LABOUR talks of Britain becoming a clean energy and AI “superpower.” It champions its commitment to delivering an industrial strategy.

Yet too often it is asleep at the wheel, allowing private companies to determine the fates of strategic sectors based on their own profit-and-loss metric without regard to the public interest. This has already had a damaging impact on our steel industry, and appeared to spell curtains for the petrochemicals centre at Grangemouth until recently, though a pledge of £200 million to turn it into a hub for new industries — extracted after intense campaigning by the Unite union — offers hope wiser councils have prevailed.

But all the government’s talk of becoming a world leader in new technologies will come to naught unless it faces up to the crisis engulfing universities — institutions crucial to research and development. 

The University & College Union’s Stop the Cuts campaign warns that over 5,000 university jobs could be axed this year. Courses face the chop at many universities, from languages to chemistry to nursing — courses equipping young people with skills vital to a modern economy. 

It’s absurd that, as the NHS grapples with a severe shortage of nurses, our higher education system cuts access to training. But the marketisation of higher education in Britain prevents a rational approach either to university funding or course availability. 

Running universities as businesses has cost higher education dear. It has driven casualisation of the workforce, with tens of thousands now on insecure contracts. Appointing teachers on a temporary basis, based on how many students apply for a course in a particular year, engenders damaging short-termism. 

The Conservative-Lib Dem coalition’s 2013 decision to remove controls on how many students any individual English university could take unleashed a competitive market for students which can see an institution’s revenue fluctuate wildly over a few years. Money is invested in attracting students but costs are cut for staff. Vice-chancellors pay themselves extravagant salaries while those working in teaching and research have less and less say over a university’s overall management.

Cuts result from funding crises, and the Office for Students estimates that 72 per cent of higher education institutions will be in deficit this year. Governments have made universities reliant on charging students, but even while a university education now leaves most graduates with debts that take decades to repay, tuition fees do not cover costs. 

Universities sought to plug the gap by attracting international students, who pay far higher fees — but this revenue stream is ebbing too. Anti-immigration policies such as banning postgraduate students from bringing dependants make Britain a hostile environment for foreigners. Meanwhile a new cold war has seen China, a world leader in multiple scientific disciplines and the largest single source of international students coming to Britain, depicted as a threat, driving a huge rise in the number of visas for students and researchers which are denied on alleged security grounds: from just 13 in 2016 to 1,104 rejected in 2022.

None of this is coherent or workable. The immediate priority is to throw drowning institutions a lifeline, to protect jobs and courses: as the UCU points out, the Scottish and Welsh governments have been prepared to do this. Now the British government must step up.

But a “new public model to fund and regulate the sector” is essential too. 

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has shown willing to challenge the market orthodoxy on schools. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill ends the presumption in favour of academies and plans to standardise staff terms and conditions, and school adherence to the national curriculum. It has got her into trouble with mouthy celebrity “superheads” like Katharine Birbalsingh (who even calls her a Marxist) but it is the right thing to do.

Phillipson should show a similar determination to end the market madness in our universities. The system as it stands is unsustainable.