Nick Hillman, HEPI Director, recounts his time at the Conservative Party Conference, which ends today, below. His speech to the HEPI / KCL Policy Institute fringe event is separately available here and his account of last week’s Labour Party Conference is here.
After last week’s visit to Liverpool, I popped to Birmingham to spend 36 hours at the second and last of the really big political party conferences of the year.
First stop was a debate on free speech that was part of the official programme (as opposed to the ‘fringe’ programme for external organisations’ events). A members’ debate on such a controversial topic is an interesting innovation, given that recent Conservative conferences have tended to be highly stage managed – though in truth, the debate was a slightly odd (predictable?) mix of misplaced jokes about ‘drag queen bingo’ and ‘identifying as a Conservative’ alongside serious analyses of how areas outside abortion clinics should be policed and the details of the Online Safety Act (2023), all overseen by Jacob Rees-Mogg. But it wasn’t really a ‘debate’ as everyone seemed to agree that free speech is a good thing and having more free speech would be an even better thing.
The most striking aspect for HEPI readers was the general ignoring of free speech in higher education, except by Rees-Mogg himself. He criticised the way in which Conservative students were billed for security when he visited Bristol, before going into a strange soliloquy on people who say ‘Chair’ when they could say ‘Chairman’. (I lost the thread when he started talking about werewolves, but I think his point was that we should have free speech for everyone except people who say ‘Chair’.) Given how the debate went, perhaps Conservative members’ concerns on the limits to free speech are not actually anything like as focused on higher education institutions as we have sometimes been led to believe.
There were long hours without any events specifically on higher education but these were filled with events co-hosted by universities or using speakers from universities or at least quoting lots of research from universities. Moreover, the programme was full of events on young people and what Tories might do to appeal to younger voters. So my next stop was a Policy@Manchester / Social Market Foundation event on children’s mental health. Much of the discussion was on the importance of friendships and belonging and the dangers of social media (as persuasively outlined in Jonathan Haidt’s new book). The most interesting point I heard was from Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commission for England. She proposed the end of youth offending units and putting the 400+ troubled children that would be affected into ‘familial settings’ as a precursor to recognising that the best solution to their challenges is generally likely to be education.
Then it is was on to a Centre for Policy Studies event on recovering from heavy election defeats, at which Lord Willetts, the former Universities Minister, advised his party to accept they’ve had a landslide defeat, recognise they won’t ever recreate the world at the moment when they lost office and consider some internal party reorganisations, as occurred for example after the heavy defeat of 1945. Neil O’Brien MP made some similar points but, when warning his audience of what to avoid, reminded us of some of the more unusual policies adopted by the Conservative Party after its 1997 defeat, including abolishing tuition fees via the endowment of universities.
Next up was an Edge Foundation event on ‘Access and Participation in Non-HE Pathways’, though the discussion had little bearing on the title. Every speaker trumpeted the benefits of higher education, ancient or modern. Jesse Norman MP, for example, spoke particularly effectively about the accelerated and employment-focused NMITE in his constituency, asking ‘why don’t do we it everywhere in the country?’ while gently chastising the organisers for picking the wrong title. Later, he fired a shot at traditional universities for overexpanding, becoming over-reliant on international students and being too homogenous, while calling for a ‘more diverse ecology’. At the same event, John Cope, formerly of UCAS, spoke effectively of the hurdles involved in making apprenticeship applications as straightforward as mainstream UCAS applications.
For me, Monday ended at a Centre for Social Justice event in which all four Tory leadership candidates were grilled, chaired by a former Conservative Party leader in Iain Duncan Smith. Higher education was mainly notable by its absence from the discussions – until the very end, when James Cleverly was asked about post-compulsory education. His answer was thoughtful if meandering (it was late and had been a long day). He mentioned how to ensure prestige for non-degree options, such as his own (and IDS’s) at Sandhurst, as well as vocational degree routes and he managed to play the old ‘parity’ of esteem tune. I posted his full answer on my Twitter / X account here. At the start, the audience put Tom Tugendhat a little way ahead of the other three candidates; afterwards, they plumped (just) for Cleverly, so it’s fair to say he came across well as – to be fair – they all did.
As I couldn’t get in to the first fringe event I was hoping to attend on Tuesday, day two for me started with our own HEPI event, held in conjunction with the King’s College London Policy Institute. The theme was the Conservatives’ approach to higher education. With both Lord Willetts and Lord (Jo) Johnson on the panel, we had the two key architects of the current higher education system – though each of them made it clear they would have liked the system to go on changing after they stopped being in charge, regretting for example the freeze in fees and loans after 2017.
The panel avoided unanimity in part by the inclusion of Alex Stanley, the Vice President of Higher Education at the NUS, which takes a different approach to fees and loans. Alex focussed particularly on the real shortfall in maintenance support for students. Consensus was also avoided via some trenchant comments from a Conservative Party member or two who were less than keen on the current student funding model. I was on the panel too and used the opportunity to suggest the Conservative Party could display a new and more constructive approach to universities by adopting a slogan from a nineteenth-century Conservative Prime Minister – see here for what I said.