Right of centre*: Searching for higher education at Reform UK’s Annual Conference

Whenever I go to a political party’s conference, I can never quite resist the temptation to see the quality of organisation as a proxy for their ability to govern. It’s incredibly unfair, especially for a party that is as new as Reform UK. But judging by the hour-long queue just to collect a pass, they still have some distance to go before they are ready for government. Perhaps one of their Tory defectors can explain the Royal Mail’s tried-and-tested method of getting conference passes to people in advance (known as the post).

Once in, it was evident the higher education sector was, perhaps surprisingly and for the first time at a Reform UK conference, out in force. I saw friends from the Russell Group, MillionPlus, University Alliance, the University of Manchester, the University of Leicester, UCL, the University of Sussex – I could go on. To my mind, it was good to see the sector engaging in this way (as proposed in a recent HEPI paper).

However, there weren’t many events specifically focused on higher education or research. So special kudos to Luke Tryl and his More in Common team, who were not only doing their bit to protect the reputation of pollsters after the latest scandal but who also hosted some excellent and well-attended events, including one on attitudes to science.

The panellists may not have seen eye-to-eye on everything, including how to talk to voters about science, but the conversation was more consensual on the need for a sensible pro-science conversation than some might have expected in advance. For me, the most memorable moment was when Baroness (Claire) Fox, a former Brexit Party MEP and now a non-affiliated peer, bemoaned the tendency to shut down important conversations with the phrase ‘the science says’, while remaining fiercely pro-science herself. Claire was also rightly keen to plug her always brilliant Battle of Ideas taking place in London in mid-October, which often hosts many lively debates on higher education.

It’s worth remembering, when searching for links between Reform UK and academia, that Nigel Farage made his name by taking over a political party (UKIP) set up by an academic (Alan Sked) and that one of Reform’s current big names is another academic (Matt Goodwin) while one of the two senior Reform UK staffers caught up in the funding sting is a Cambridge academic (James Orr).

Other parties tend not to have such a high proportion of former academics among their key personnel – even if it has encouraged rather than limited the rhetorical attacks on universities. To at least one of the hecklers during his big set-piece speech, Nigel Farage made a jibe about university education. From the 1950s on, the far-right League of Empire Loyalists, a precursor to the National Front, sought to disrupt Tory party conferences for not being right-wing enough; today, those trying to shut down political debate are seemingly more likely to hail from the left. 

One thing that is the same at the Reform UK Conference as at every other party conference is the tendency of leading figures to turn up late to the sessions at which they’re speaking, as they dash from engagement to engagement. And so it was with Suella Braverman, Reform UK’s Education spokesperson, for a fringe session on ‘outcomes for disadvantaged white young men’. Once she arrived, her opening remarks attacked a long list of organisations for the educational shortfalls that exist, including the Labour Party, her former colleagues in the Conservative Party and even MI5, who she described as ‘racist’ for their internship programme.

Professor Malcolm Press, the President of Universities UK, responded on behalf of the higher education sector. He accepted the main outline of Suella’s argument: in other words, that there is a genuine problem of educational underachievement among young white men. HEPI’s output confirms this too. Malcolm also sensibly linked poor white boys’ relative disadvantage to long-term changes in the labour market. 

Suella then moved on to blame the failure of so many boys not on them as individuals but rather on institutions and societal structures. That may resonate with many people (including parents), though I am not sure I expected Reform UK to sound so much like sociologists, especially given sociology is sometimes another one of Nigel Farage’s targets.

Suella’s critique led her to propose policy changes that, at a high level, seemed completely indistinguishable from Andy Burnham’s and Lucy Powell’s policies and, for that matter, those of the Conservatives: more apprenticeships and the like. Anyone playing word bingo would have done well, with ‘parity of esteem’, ‘Germany and Switzerland’ and more ‘vocational education’ raising their heads.

To me, it seemed a little same-y for an insurgent party seeking to offer a brave new world. Did Suella really break her bonds with her original party because she was desperate to match their commitments on tertiary education? Perhaps not, as we were told in Farage’s big speech that she would be saying a whole lot more about higher education on Saturday afternoon.

Intriguingly, and I don’t think this is just my wishful thinking, Farage’s hint that university places would be strictly controlled in future didn’t seem to go down quite as well in the hall as his other commitments – perhaps even Reform UK activists are coming to see tight student number caps might shut their children and grandchildren out of higher education? (I say ‘children and grandchildren’ because, while Students for Reform did have a small stand and were hosting an event, the most common demographic at the conference was older men.)

Suella Braverman went on in the same fringe session, after some prompting from the Chair, to blame a lot of the existing challenges faced by young white men on EDI / DEI initiatives. In his usual emollient and persuasive way, Malcolm responded with an agenda that was actually much more radically different than many people in the room may have realised, for he made the clear practical case for privately-funded bursaries and scholarships limited to specific groups that have been under-represented in higher education. This won a rare round of applause from the Reform activists in the room. Given the focus of the event was on poor white men, they loved the idea of targeted support. Perhaps they didn’t spot the contradiction between Suella’s critique of EDI schemes and Malcolm’s call for more support targeted at specific groups. But in the end, a targeted bursary is a form of EDI.

The most memorable moments of the conference overall were those remembering Ann Widdecombe. I felt I had come full circle as the first ever party conference I attended was the Tory one of 2000, where Ann Widdecombe’s promised crackdown on drugs was hailed in the main conference hall before being blown up by a new generation of more liberal Tories admitting they had taken illegal substances as students. In his tribute, Andrew Rosindell MP said Ann was not the sort of politician who needed an autocue (though, having briefed her on social security policy at the time of 2001 general election, I know for a fact that she did her homework diligently before speaking her mind).

All party conferences are bubbles. But this one is more bubble-like than most. (Few people there have been talking about the Channel 4 exposé even if it was by far and away the one part of the Reform UK conference that the world outside were looking at.) Yet it is a bubble that the higher education sector has finally found its way inside.

* The first gig I ever attended, back in 1987, was Suzanne Vega at Birmingham’s NEC, the venue for Reform UK’s Annual Conference. Her setlist included ‘Left of Center’, so I’ve pinched my title from her. But there were more pyrotechnics at the Reform event than the pop concert.