [philosophy / ideology — delete as appropriate] behind that as I do behind the sale of council housing.

Nevertheless, the question for the Conservative government now is what they do in response. As Sam Freedman points out in his election roundup:

“Older, less educationally qualified, high homeowning areas, that have trended strongly Tory, are still doing so and areas with more young graduates and professionals, especially in places where many are renting, are still trending the other way. Essentially having a university in an area is like kryptonite for Tory electoral chances.”

This is a policy problem, as well as a political problem for them. We have a bulge in 18 year olds coming down the line, and we might expect a good half of them to want to go into some form of tertiary education. HEPI analysis suggests an extra 300,000 places a year in full time HE might be needed by 2030. One of the drivers for the recent Augar reforms was precisely to try and dampen down the spiralling costs of HE under the current system. It is unlikely that HMT will willingly open the loan book to an extra 300k students a year, or even close to that.

But let’s assume that they do — or that the funding system can be changed so as to reduce the costs on the state. The political question remains. Do the Conservative government want to support, at a minimum, several tens of thousands of additional students a year going into HE? It is highly unlikely that even a radical expansion of Level 4 and 5 qualifications, and apprenticeships, can cover all of this additional demand (and, being crude, it’s also not clear whether this group would vote as if they were ‘traditional’ graduates anyway). Such an expansion would likely mean all of the shifts outlined in the Augar review, AND growth of existing universities, AND a mass expansion of tertiary education delivered in partnership with FE colleges, AND — as Michael Gove has conjectured — a number of additional new institutions. Or it would mean, as a conscious choice, closing the doors to progression for a number of people at 18. Either way, the transformative political impact of HE has some way to run yet.

This is the first in what I hope will be a resumption of a short weekly blog on educational issues. I’ll almost certainly fail in the commitment on frequency, but publicly stating your goals is meant to make you stick to them, and I don’t have Ed Dorrell as an editor ringing me every week to demand copy any more [whatever happened to him, by the way?], so this is the best I can do….