It’s hard to get romantic about the death of office jobs.
Nobody waxes lyrical about the glory days of working in payroll, and Bruce Springsteen doesn’t fill stadiums with soaring anthems about middle management headcount. But whether the recipient’s collar is white or blue, getting made redundant is getting made redundant, and it hurts.
Last week the University and College Union warned that it expects up to 10,000 jobs in academia to disappear this year: roughly the same number as are expected to be lost from the civil service over the next few years, or just a tenth of those expected to be cut in the NHS. Though some will surely be senior posts, plenty will be relatively low-paid back office roles, often disproportionately done in the public sector by women: HR, or accounts, or one of those unsung admin roles everyone takes for granted until it’s not there.
Though this is the last thing any student bogged down in Easter holiday revision wants to hear, universities now seem to be entering the end stages of a financial crisis that has been building for years, and that means a bonfire of jobs. The Office for Students (the higher education regulator for England) confirmed at the weekend that contingency plans are being drawn up for a major university going bust, amid concerns about how students would finish their degrees, or whether one bankruptcy would lead to banks panicking and calling in loans right across higher education. (There’s no shortage of candidates: three-quarters of universities could be in deficit by the end of the financial year, MPs were told last week.) And they’ll be even more squeezed if a mooted Home Office crackdown on graduate visas for foreign students – seemingly designed to get immigration down to levels Reform UK party-minded voters might grudgingly be prepared to tolerate – goes ahead. Though the University of Dundee was given £22m by the Scottish Funding Council after warnings that it would otherwise run out of money by June, so far there’s no sign of a wider bailout.
It’s obviously tin-eared to compare this reluctance to step in with the way parliament was recalled to save Scunthorpe steelworkers: though both industries are strategically important to the nation in different ways, nobody’s currently trying to shut down the last university in Britain to the strategic advantage of their Chinese rivals. Rescuing British Steel really was a race against time, given blast furnaces can’t simply be switched back on again if they’re allowed to go cold. But to those on the sharp end, it certainly feels like a stark illustration of where priorities lie.
This new government is being forged in fire. Hammered and twisted by crisis abroad and domestic unpopularity, what was once molten and confusingly formless is hardening into a new, very clearly defined shape dictated by the threat from Reform UK.
Ahead of English local elections at which Nigel Farage is expected to scoop up plenty of protest votes, the hastily formed new message to the Reform-curious is that Downing Street is on their side. The days of manufacturing jobs being “allowed to decline or disappear” are over, Rachel Reeves argued at the weekend. Quite right too, in the case of a domestic steel industry underpinning our capacity to produce everything from warships to windfarms. Supporting the car industry and other major exporters through Donald Trump’s bone-headed trade war also makes perfect sense, keeping people attached to jobs until what everyone hopes is a temporary madness has passed.
But it doesn’t stop there. Cutting immigration seems to be back on the agenda with a vengeance, even though the House of Lords science and technology committee recently described the reluctance to offer visas to foreign postdoctoral researchers as “an act of national self-harm”, pushing away young scientists on whom the big breakthroughs of the future (and associated commercial spin-offs) may depend. Though Britain seems to be moving inexorably closer to the EU, there will be hard limits to how far and how fast. At least until 1 May, this is Nigel Farage’s world again and a Labour government just happens to live in it.
Frankly, it wouldn’t hurt for politics to revolve a bit less around the sharp-elbowed middle classes, or for apprenticeships and the more than 50% of 18-year-olds who don’t actually go to university to get some love. (Though it should also be said that some of those institutions most at risk of going bust serve “red wall”, Reform-leaning areas where local students come in on the bus every day to study something practical – maybe nursing or pharmacy – before going home at night to look after their own children).
But remoulding Labour policy too closely around the threat from Reform nonetheless has consequences, both political and economic. It’s dangerous to assume that disappointed liberal left voters have nowhere else to go when, in a fractured and volatile political climate, they clearly have options. It cannot be seen as wildly elitist to say that there’s a hard choice to be made between immigration and growth; that manufacturing matters but the knowledge economy is a massive engine for future prosperity; that three quarters of a million jobs depend directly or indirectly on higher education; that we should have learned by now what Brexit era thinking does to national prosperity. So in forging this new era, ministers should remember that tough doesn’t always mean unbending. Steel’s usefulness comes, in part, from it being so unexpectedly flexible.
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