I’m beginning to think there is some kind of coherent long-term strategy to the government’s seemingly braindead appointments, the most recent being professional troll and sex pest Toby Young.
There is an understanding, when we follow the money and the ideology, of most of the rest of the government’s apparent incompetence. The entirely-predicted NHS crisis has been deliberately manufactured as part of this government’s long-term strategy to restructure the NHS to be more suitable for selling off to private enterprise. These crises serve to (they hope) weaken the public’s resolve, until there forms enough of a national consensus to end the NHS as a public service and transfer it to a gravy train where the public actually fund it twice, through taxation and ‘top up fees per treatment’, and the private sector (mostly Conservative donors of course) delivers healthcare for those who can afford it and gorges itself on a huge stream of money.
When we see the fiasco of the unjustifiable rail fare rises, and the news that serial failure Chris Grayling has bailed out a Stagecoach-Virgin partnership who claimed they couldn’t afford to see out their contract – an opportunity they were lucky to have been afforded at all after East Coast had previously returned record amounts of money to the treasury during its time of being run directly by a government company; we understand (mainly because he has admitted it) that the government would rather bail out a failing company than take over the line directly, because it would conflict with their neoliberal ideology of not allowing the government to run anything ahead of the private sector.
But I struggled to see the sense in appointing Young to the position of Higher Education watchdog, beyond pure cronyism; a reward for championing the Tories’ cause in the organs he had written in. When the news broke, far more qualified candidates explained how they had been rejected. Young’s only ‘qualification’ seemed to be that he helped set up some free schools, before buggering off when it seemed too much like hard work. This didn’t seem quite right that the Tories, who, despite general incompetence in office, don’t tend to make highly contentious appointments unless there is an obvious positive that they gain that we don’t immediately see when following the money.
I heard some speculate that Young has been appointed precisely to tackle the fabricated ‘problem’ of “censorship” within Universities: a Daily Mail appointment if ever there was one. But then it occurred to me that there’s a deeper resonance in his appointment in the cultural sphere, and to understand it, we need to understand the modern economic and social paradigm we currently live under.
Neoliberalism was birthed under Thatcher’s reign, but only economically: the financial sector and other industry sectors were heavily liberalised, that is: deregulated, while socially Thatcher was more of an authoritarian. However, when New Labour took power in 1997, Blair changed very little of the fundamental economic consensus, but he liberalised social policy: repealing Section 28, banning smoking in public places (one of the few times that banning something could be classed as a liberal triumph), relaxing pub licensing laws and more (ironically in the last term of New Labour, they began to get worryingly authoritarian with indefinite detentions, ID cards and the like, perhaps they had emulated the abyss of Thatcherism for too long and had become what they once opposed). This married the liberalisation of economic and social policy: true Neoliberalism.
When the coalition took charge in 2010, the economy was further liberalised in the sense that public spending was planned to be drastically cut, and socially it appeared as if it would go the same way when David Cameron pronounced himself the ‘liberal Tory’, and helped legalise gay marriage. But soon they reverted to type, bringing in the 2014 Lobbying Act to silence criticism of their policies, while Chris Grayling went on a demented “Hang ‘em and flog ‘em” rampage in the criminal justice sector. It seemed that they had too many hard-right ministers who loved the economic deregulation, but craved more regulation in social policy.
One area in which they have long expressed animosity is the “culture of political correctness”, which reached its peak when they saw Michael Fallon and Damian Green partially fall because of the #metoo sexual harassment scandal. Twitter has seen something of an obsession with identity politics, and Tories are often being called out for crass statements about women, the disabled and the working classes. So appointing Toby Young seems not only to fill an immediate need to satiate the Daily Mail by pressuring universities to allow speakers that promote Brexit and right-wing social ideology, but also cocking a snook at the fabled ‘liberal elite’ they consider opponents of Brexit. Their obsession with fighting any opposition to Brexit is the primary motivation for Young’s appointment to a position he seemingly would only otherwise have ‘earned’ by his previous propaganda in favour of the party who created the role.
It’s also slightly disturbing on a larger level: that is, the government interfering with the orthodoxy and autonomy of universities. A cynic might suggest this appointment can be seen as actually attempting to further censure criticism and opposition to their ideology, at a time where young people are most likely to develop critical thinking and critique institutions. Perhaps there is an even bigger narrative to consider: well aware they will lose power soon, the Tories are packing institutions with their cronies, in the hope they will retain ‘tentacles’ in these sectors, and their ideology will still resonate.
What hath blog wrought? 