Tory ‘culture war tactics’ spell election risk for universities

Universities could be “part of the election campaign in a way they do not want” if campus controversies are seized on by Conservatives using culture wars to split the Labour vote, according to the author of the last Tory manifesto, who said that currently “everyone hates the Conservatives for the same reasons”.

Rachel Wolf, a founding partner at political consultancy Public First, also said universities should keep in mind on funding that for any government “fiscal is everything” and for Labour “fiscal is going to be conservative”.

The advice for universities ahead of the election campaign was to “make it local, make it tangible”, she told a Higher Education Policy Institute and Advance HE event looking at how higher education should prepare for the next general election.

On manifestos, universities should remember that “if there is money to spend – big if – you are not top of the list”, advised Ms Wolf, who co-wrote the 2019 Conservative Party election manifesto and was an adviser to Boris Johnson in his time as shadow higher education minister. Voters “do not generally want to talk about universities – and politicians respond to the electorate”, she added.

But there was a “downside risk” for the university sector in an election campaign, Ms Wolf also said. “For the Conservatives, one of the tactics in an election campaign will be to seek to find moments, and expand moments, that split the other side’s [voter] coalition…Universities are sites where that can happen.”

While many “massively overestimate the importance of the culture war in the electorate’s mind” at present, she continued, “if there are things that happen on university campuses that provide opportunities for the Conservative Party to say ‘the Labour Party is split, they are not on your side…’ they will take them, and it will be all over front pages of the newspapers for a very long time.”

Ms Wolf added: “To be honest, the biggest probability for universities is they are part of the election campaign in a way they do not want…I’m sure all universities have done this, but you need to be spending a lot of time thinking about how you are going to manage that situation if it emerges in an election campaign. Because all eyes will be on you very, very fast.”

The general election is “not going to matter to you [universities]” aside from that downside risk; “what is going to matter is what happens after the election”, she argued.

It was “very plausible there will be a one-year spending review” to allow the economic outlook to improve “so they [the new government] have some more money to spend”, Ms Wolf went on.

Beyond that, she added: “There is absolutely going to be an opportunity for universities to place themselves more centrally in terms of growth and productivity – that is going to be the major obsession of the next parliament and plausibly the next two parliaments.”

Universities would need to focus on ensuring that their “general R&D story can be made as practical and practically transferable [into economic impact] as possible”, to match with a new government – Ms Wolf was apparently referring to a Labour administration – “more active in how it thinks about the state and the state’s partnership with industry, while also having no money”.

The kind of electoral “realignment” seen at the last election, and since the Brexit vote, was being masked by the size of Labour’s current polling lead, she also argued. “Because everyone hates the Conservatives for the same reason, right: everyone is cross about the economy, everyone is cross about cost of living, everyone is cross about public services. That therefore hides these schisms – but those schisms do still exist.”

These continued schisms would mean, she went on, “continuing to think about a university in their place – why they [universities] matter for people who are not going and what they are doing for an area”, issues that are “going to still matter in five or 10 years”.

Ms Wolf also said: “While it is fairly clear what the next government is going to be – and it looks like the majority will be very large – this is from all our opinion research the most apathetic and disillusioned with politics we have seen the British population.”

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com