The Best and Brightest
Universities should be centres of excellence, not backdoors for cheap foreign labour
Towering columns
For The Times, William Hague believes Britain should follow the example of Taiwan and act strategically to attract innovators that can create substantial wealth.
The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) accounts for around 7 per cent of the country’s GDP, and more than a million jobs depend on the chip industry that has grown up around it. The fact that TSMC’s chips are the most advanced on Earth is of vast geopolitical importance; a single point of failure in the world economy in a country at the heart of superpower tensions. But it also illustrates how modern economic growth can depend on the skills and investment decisions of a very small number of people.
This is an uncomfortable truth that we often shy away from mentioning. There are countries that will be among the richest because they have nurtured or attracted groups of scientists or engineers and allowed them the space, regulations and financial capital to expand. That can matter at least as much as what literally millions of other people are doing, or even — from a statistical point of view rather than a human one — whether they go to work at all. It is uncomfortable because it means the dependence of most of us on the elite skills and excellence of a tiny proportion of people is growing…
…The trend towards critical dependence on key companies or teams is set to accelerate. Think of the wealth that will accrue to the first firms that solve nuclear fusion, or invent a battery with ten times current storage, or a blood test that predicts all major diseases, or a drug that slows ageing. There is already a ferocious global talent war under way for people with the skills to develop artificial intelligence (AI), quantum science and other technologies, with millions of dollars being paid to poach the best talent or to keep it. This is only the beginning. On a planet with eight billion people, it will be indispensable to attract, or produce, some of a critical few hundred — the Oppenheimers of the future. Politics can easily get in the way.
On his Substack, Neil O’Brien reveals the data within the MAC review proving that graduate visas are being used to subsidise cheap labour.
Working 40 hours a week on the minimum wage gets you just under £2k a month: but the great *majority* of people on the graduate visa earn LESS than that on average. It is a boon for dodgy employers. I am not sure why its not in their main report, but the data annex to the report, it points out that 41% of Graduate visa holders with earnings "earned less than £15,000" a year. Given full time minimum wage work gets you c. £24k - this is not graduate work.
The MAC choose to compare the earnings of people on the graduate route only to people who just graduated from university. But given this route is a policy choice, I think a more relevant comparison is with all earners. Here’s how much all full time workers earned (graduate and non-graduate) last year. People on the graduate visa earn half as much as UK workers. The MAC say "median annual earning for the 73% of Graduate visa holders who were in employment for at least one month in financial year ending 2023 was £17,815."
Compare this overall median earnings in 2023 of just under £30k - and earnings for full timers of just under £35k. The median for full time workers was just under £3,000 a month, compared to a mode of £1,600 to £1,800 for people on the graduate route. Some people on the graduate route are earning really well, and wouldn’t struggle to just go through a conventional route into genuinely skilled work. But others are really propping up the table - likely in low wage work and in the gig economy.
At Wonkhe, Jim Dickinson argues that the higher education system needs to show restraint and avoid the boom and bust cycle of international students.
Despite the pervasiveness of the argument to take international students out of figures that calculate it, this isn’t really about “net migration”. Even if every international student left after completing their degree and/or the graduate route, adding the best part of a million people to the UK’s cities and university towns over three years required and requires both institutional and community infrastructure that nobody appears to have been willing to take responsibility for planning or securing.
If we view international students as a kind of educational tourism, it would be like staging the Eurovision in a city with no hotels. Everyone would be late to the event, prices would rocket, locals would be furious at not being able to get on the metro, and so on. Waiting for the market to respond with capacity is too slow – and basically immoral.
The Home Office impact assessment did some stuff on the regional location of where graduates would end up – but nothing much on any impacts of very high growth itself. Population absorption – both logistically and politically – is straightforward when increases are modest and spread over time. It’s always a different story when it’s very high numbers very quickly.
For The Spectator, Iain Mansfield criticises universities for their unwillingness to confront pro-Palestine campus protests.
Too many universities are disingenuously pretending this is somehow an issue of free speech. It is true that there can sometimes be ambiguity about when certain forms of speech cross the line into being unlawful. But the truth of the matter is that in most cases with these campus protests we are not dealing with questions of free speech.
The right to free speech incorporates the right to be offensive, controversial, or even just pig-ignorantly wrong. What it does not include is the right to harass, threaten or intimidate. Still less does it include the right to trespass, disrupt other students’ education that they have paid for or occupy lecture theatres and administrative facilities. The Free Speech Act of 2023 is about speech, not actions…
…Similarly, free speech does not oblige universities to negotiate with protesters, to celebrate or ‘commemorate’ their actions, or aid and abet that speech by failing to enforce standard campus rules on obstruction and the use of university buildings. Does anyone doubt that if far right protestors were chanting ‘Go back to Africa’, or displaying symbols of the Ku Klux Klan, universities would – rightly – show no hesitation in using the full force of the powers available to them to condemn and shut the protests down?
At The Critic, an anonymous author exposes how Hope not Hate has campaigned against Conservative candidates while receiving funding from the taxpayer.
Hope not Hate constitutes two organisations — a charitable trust and a Ltd Company. As a registered charity, Hope Not Hate is subject to strict regulations regarding political campaigning and must adhere to the election guidance outlined by the Charity Commission, which is rather clear; “Charities must not support or oppose a political party or candidate.” Hope not Hate’s anti-Hall activism clearly contravenes these guidelines. But they were conducted not by Hope not Hate the charity, but Hope not Hate Limited (Reg. No. 08188502).
The distinction between the two is legally important, but in practice irrelevant. Hope not Hate Charitable Trust doesn’t even have its own website; rather, a sub-section on the Hope not Hate website. In fact, Hope not Hate Charitable Trust has no staff whatsoever. According to their last report, Hope not Hate Ltd is the only beneficiary of Hope not Hate Charitable Trust, who provide 80 per cent of their running costs, alongside “the costs of a full-time fundraiser and associated fundraising costs, the cost of servicing the charity and its finances.”…
… Charlotte Gill has already researched Hope not Hate Charitable Trust’s funding, which includes many of the trusts behind many of the most prominent radical chic charities. And, of course, the Home Office; no tale of The Blob is complete without evidence that the government is wasting taxpayer’s money to fight its stated objectives. Gill notes that, given the Paul Hamlyn Trust has also given over half a million pounds in funding, “the taxpayer under a ‘Conservative’ government, is a joint-funder with a Foundation that supports open borders.”
At UnHerd, Aris Roussinos looks at the efforts of Matthew Goodwin and Dominic Cummings to build right-wing alternatives to the Conservative Party.
The opportunity, or in Cummings’s phrasing, “market share” for an insurgent reformist party therefore looks excellent: yet the British political system, with its Early Modern parliament clustered round by whispering courtiers, is almost expressly designed to prevent such a possibility (indeed, to imagine a different, functional political system may now even face legal sanction). Where the two differ is in their approach to this problem. For Goodwin, the new movement — it need not necessarily be a party — may find its greatest chance of success outside Parliament.
After all, Brexit was, he notes, “perhaps the single most important thing achieved over the last decade and it had nothing to do with winning seats in Westminster… Indirect political pressure, from outside the system, can often be as consequential as direct pressure from the inside.” For Goodwin, the guiding principle behind the new movement, its overriding goal, is “popular sovereignty” as “the only way to hand power back to the people, where it belongs”, though the means to achieve this outcome is so far left unsketched.
Where Goodwin is then a genuine populist, Cummings, by contrast, leans towards elitism: the effective models he cites as examples are California tech CEOs, “the subset of elites who are a) most competent at building but also b) almost entirely disconnected from mainstream politics”, particularly Marc Andreessen and other Silicon Valley would-be philosopher kings. The Cummings solution is built around “the elite Insider network”, who “are overwhelmingly in hedge funds, banks, VCs, PE, tech startups, research labs, academia and so on — keeping their heads down and building walled gardens between themselves and political madness”. Yet even here, the Cummings model is more democratic, in practice, than our current sclerotic system.
Wonky thinking
Policy Exchange has published the report Tall Buildings: A Policy Framework for Responsible High-Rise and Better Density by Ike Ijeh. The paper argues that high-rise buildings have not eased the housing crisis and calls for a new approach to urban density that meets demand and improves people’s quality of life.
In London, the 68 residential towers above 111m that have been added to the city’s skyline since 2000 have provided over 22,000 housing units. But shockingly, just 6% of these have been affordable and around 0.3% has been social housing. The vast majority of the housing provided has been luxury with over one third of it developed by non-UK investors. Over the same period, the number of households on London’s housing waiting lists has risen by 18%. And yet ironically, our recently conducted polling indicates that provision of affordable housing would be the most likely attribute to encourage the public to support tall buildings.
Equally, there is an erroneous conflation between high-rise and highdensity with the common misconception that the former is the best way to deliver the latter comprehensively, ignoring the fact that successive waves of academic research has proved that mid-rise developments are often the most efficient means to optimise density and maximise housing supply. Abel and Cleland House is a thirteen-storey modern mansion block in Westminster. Yet it contains more than twice the density of the infamous Brutalist Trellick Tower in nearby North Kensington which, at 32 storeys, is almost three times its height.
And to add insult to injury, despite the hundreds of tall buildings London has erected in recent years, their residential impotence is proven by the fact that London’s density levels still remain a fraction of cities like Paris and Barcelona. Ironically, these are cities that have largely rejected the high-rise aesthetic (at least from their historic centres) in favour of prodigious mid-rise development.
As well as diverting attention away from the opportunities presented by these potentially more efficient and contextually sympathetic forms of mid-rise housing, the indiscriminate proliferation of tall buildings has also caused grave harm to the historic fabric in several cities, especially London and Manchester. Historic character, cherished views and the setting of key heritage assets have been recklessly squandered and sometimes wrecked in favour of inappropriate, and poorly designed high-rise development. The threat of tall buildings was also partially responsible for Liverpool being dramatically stripped of its World Heritage Site status in 2021, only the second time in UNESCO’s history this has happened.
Extensive polling carried out by Policy Exchange shows that 71% of the public believe that tall buildings should not be permitted to interfere with historic views and 41% believed that London’s skyline has been worsened by tall buildings, with just a quarter believing the opposite. Out of Rome, Paris and London the public also selected Rome’s skyline arrangement (where tall buildings are virtually non-existent) as their favourite, with London, (where tall buildings are now indiscriminately spread throughout much of the city), coming last. In 2015, one of London’s most prolific tall buildings in recent years, the Walkie Talkie, won the annual Carbuncle Cup award for being the worst building in Britain.
The Youth Endowment Fund has published its Education, Children and Violence report. This new guidance looks at what actions schools and colleges should take to prevent young people from becoming involved in violence. This includes a series of practical recommendations for schools and colleges to follow.
The recommendations in this report provide guidance on the ‘best bets’ from the underpinning evidence. School, college and AP leaders’ professional judgement on how to use these recommendations, as well as their knowledge of local contexts, remain critically important.
1 – Keep children in education
Why?
Being in education can protect children from violence.
Recommended action
Deliver evidence-based attendance improvement strategies (such as meetings with parents/carers and breakfast clubs).
Implement whole-school and targeted behaviour support to reduce the need for exclusion.
Provide appropriate support for temporarily suspended and permanently excluded children.
2 – Provide children with trusted adults
Why?
Meaningful relationships with trusted adults can protect children from violence.
Recommended action
Provide one-to-one mentoring by trained adults to support vulnerable children.
Engage vulnerable children in sports with coaches who can support them.
3 – Develop children’s social and emotional skills
Why?
Effective social and emotional skills can protect children from violence.
Recommended action
Develop children’s social and emotional skills with a universal curriculum, targeted support and whole-school strategies.
Provide relationship violence reduction sessions to secondary-age children.
Implement an anti-bullying strategy.
Support access to therapy for those children who require additional support.
4 – Target efforts at the places and times where violence occurs
Why?
Violence happens more often in certain places and at certain times.
Recommended action
Survey children and talk to staff to determine where to focus your efforts.
Meet with partners to understand the local context and coordinate your safeguarding response.
5 – Cautiously consider unproven strategies and avoid harmful approaches
Why?
Resources are best spent on evidence-based strategies.
Recommended action
Cautiously consider unproven strategies (such as knife education programmes, trauma-informed practice training, and police in corridors and classrooms).
Avoid approaches that have been proven to cause harm (such as prison awareness programmes).
Book of the week
This week we recommend The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History by Eric Helleiner. The author explores the wide range of nineteenth and early-twentieth century ideas and thinkers that have inspired protectionist economics across the world, from Latin America to Asia. Understanding this historic tradition can shed greater light on today’s growing rivalry between the United States and China.
Although the emergence of neomercantilist thought was encouraged by the cross-border circulation of ideas, it was also often a product of independent intellectual innovation informed more by local mercantilist tradition than by imported thought. The fourth and final limitation of List-centric understandings of neomercantilism’s history is their neglect of the diverse mercantilist intellectual traditions that helped to inform the emergence of this ideology. Whereas List drew inspiration from some well-known European mercantilists such as France’s Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Italy’s Antonio Serra, other neomercantilists build upon quite different mercantilist traditions that receive much less attention in modern IPE scholarship.
The East Asian experience highlights this point particularly well. Many neomercantilists in Japan, China, and Korea drew directly on vibrant mercantilist traditions within their own countries that are rarely mentioned in IPE literature (or even in much of the scholarship on the origins of East Asian developmental states). These traditions included Japan’s kokueki ideology, which first emerged in the early eighteenth century, China’s statecraft school from the early nineteenth century, and Korea’s late eighteenth-century Bukhak thought. In all three countries, neomercantilist thinkers also were inspired by much older Chinese mercantilist texts, such as The Book of Lord Shang from the Warring States era (453–221 BCE). The latter’s slogan, “rich state, strong army,” became a rallying call for nineteenth-century neomercantilists across the region, some of whom also explicitly compared the conflictual world politics of their era with that of the Warring States period.
It is no coincidence that a region with this kind of rich mercantilist intellectual history was the place with some of the most dynamic, endogenously generated neomercantilist ideas in the pre-1939 period outside Europe and North America. Some of the distinctive content of East Asian neomercantilism also reflected this history, such as its often heavy export-orientation, its frequent endorsement of ambitious government economic activism, and its Confucian content. Although this book is focused on the history of neomercantilist thought, I devote space in the third part of the volume to providing a brief overview of some of these East Asian mercantilist traditions in order to highlight their significance and because they are less well known than their European counterparts. That poor knowledge of East Asia’s mercantilist past has contributed to the common but mistaken argument that East Asian neomercantilism is simply a derivative ideology imported from the West.
Non-European mercantilist intellectual traditions also informed the emergence of pre-1939 neomercantilist thought beyond East Asia. In early twentieth-century India, Sarkar supported his neomercantilist views by citing the Arthashastra, an ancient South Asian mercantilist text from a similar age as The Book of Lord Shang (to which it is sometimes compared). In West Africa, Asante neomercantilism in the late nineteenth century emerged directly from a mercantilist tradition that had been pioneered earlier in the century. In Egypt, Mohammad Ali’s neomercantilism followed in the footsteps of Ottoman mercantilist ideas that had emerged in the late eighteenth century.
Even the European mercantilist traditions that helped to inform neomercantilist thought were wider than those that inspired List. For example, Drucki-Lubecki’s neomercantilist initiatives in early nineteenth-century Poland built on some unique mercantilist ideas in his own country, to which List made no reference. The initiatives of some Latin American neomercantilists in the nineteenth century drew inspiration from another strand of European mercantilist thought that List did not discuss: that associated with reforms within the Spanish Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. Another example may have been Mathew Carey’s American neomercantilism, whose characteristics bore some similarities to a little-known eighteenth-century mercantilist tradition in Ireland, the country of Carey’s birth, where he first expressed his skepticism of free trade.
Quick links
New guidance has been published telling schools not to teach contested gender ideology and bans sex education for children aged under nine.
The share of higher education visas going to students at Russell Group universities has fallen dramatically since the introduction of the graduate route.
Uber found 3,000 people with false identities after auditing their UK delivery drivers last year.
UK goods exports are falling well behind the OECD average with an increase of just 4% since 2019.
National Trust-recommended candidates had his/her vote inflated by over 72,000 Quick Votes, preventing candidates, such as Lord Sumption, from winning.
Private schools increased their fees by 8% in anticipation of Labour’s VAT plans.
A Palestinian student had her student visa revoked after saying she was “full of joy” following the October 7th attack.
President Biden has increased tariffs on Chinese goods, including a 100% tariff on Electric Vehicles and doubling tariffs on semiconductors and solar panels.