From Urban Dictionary: 'To Clegg is to betray everything you once stood for in a dash of opportunism and stupidity.'
The Liberal Democrat spin machine has gone into overdrive during the last week. Nick Clegg’s sympathetically candid interview in the New Statesman seems almost like the beginning of a public rehabilitation. The message seems to be that we’ve torn him down, and now, in time honoured media tradition, it’s time to build him back up again. Even the Telegraph’s take on the interview, beneath with the ostensibly mocking headline, “I cry to music and even my sons ask why everybody hates me”, inspires a quick flicker of – what is it – guilt?
The question arises, are we justified in continuing to hate everything Nick Clegg represents, or have we turned into massive playground bullies, continuing to flush our victim’s head down the toilet?
Almost a year into coalition government, it is still worth holding onto the memory of those Liberal Democrat manifesto pledges, embodied by Nick Clegg, that led to a barrage of student protests, vociferous journalistic bile, effigies on bonfires, and his own set of entries in Urban Dictionary. Nobody who can understand that £27,000 is a ludicrous amount of money for three years of lectures and library access will forget the tuition fees betrayal in a hurry.
On the other hand, the commodification of higher education wasn’t cooked up solely by this government. The infamous, idiotic Browne report, leading to the decision to officially mandate university courses solely according to the market-governing value, economic “use”, was commissioned by Labour. It was Peter Mandelson’s hand on the helm when the initial push came for the reconceptualising of degrees as useful business contracts meted out to student-customers paying through their tightly clenched teeth for the privilege. “Listen, professor, I’m paying for this degree: now explain to me how this ‘Beauvoir and existentialism’ essay will be directly relevant to changing demands of the job market (none of this ‘transferable skills’ bullshit), or I’m buying a different course”.
Most damagingly, it was under Labour that the higher education department was moved into the business department, foreshadowing this government’s “reforms”. Accusing the Tories and Lib Dems of acting “ideologically” is one of Labour’s better catch-phrases of the moment. As Dominic Lawson points out in the Independent, most people believe that acting according to ideology is a bad thing. But Lawson is wrong to argue that Labour’s assertion: “the Tory cuts are ideological”, is an accusation simply of Thatcherism, or one borne out of jealousy. Rather, it is the quite fair charge that the Thatcher-esque policies of the Tory-Lib Dem government are being enacted dogmatically, that they are not supported by the available evidence.
That is why it is important that we continue to fight for higher education to be seen as good for other reasons than economic utility. Without graduates in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, we will not know what it is to speak of other values than use; we will not know anything of the philosophy behind politics, nor of politics itself. We will not know why it is important that we should know these things. Without an understanding of these ideas, the ascendant ideology of economic utility will go unchallenged.
We have already seen a concentrated assault on the idea that as far as governing values go, if you can’t easily quantify it, you should get rid of it. If use is the only value we admit of, we will not know that it is just one black and white, up and down, right and wrong field of thought – in a politics that should rightfully admit of grey.
Tempting though it is to hate Nick Clegg’s guts until the end of time, the reality is that he probably isn’t the arch-villain we would like to think he is (that sentence was very difficult to type). He did deliberately canvass the student vote on a policy that he never intended to keep, but he probably isn’t completely evil. Like Darth Vader, there might be some good left deep inside him, in spite of the fact that he would condone building a massive Death Star with which to destroy higher education, the welfare state, the public sector, our rich artistic culture, and everything else that is valuable.
Yet, somewhere, there must be some good in him, after all, he does cry alone in his room while listening to music, and what Radiohead fan doesn’t understand that?
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