The end of the green consensus?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: ‘The end of the green consensus?’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Robert Shrimsley
All the charges that Nigel Farage levels about society at the moment, about the nature of culture and the way that people are excluding the majority opinion get validated by events like this. And so it’s a double win for him.

Lucy Fisher
Welcome to Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, Lucy Fisher. You heard there the FT’s Robert Shrimsley talking about the saga of Nigel Farage and Coutts bank. More from him later. Coming up, we’ll be asking, why are the Tories watering down green policies? And just how far are they prepared to go? Plus, we’ll examine the latest trouble engulfing Britain’s universities. With me are FT columnist Robert Shrimsley. Hi, Robert.

Robert Shrimsley
Hi, Lucy.

Lucy Fisher
And the FT’s deputy political editor, Jim Pickard. Hi, Jim.

Jim Pickard
Hi.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
So before we kick off our discussion, what else caught your attention this week? Robert?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, I was quite interested by the fact that Labour has taken quite a few big steps backwards on its trans rights policy, from being the full trans rights agenda that essentially one asked for by Stonewall and trans campaigners and the one that got Nicola Sturgeon such trouble in Scotland. Labour has now rode back a lot on this to a position that’s actually not that different from the government’s and its main position. What I find interesting about this is obviously it’s an attempt by Keir Starmer to remove problems that the issues that might alienate him from mainstream voters. But also, I mean, having gone through a period where he ditched all the policies and positions of Jeremy Corbyn, he’s now going through that period where he’s ditching the things he actually supported at the start of his own leadership. So I think there could be more to come.

Lucy Fisher
Absolutely. We’ll have to return to that in more depth. Jim, what caught your attention?

Jim Pickard
I’m fascinated by this story about Joe Lewis, who is one of the richest men in Britain, is a billionaire whose family trust has a majority stake in Tottenham Hotspur football club. And he’s being accused of brazen insider trading in the US. He’s 86 years old and he has handed himself into officials in New York to face 19 charges. And it’s alleged that he shared information with his pilots and a girlfriend enabling them to make millions of dollars into dollars on the stock market. And he, of course, denies this.

Robert Shrimsley
And what’s yours, Lucy?

Lucy Fisher
Well, for me, Robert, I was really struck by Tony Blair predicting that the UK will end up going back into the EU. And I think in part it may be off the back of a new poll by Deltapoll, which shows a five-year high for pro-EU sentiment in the UK. They found that 56 per cent of people would vote to rejoin if there were a second referendum versus 38 per cent who would vote to remain out. And I just think it’s interesting. You know, there’s a lot of talk of wanting to go back in, but I think Blair’s one of the first major figures to predict that will happen.

Robert Shrimsley
Slow burn, I think.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Slow burn, absolutely. Well, let’s move on to the major political theme this week, which has been around green policies. There’s an irony to the timing in the week that Europe has been engulfed by a heatwave that spiralled into horrifying wildfires in some places. The UK government is looking at softening its environmental agenda. On a visit to the West Midlands this week, Rishi Sunak had this to say.

Rishi Sunak
Yes, we’re gonna make progress towards net zero, but we’re gonna do that in a proportionate and pragmatic a way that doesn’t unnecessarily give people more hassle and more cost in their lives. That’s what I’m not interested and prepared to do.

Lucy Fisher
So, Robert, quite a change in direction from the prime minister there.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah. I mean, I think what we’re seeing, and obviously this all goes back to the Uxbridge by-election where Tories were delighted and enthused by the fact that campaigning against the Ulez air pollution charge obviously which not technically a climate change measure than it is a green measure, seems to have served them well in that by-election, and it plays to the prejudices of a number of Conservatives who worry about green policies, think they’re expensive, think there is something socialist about them and big statist and don’t like the net zero targets.

And it’s a quandary for Rishi Sunak and the leaders of the Conservative party because on the one hand, all polling shows that climate change policies are popular. The country thinks we need to do something about climate change and meet net zero. But the moment that comes into connection with reality of, you know, it’s gonna cost me money, it gets a bit more complicated. That old line about everyone wants to get to heaven but nobody wants to die.

And so I think what we’re gonna see, I suspect and I thought it was quite sneaky, the Sunak comments. What I think we’re going to see is the prime minister and cabinet ministers maintaining all the time that they remain absolutely committed to their net zero targets while slowly resiling from any of the steps that are actually necessary to hit them. So they’ll keep saying, no, no, we’re totally committed. We’re just being pragmatic and sensible. And meanwhile, the clock is ticking and the targets get further away. The other thing I remember some while back was talking to one of the now cavalcade of people who’ve been energy ministers since 2019 saying to me, look, you know, these are 2050 targets.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah.

Robert Shrimsley
We don’t have to hit them till 2050, which of course in one sense seems true. But on the other hand, the nature of the way the planet is warming suggests that you can’t leave it till the last minute.

Lucy Fisher
Let’s look at some of the policies that could be reviewed. There’s the ban on new fossil fuel cars from 2030, a ban on new gas boilers from 2035, a recycling scheme that’s been delayed by a year, energy efficiency requirements for landlords that are set to be pushed back and a long-awaited biomass strategy that we’re not expected to see any time soon. So there is a lot of movement on diluting these green policies. But as Robert says, that target of 2050 for reaching net zero carbon emissions is a long way away, isn’t it?

Jim Pickard
I would say there’s been not a lot of movement, actually, if you think about it. The gas boiler target is still 2035. The petrol diesel cars is still 2030, as you pointed out, and the delay to the repackaging scheme, the packaging recycling scheme, was something that we reported that before the Uxbridge by-election was going to happen. So I think that’s fishing around for other things to delay. But apart from the issue of landlords, it’s not quite clear what it is that they’re gonna do.

Now the point Robert made is a good one, which is you can talk about we’re gonna get to 2050 and that you can get there in a straight line or you can do a curve which starts out very unambitious and then suddenly races towards the target closer to the time, in theory. But in practice, the reason they can’t do that is because legally they have to produce these things called carbon budgets, which cover I think it’s three, four, five-year periods. They basically inch us all the way up to 2050. And if the government fails to hit those, then I think it finds itself actually outside of its own legal targets. So they are obliged to do it more or less in a straight line.

I think what the Ulez situation has shown, and I quote a colleague calling it a “Labour loss” the other day, we have to remember that Labour did come pretty close to taking a seat, which is a very Tory seat and has been for many, many years. What is true is that the swing towards Labour was of course much smaller than the swing to the Labour party up in Selby where they overturned a huge majority and of course it was identified as a major issue. I think it’s the fact that it’s a very clear, labelled hypothecated tax basically on green stuff, which is what puts people up in arms. I think there are other ways of reaching net zero involving more borrowing or using tax towards doing it in a more kind of subtle way. And if you think about how this Tory government has managed to achieve a decarbonisation, a massive decarbonisation of the electricity system, they’ve done it basically by a sort of green levy on people’s bills, which, I mean, if you bothered to read your bills you’d notice it or if you read certain newspapers then you probably a bit irritated by the green levy but largely, people haven’t been sort of totally incensed by it.

So I think there’s a lesson here as much about hypothecation of certain things as much as there is about the difficulty of going green. But I think this is a bit of a taste of the future because, you know, we’ve done the relatively easy, low-hanging fruit of decarbonisation of the electricity system, getting rid of gas boilers, getting rid of petrol and diesel cars and replacing them is the bit that’s really expensive. They didn’t have to worry about that before the election, but it’s coming up quite fast towards the end of the decade.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, I do think this is quite a useful point that Jim was touching on at the end there, which is that actually changing cars is a picnic compared to changing household boilers. And actually, if you were to move from a combination boiler, say, which a lot of people have to, to a heat pump, that requires all kinds of other re-engineering of your domestic heating system as well. I think what governments are gonna have to look at is that there’s gonna have to be a lot more carrot and a lot less stick in the way they do this. I mean, we know how angry people get about any of these charges. We saw with the fuel protests in the 1990s, which wasn’t an environmental issue as such. It was just they didn’t like paying more tax on things they knew about. And the problem is that the moment when we really have to be speeding up the agenda to hit these net zero targets has coincided with, you know, a very bad time for the economy and a cost of living crisis, which makes it hard for the government to reimburse people. But it is gonna have to do so because you’re telling people they’ve got to change things they did legally and reasonably.

Lucy Fisher
Mm-hmm.

Robert Shrimsley
And if you want them to do these things, the fact is compensation schemes are gonna have to get a lot better.

Lucy Fisher
I guess one of the issues, though, if the government is giving mixed signals to the market is they, you know, create confusion, don’t allow the certainty or create the conditions of certainty that allow firms to invest in, you know, mass producing heat pumps at a much cheaper level.

Robert Shrimsley
Totally. And I mean, we’re not got the skills to fit enough. I think, I can’t remember what the target was, but we’re way, way, way below it in terms of fitting them this year. But the fact I think the market’s actually given up on making any long-term decisions until the election. I think anybody who makes decisions now before they’re either a) sure there’s a Labour government or b) sure that the Conservatives aren’t gonna sneak back in is probably a fool to themselves. So the truth is we’ve probably got a year-long hiatus before we get any certainty in the market.

Lucy Fisher
And Robert, just finally on this topic, clearly the government think that there’s electoral gain to be had from creating a wedge issue with Labour on this by rowing back and leaving Labour as the kind of green party. Is that a trap for Keir Starmer?

Robert Shrimsley
Look, I mean, I’ve thought for quite a long time that it’s very, very hard to see how the Conservatives can save the election next election, but they can clearly diminish their losses and they can put pressure on Labour. I think the green agenda fits into a broader point, which is that the Conservatives are constructing an argument. We’ve had those old conversations about the blob, but the notion of a liberal elite with liberal ideals, and they like to refer to them as woke, which I think just means anything that the Daily Telegraph doesn’t approve of.

Lucy Fisher
Hmm.

Robert Shrimsley
And they’ve been struggling to make it relevant to ordinary people. But the point is, climate change is one of the areas where they can because it comes with a cost and a tax. They can say these are the people, the elite telling you what’s good for you and they’re imposing these extra charges on these extra taxes on you. And you see Tory strategists trying to, you know, tar Keir Starmer as being the same as Just Stop Oil. They do the same on immigration. He’s on the side of the immigration lawyers against the people. And you can imagine this stepping up to he’s going to tax your pension, he’s going to cut your inheritance tax thresholds. And I can begin to see an argument that they, where they put all of this together and say, this is a party, the Labour party, which is out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns and fears and values. You know, political parties have to have dragons they’re gonna slay for the voters and you have a dragon of a big statist elitist, we know what’s best for you, we’re gonna tax you to make it work party. Now, is that enough to stop Labour winning? I don’t think it is, but it is enough to mobilise an energised Rishi Sunak’s base. And one of the other things we saw in the by-elections was that actually his big problem in the seats he lost was as much the fact the Tories didn’t bother voting as that they switched to other sides. So, actually, just getting disaffected and angry Tories back on board is a big difference between an absolute electoral rout and a small defeat.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Well, the other big story on the political front this week has been Nigel Farage’s battle with the private bank Coutts. The row over the closure of his account, partly because of his political views, led to the dramatic 1:30am resignation of Dame Alison Rose, chief executive of NatWest, which of course owns Coutts. The chief executive of Coutts, Peter Flavel, has also had to step down. Nigel Farage hit out at the banking sector when he spoke to the BBC.

Nigel Farage
I was kicked out of the bank because of my political views. What on earth does that have to do with a bank? Their job is to run a bank, not to become moral arbiters. The frightening piece is this: I am far from alone. Many other people have come forward to say they’ve been shut out because of what they stand for and what they believe.

Lucy Fisher
Now, Jim, it’s been quite a rollercoaster this story, and I know you’ve been covering it in depth. Just to kick us off, how surprised are you in the first place that a bank would take a decision like this and that you’d have a chief executive taking such a big risk of briefing a journalist about a private client’s financial situation?

Jim Pickard
I mean, on one level, I’m not surprised that a super elite private bank which models itself as being for the very richest elite in society would consider who it takes on as a client reasonably carefully. I mean, there is, of course, an irony here of, for us is an anti-elitist wanting to belong to one of the most elite clubs in the country, Coutt’s membership. The fact that they would create a dossier of, you know, 40 pages going through almost a bit of a sort of worst-case scenario of how bad an individual Farage is, this was something which I didn’t really know existed, to be honest. I mean, the comprehensive thing with this whole story is it starts off with an elite institution, which I suppose you would expect it to be vetting people quite heavily. But I think the reason people are kind of more sympathetic . . . 

Lucy Fisher
But surely Jim, not on the basis of their views.

Jim Pickard
Well exactly. And the complication and the reason this took a little while for this story to unspool is because it was partly true that he was about to fall below their commercial threshold. But of course, that the dossier showed us that it was primarily his political views which got him ejected. And I think the reason this is a concern is because — if it’s true that another eight or 10 banks rejected Farage and basically threatened to make him bank account-less — that the idea of an individual who is there within Britain’s political norms, and there is a citizen with the same rights as anyone else not being able to bank in a world which is increasingly a cashless society, has raised totally legitimate questions about how widespread this is. And, you know it’s complicated because politicians — Farage is not the only politician who found it very complicated to get a bank account because of this whole system of PEPs.

Lucy Fisher
Which just to remind listeners means politically exposed people.

Jim Pickard
Yeah. I mean there was a debate in the House of Lords last month where Ken Clarke said he’d given up his American Express card because the whole sort of questions around it become far too onerous. There was a Lib Dem baroness, Baroness Kramer, who said that in her attempt to open an account with one bank, they’ve insisted on the payslips from her husband who died 17 years ago. This has been an onerous situation, particularly for politicians for some time. But I think what Farage has done has basically opened up an awful lot more scrutiny on something which I think is the thin end of the wedge and not a great thing. But let’s not forget the reason why the chief executive lost her job was not because they rejected Farage as a customer. It was the act of briefing a journalist not accurately about Farage’s personal circumstances. Let’s keep in mind that was the thing that did for her.

Lucy Fisher
So Robert, as Jim said, this phenomenon of debanking has firmly entered the lexicon. I have to admit, I had not heard of either the term or this sort of trend, if it is a trend, before. I’m interested how quickly and fiercely the government — Sunak, Hunt — have leapt on this. Is that smart politics or just over-opportunism?

Robert Shrimsley
Well, the two aren’t necessarily in conflict with each other. I mean, I think it touches on sort of there’s a general fear of Nigel Farage in the Conservative party. And since on this occasion they happened to think he was right, it was an easy call to make. This also, I mean going back to what we’re saying about the green agenda, this also ties in with the general Conservative attack approach, which is that there is a sort of what they call a woke career political correctness in all forms of society, and particularly in business which needs to be pushed back on. So again, this played to that agenda which they’re happy to deal with. And let’s be fair, he’s right. You know, he’s right about the fact that he shouldn’t lose his bank account because he has views that particular banks don’t like. And I think it is a very difficult call for the Conservatives to do, so I think what’s gonna be interesting. I mean, Jim’s talked about the people who are politicians are politically exposed, other people who might lose their bank accounts because of their views.

I think there’s a bigger, another big issue which Nigel Farage has touched on already, which is the issue of just how difficult it is to get a bank account if you’re a small business. And how many small companies, small businesses find the banks don’t want to bother with them cause they don’t make any money on these people. And it’s a pain for them. So they don’t want to give businesses banks. And ever since the privatisation of the Royal Mail, it’s become much harder for people to have to insist on having a bank account. And we do actually have a bank in NatWest, which is 39 per cent owned by the state at the moment. So I think there is a genuine and big issue which I think the government would be wise to address. I think there is a question that Nigel Farage has touched on something which is about the sort of the monolith of banking, be it for political correctness or be it because they can’t quite be bothered with the effort of running a small business account. And so I think this is one is gonna run a bit.

Lucy Fisher
Mm-hmm. And interestingly, the Tories, Jim, are trying to turn this into an attack on Labour in quite a convoluted way. Is this getting much purchase, do you think?

Jim Pickard
I agree with Robert that the danger for Labour here is that in their attempts to be business-friendly. I mean, I think that’s the explanation for why they have sort of given off mixed messages over this in a way with Conservative party’s very consistently supported the Farage point of view. I think Labour is so desperate to look friendly with big business and shed that whole leftwing Jeremy Corbyn era that perhaps, they were a little bit late to come to the conclusion that Keir Starmer came to after Rose resigned, which was actually the way that Farage was treated was a bad thing. And the danger of doing that is, it could potentially sound like they’re a bit tone-deaf to the broader issue of people losing their bank accounts for political views, who may not be Farage but just ordinary people whose views are not, inverted commas, “woke enough”. And there’s a broader public view of the banks, I would say, which is that we, the taxpayers, bailed them out 15 years ago. And yet since 2015, they have closed more than 5,000 branches. They can get rid of your account with a month’s notice and not even explain it. He’s definitely tapping into something here, which is not just about him.

Lucy Fisher
Yeah. But actually, if we focus for a moment on him, Robert. I mean this has been the most fantastic platform for Nigel Farage who we know is no shrinking violet when it comes to the limelight.

Robert Shrimsley
He has been, but he’s fundamentally got a point. I mean, I’m sure we all read the 40 pages of dossier that they, Coutts prepared for him. And they read like they’ve got some intern to do a Google search. I mean, there’s tons of stuff from Hope Not Hate, bits from Wikipedia. And it was hardly as if they had forensic accountancy. Jim is right about the point about Coutts, which is they are an elitist, exclusive bank. It’s not like he was thrown out of Barclays. Nevertheless, the reasons are just not good enough. And all the charges that Nigel Farage, you know, levels about society at the moment, about the nature of culture and the way that people are excluding, you know, the majority opinion, if one takes the Brexit vote as the majority of opinion, get validated by events like this. And so, it’s a double win for him. It’s a huge exposure. It’s another big campaign that he can put himself at the front of [MUSIC PLAYING] and people relate. And I think on this occasion he’s right.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lucy Fisher
Well, Robert, Jim, stay with us as we move on to our next subject. Now joining us in the studio is Peter Foster, the FT’s public policy editor. Hi, Peter.

Peter Foster
Good afternoon.

Lucy Fisher
I’m afraid it has to be pointed out to listeners that you have just arrived (Peter laughs) with a mug, with a photo of yourself on it.

Peter Foster
Yes.

Lucy Fisher
Do you wish to explain?

Peter Foster
Well, it’s an old heirloom from another job, a colleague, when I was leaving another newspaper, gave it to me and my wife took one look at it and said, that is not coming into the house. So it sits on my desk and I’m pretty comfortable that no other colleague is gonna want it (Lucy laughs).

Lucy Fisher
Now, Peter you’re here to talk about the problems facing universities. If anyone listening was a student or a parent of one during the pandemic, then they will know that the university experience during Covid was very far from normal. Now graduates and students are teaming up to sue a number of top universities for compensation for the disruption caused during Covid. So, Peter, just remind us first up, what was university like for many students during coronavirus?

Peter Foster
It was pretty tough, Lucy. You know, a lot of them found themselves locked down. Often, you know, newbies’ first years in halls of residence with people they didn’t know. You know, it’s tough enough going to university as it is in your first year, all sorts of stresses and strains, but doing it locked up with other people, everyone was frightened about Covid. A lot of online teaching so people didn’t get the experience. They didn’t go to freshers’ fair, they didn’t go hang out in the bar. And it was, I think, pretty miserable.

Lucy Fisher
And so tell us a bit about the sort of US-style class action lawsuit that’s being launched by 120,000 students and graduates in the UK.

Peter Foster
It’s an interesting case. About 120,000 in total. The first case is against UCL, 11,000 students there who’ve signed on. As you say, it is a US-funded, no-win, no-fee litigation. So £13mn being put up by a US firm. And obviously, they’ll get a cut of the upside if there’s a settlement and the students will get a cut of the upside if there’s a settlement. They’re asking for about £5,000 per student, although there will be individual settlements if they win, which is roughly the gap between what you’d pay for a distance learning course and what you pay for an in-person course. And it’s quite important that because students have a contract with universities essentially, and the universities will say that the contract never explicitly says it’s about in-person teaching. But the case for the prosecution, as it were, for the students, is it’s obviously implicit that there’s in-person teaching because otherwise you wouldn’t charge lower fees, which a lot of universities do for a distance learning course. So that is their argument. And whether they’ll win or not? Well, I think, you know, you’ll hear quite a diversity of legal opinion. I think on balance, from the amount of interviews that my colleague Alistair Gray and I did for this story, the balance of legal opinion is that they’ve got an uphill battle to win the case. But you have to say if someone’s putting £13mn up to underwrite the case, they must feel they’ve got a shot.

Lucy Fisher
Mm-hmm. And I was struck by another analogy I think you used in your piece, which is that private schools, many of them dropped their fees during the pandemic in acknowledgment that teaching was happening online and it wasn’t the same experience as in-person. So you say the chances of the students winning is perhaps lower than in universities. But what’s at stake for the universities if they do have to pay out hundreds of millions of pounds collectively, the settlement?

Peter Foster
Yeah, I mean, multiply 120,000 by 5,000, you end up with a large number. 500mn-plus, 600mn. We’ll see. You know, my feeling is that, you know, there may well be settlements. Part of the case here is that the universities have always said that they’re not like a holiday company. You know, you booked a holiday. Force majeure still didn’t mean the holiday company was exempt from giving you compensation, from giving you something back, you know, allowing you to rebook, etc. Now, university sort of argue that actually the sticker price on a university degree with 9,250 for the tuition fees is not really the same thing, partly because, you know, the government carries the liability on the loans, right? So if you don’t get your full value for the courses where you don’t go on to earn. So the question would be, even if they did get compensation, should the government be in line for some of the lucre that might come out of the settlement? It would set a really interesting precedent, though, now that we live in a world that we, you know, we all didn’t grow up in where tuition fees get paid. It’s a much more commercial world. And if the universities were to lose the case, it might well set a rather different tone between the consumer, the client, as it were, and the university, which isn’t perhaps traditionally the way we think about the relationship between a university and the student.

Lucy Fisher
I have to add, I certainly did face tuition fees, although admittedly they were nowhere near as high as they are now. You mentioned they are capped at just over £9,000. But that’s also a big problem in an era of high inflation, isn’t it, Peter? And you’ve written also recently about the need to rethink the funding model underpinning English universities.

Peter Foster
I think this is a much more serious story, which is that essentially the universities are approaching a funding crisis. So if you look at what happened in university tuition between 1975 and around 2000, the unit of resource, the amount of money per student, basically halved. And that reached a crisis point where we had the Dearing review and we ended up having to have tuition fees. That was all fine. 2012, we ended up with £9,000 worth of tuition fees but that’s essentially been frozen. I think 2017 it went to 9,250 and that was also kind of fine until we start to see inflation really kick in. And those fees are now worth in real terms, about £6,000. And by 2030 they’ll be worth about £5,000.

So what you see is that universities are basically taking a loss on every undergraduate, and that’s having a load of knock-on effects. One is they have to have more international students who pay two or three times the amount of fees. And that again, the university sector has said was actually underwriting an expansion of the sector. So it was creating more places. But we’re now reaching the point, the data shows, where actually universities are probably having to constrain the number of places available for home students. And then you get into a, you know, another whole area of problem, which is that we’ve got a demographic bulge coming through in the UK so we’re gonna have a big lump of extra 18-year-olds. So you’re gonna have to find 46,000 extra places by 2030 if you want to keep participation rates the same as they are now. So you’ve got a lot of demand pressure on universities and, you know, their revenues in real terms are falling.

And it’s not really clear what the solution is if we want to maintain the much-vaunted science superpower knowledge economy sector that ministers love to boast about. And I think increasingly we’re going to see a world where if we want to maintain staff-student ratios, facilities and the level of investment in research, there’s gonna have to be a conversation either about tuition fees or about changing the way the loan repayment works so that people who do well might have to pay more back than they borrowed. That’s a tricky one. Or you start repayments earlier. And you may well have a world where even if the sticker price of university remains the same, the government’s gonna have to contribute more, particularly in areas, you know, lab-based projects if we’re going to maintain standards and the attractiveness of the UK sector to what is an incredibly mobile and competitive high-end research audience. You know, they can go to Singapore, they can go to Oxford, Cambridge.

Robert Shrimsley
Yeah, I think it’s real. I was gonna ask, by the way, because one thing that struck me, having had children who were going through the universities during Covid is, if this case is not clear cut, I do wonder about those students who find themselves disadvantaged by strikes in the university sector and the lecturers’ strikes and markers’ strikes, whether they haven’t got a much clearer case against the universities for failing to fulfil the duties they’re in. And if even if this one doesn’t work, well, there’s scope there.

Peter Foster
So marking is not part of this case. But actually strikes are.

Robert Shrimsley
The lecturers . . . 

Peter Foster
Yes. And obviously, we’ve had, you know, seven or eight years I think now of rolling strikes. And again, I think Robert’s right, if, you know, if that would put a different complexion on those strikes because, you know, again, you could argue that’s, you know, essentially a failure to deliver the experience. One of the concepts that will be discussed in the case is whether universities have a duty to provide a, you know, a kind of a level of experience, like a holiday company would, essentially.

Robert Shrimsley
I mean, the other things that come out of this, the two points where, you can see the political arguments the government is wading into, one of which is, of course, that it’s trying to throttle back the number of overseas students in some ways by making it less attractive for spouses and that kind of . . . There’s obviously masters and post and doctoral students. But the universities are reliant on these people, so if you start making it harder for overseas students to come, that’s one problem. The other thing is you can see why the government is quite keen to just pull back the university sector a little bit, have a smaller percentage of the country going to university because, actually, if they do end up having to pay a bit more to contribute, well, a smaller university sector in that respect is helpful.

Peter Foster
It’s helpful for the Treasury; whether it’s helpful for the country is an entirely different matter, ’cause the people you squeeze out of the sector are often the people who are the first people in their families, etc to go. And if you look at, by OECD standards, UK higher education participation rates, the UK is absolutely in line and it’s frankly something of a myth that there’s masses of low-value courses. The stuff that the government announced just recently about crimping low-value courses, those powers already exist in the regulator if you don’t get sufficient progression from these courses and the numbers are actually very, very small when set against the total number of courses. And I think we have to be really careful to create a system whereby, you know, the government is fuelling a kind of anti-university narrative because that’s not the future of a knowledge economy-based country. So what we’re saying is, you’re now making the UK sector the most expensive to get to, it’s not part of Horizon, and you know, the danger is in 10 years’ time we’re going to look back and find that the British university frog has been boiled relative to our competitors.

Lucy Fisher
Yes. Well, I noticed in your piece, you point out British ministers never tire of pointing out that the UK has the second most Nobel laureates of any nation and four of the world’s top 20 universities, and perhaps you wonder how long that will continue to be the case. Peter Foster, thanks very much for joining us.

Peter Foster
My pleasure.

Robert Shrimsley
Don’t forget the mug. (Peter laughs)

Lucy Fisher
Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Well, to round us up, there’s just time for the FT’s political stock picks. Jim, who are you buying or selling shares in this week?

Jim Pickard
So I’m buying Andrew Griffith, who’s the economic secretary to the Treasury, otherwise known as the City minister, because in the whole Farage vs Coutts debate, he has found himself quite proactively on the populist side of the arguments. And this is something that the government has in the last couple of days increased or tripled the amount of time that banks have given terms of notice for customers when they drop them. And they also will have to give them a clearer explanation as well. But this hasn’t come out of the blue. This isn’t the panicked reaction to the recent Coutts situation that it might seem. This is something that Griffith’s been working on for months. So I would say that has shown him to be rather astute.

Lucy Fisher
Interesting. Well, I’m selling this week, and I’m selling Suella Braverman, because I think while everyone has headed away from Westminster and isn’t sort of as focused on immigration policy, there’s been a couple of interesting developments in the courts this week, including a High Court judge ordering the home secretary to change a key part of trafficking policy that was introduced just months ago. A separate court case has ruled that the routine use of hotels for lone child asylum seekers is unlawful. So I think this is a kind of brewing row that she’s going to reap the consequences of when parliament returns in the autumn. Robert, final word to you.

Robert Shrimsley
I think I’m gonna buy shares in Keir Mather, who was the winner for Labour in the Selby & Ainsty by-election and was cruelly derided by a Tory as being an in-betweener because he is now the baby of the house aged 25. I think that’s given him quite a bit of celebrity and name recognition; apart from that he’s also called Keir. So I just I’m going to buy shares in him. I think he’s one to watch.

Lucy Fisher
Robert, Jim, thanks for joining me. And that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix. If you liked the podcast, do subscribe. You can find us through all the usual channels to receive episodes as soon as they’re released. We also really appreciate positive reviews and ratings. It does help spread the word. You can find FT articles linked to today’s podcast topics in our show notes. Political Fix was presented by me, Lucy Fisher, and produced by Audrey Tinline. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer; original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s head of audio. We’ll meet again here, same time, same place next week.

[MUSIC PLAYING]