A party predicted to win a majority in the House of Commons. A leader described as the prime minister in waiting. And a shadow cabinet that is preparing for power in just two years, by which time it believes the Labour government will have collapsed.
Yet Reform UK has no education spokesperson and apart from Nigel Farage claiming that universities are “poisoning the minds” of students, higher education received little direct attention at the party’s annual conference in Birmingham last week. But by speaking to the delegates mingling in the cavernous National Exhibition Centre, 探花视频 was able to gather some insight into what a Reform UK government could mean for universities.
One abiding theme was a preference for vocational over higher education. Farage noted that artificial intelligence will never replace plumbers, and others expanded on his idea. Although she does not speak for Reform, Claire Fox, director of the Academy of Ideas and a former Brexit Party MEP, said the growing number of nurses and police officers with university degrees was “not creating a better service provision”.
“At the very time that you’ve got more and more police officers going to university, you’ve got more and more police officers not appearing to be able to do the job of policing,” she claimed. “One thing that I do anticipate would be that [Reform] would say it’s a nonsense. You don’t need degrees to do all these different [jobs], to be productive and useful members of society.”
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More apprenticeships and vocational education are also endorsed – over a system based on “universities and algebra” – by George Finch, the 19-year-old leader of Warwickshire County Council, who wanted to become a history teacher but claimed to have declined to pursue a degree in history on the grounds that that “universities and colleges are a conveyor belt for socialist wokeism”, as he earlier this year – or for communism, as he put it to 探花视频.
The historian David Starkey agreed. The former lecturer at the London School of Economics said that during his time as Conservative education secretary, Michael Gove had been responsible for “over academising” England’s education system.
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“Turning them into so-called graduate professions has led to the destruction of things like nursing, whereas they should effectively be the result of apprenticeships,” he said. Starkey would also like to see Reform reverse former prime minister John Major’s decision in 1992 to allow polytechnics to become universities and oblige the restored polytechnics to focus on technical education.
Andrea Jenkyns, the Reform UK mayor of Greater Lincolnshire and former Conservative minister for skills, said she wanted end the “snobbery” of universities and push for higher education to “get back to basics”.
“The thing is, I want a parity of esteem between vocational, technical and academic qualifications and the trades because all are equally important for the economy and for Britain.”
The former director of higher education policy at the University of Bolton criticised “Harry Potter degrees” during her brief time in government and stands by that criticism, accusing universities of leaving young people “saddled with so much debt” and degrees that no longer guarantee the graduate premiums that they once did.
However, she is not down on all degrees. “I think we’ve got to look at what the skills shortages of Britain are and actually turbocharge investment in these type of degree courses, which is going to benefit [everyone]. I’m a firm believer we [should] import talent which is right [for the country] but we also should ensure that our British people are equipped for these jobs.”
And Jonathan Gullis, the Conservative mayor of the Staffordshire market town of Kidsgrove, who has openly discussed defecting to Reform, called for a more balanced education system that will enable “a technical revolution”.
“Universities play an important role in many ways. Science and research is obviously a major export of the United Kingdom, something we should cherish, but at the same time, how many jobs are we having to fill by using overseas migration in order to have the amount of plumbers, welders, [electricians], builders that we desperately need?” he asked.
Another area affecting higher education that would be an obvious plank of a Reform platform would be free speech, which right-wing populists typically depict as being under threat. In his conference speech, Farage warned that political leaders “will do everything they can to crush free speech”, and Jenykns said that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights – an idea?that seemed very popular in Birmingham – would be a first step in solving the problem.
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“Our universities should be really a hotbed of debate,” she added. “We should be able to have these debates respectfully and listen to other people’s views. People shouldn’t be shouted down. If people in the education profession will not sign up to having true debate and true freedom of speech, then do not be in education.”
Fox, who was formerly a visiting professor in professional practice at the University of Buckingham, was disinvited from speaking at Royal Holloway University in London over her views on gender in 2023. She said free speech remains a “major problem” on campuses – with students walking on “eggshells” and academics unable to challenge “certain orthodoxies” around critical race theory and “endless EDI initiatives”.
“Universities have not covered themselves in glory in terms of being bastions of open inquiry and free speech. The whole way that you can defend the pursuit of knowledge is that it’s open and important for society, and that hasn’t really felt like what universities have been like.
“How do you defend the university…to millions of ordinary people in a period of economic difficulty when they themselves appear to have betrayed their own mission?”
Fox, a member of the House of Lords, said the introduction of the 2023 Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act proves that that there is still a problem. “To say that there’s a lack of diversity of intellectual thought at university is an understatement. Universities are not meant to be snobby places that look down on people who haven’t got degrees, but they have become a vehicle for that kind of a political orthodoxy, which has been unpleasant to witness.”
She said Reform might support a bigger role for the Office for Students in protecting free speech. The regulator hit the University of Sussex with a record fine after it was accused of breaching its free speech duties over its handling of the resignation of Kathleen Stock.
“I don’t know what [Reform’s] policy would be but…but they might start fining people if they are anti-academic freedom,” said Fox. “Maybe they’ll go further down that line – start withholding grants for researchers if they think the research is nonsense and just propaganda, that sort of sort of thing.”
Gullis said he wants to see inspections of universities over free-speech issues and for lecturers to be held to the same standards as teachers in terms of political bias.
“The purpose of going to university is to develop an ever-deeper knowledge in your subjects of choice, and that should mean listening to and understanding a variety of views and arguments,” he said. “I think, sadly on university campuses, there are too many right-wing students who I speak to first-hand who have told me they are scared to expose their views in the fear that that will impact the grades they’ve achieved…The fact they feel like that should be a concern.”
If Reform UK is sceptical of universities and graduates, it is fair to say that the feeling is mutual.?Although the party has built up a large and sustained lead in the polls nationwide, has found that Reform performs much better in constituencies where fewer voters have degrees.
Will it try to broaden its base as the next election draws near? Reform is a long way off being able to ape the success of the late?Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA in mobilising right-wing students in the US. But the large number of young men in the NEC suggests that the party is making inroads.
Finch said the number of young people and students switching to Reform was “going through the roof”, and his fellow teenage councillor, Charles Pugsley, cabinet member for children and family services at Leicestershire?county council, is also a student at the University of Nottingham.
But Kieran Mishcuk, an 18-year-old who was elected in Kent, told the BBC that universities are a “poisoned chalice” for leaving young people with so much debt, and Jenkyns believes that “getting this country back on its feet to give them a brighter future” is the key to increasing support for Reform among students.
“Consecutive governments, including my own previous government, let young people down, and it’s very sad that you’ve got people in their 30s still in shared accommodation because they can’t afford to get on the property ladder,” she said.
Fox said that the traditional political parties have not managed to?maintain the loyalty of new generations of voters and that there is a growing substantial minority of students who already back Reform precisely because of the free speech issue.
“I think there’s a kind of a revulsion [about universities among] many, many students who are smart and bright and questioning and open minded and don’t want to be treated like idiots,” she said. “The stifling conformity on university campuses and the expectation that there will be a suite of opinions which they’re all meant to sign up to and if they don’t, they’re considered to be bigots…there’s more and more of a reaction against that.”
But convincing significant numbers of students and graduates to back Reform might not be necessary for it to win power, according to Anand Menon, professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London?and director of the UK in a Changing Europe thinktank.
“What we often forget when we go on about 50 per cent of kids going to university is that the flip side of that is that 50 per cent of kids don’t – and, at the moment, you can win an election with 26 to 27 per cent of the vote. Labour’s share of the votes cast in 2024 was , the lowest for any party forming a post-war majority government.
“There’s an increase in support for Reform and there is the growing fragmentation of the British electorate, and what the latter means is that you need less of the former for them to win.”
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Reform is running on a “very traditional, old-school conservative mantra of tough on crime and bringing down immigration”, according to Matthew Torbitt, a former Labour adviser and senior fellow at the Centre for Social Justice, co-founded by former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith. But he said it would be wise for the party to “broaden their horizons a little bit further” and start developing serious policy proposals for education.
“From an electoral point of view, if immigration is your biggest issue, it’s pretty baked in that you’re going to vote for Reform anyway, so I think that, strategically, they would look more serious and sensible to be talking about other issues of work, not just [being] an anti-immigration party.”
Education is clearly not a big priority for the party faithful. More in Common’s data showed that education and childcare was the most important issue for 8 per cent of British people – but just 3 per cent of Reform supporters. But, according to Menon, that might, in reality, mean more, rather than less, political heat on universities under a Reform government.
“My fear is that because of the way the electorate splits – which basically means that people with a degree don’t support Reform – universities start to look like soft targets for [Reform] in the same way that they do for Trump,” he said.
For all the Union Jacks and St George’s crosses on display at the NEC – featuring prominently on taxis, buses and suit jackets – the US influence is also very apparent – and not just in TV presenter Jeremy Kyle’s live interviews with voters in Birmingham, used to add a little American-style pizzazz to proceedings.
Reform has already copied from the Trump playbook in a number of ways beyond its pledge to massively reduce immigration and take a “common sense” approach to the culture wars. Farage himself is deeply embedded with the MAGA movement, and . Many conference delegates sported “Make Britain Great Again” hats, and Reform has pledged to replicate the controversial Department of Government Efficiency, initially headed by Elon Musk. But will this extend to aping Trump’s sustained attacks on universities’ funding and his attempts to exercise influence over ?
Starkey said he would like to see a Reform government be “very similar” to Trump’s administration in its treatment of the sector, urging it to “deploy the machinery of patronage” to fill key posts and force reform.
“You have got entire universities, entire departments which are really purveying unintellectual nonsense [and] you have structures of patronage which purvey and determine this stuff,” he said. “All one needs to do is to introduce what I would argue are proper scholarly tests [to fill posts].”
For her part, Fox does not support Trump’s policies on higher education, but she cited the allegations of antisemitism at elite universities as evidence that some change is needed – and she said there was “justified populist revulsion” at some aspects of UK universities.
“Trump has attacked the university sector and I criticise it as much as anyone because it’s been worrying, but it’s also the case that the way the universities have behaved in America has been really problematic in some instances. What a populist movement does is it spots the things that are genuinely wrong, and I’d say there’s a lot of institutional rot in universities.”
But the Centre for Social Justice’s Torbitt, whose experience at university helped transform a life scarred by homelessness and being groomed into a gang, warned of the “dangerous” consequences of harsh economic realities on Reform’s attitude towards universities.
“What happens when you’re blaming intellectuals or, potentially, institutions because you can’t get through…your ?10 billion deportation plan?” he asked.
Trump has also made life more difficult for international students, with some indications that his and the arrest and deportation of students who have expressed pro-Gaza sentiments has?. And those familiar with Reform’s thinking also foresee a crackdown on international students in the UK – if not exactly for the same reasons.
Gullis, the Kidsgrove mayor, said there are too many UK universities whose entire business model is based on international students, while Fox took issue with the “massive problem” of students bringing their dependants.
“That seems to have been an area that’s been exploited in a ridiculous fashion. It’s one thing saying ‘come and study here for three years and get an international student visa’. It’s [another] to then bring your family.”
Since the beginning of 2024, all students except those pursuing postgraduate research have been barred from bringing their dependants to the UK, following a sharp uptick in numbers.
Fox also criticised universities that she sees as placing more importance on the tuition fees of international students than on the quality of education.
“It’s basically a corruption of what a university should be…and it’s not fair on anybody,” she said. “I wouldn’t say this is the major thing that every possible Reform voter will be thinking about, but quite a lot of them know about that sort of thing.”
However, hostility to international students is not universal among Reform-minded figures. Chris McGiffen, a Reform councillor in North Northamptonshire, said that while loopholes in the visa system are being exploited by some, international students are the “lifeblood” of many universities. Jenkyns supports the important role they play, too, while Reform?supporters back the idea of a youth mobility scheme with the?European Union.
Menon agreed that will not be easy for a Reform government to reduce foreign student numbers given the likely consequence that this would precipitate the collapse of some institutions – particularly as “I suspect that the universities that go under first will be the ones in areas where you have a high proportion of Reform support. And it turns out that quite a lot of those people are directly or indirectly impacted by a university closing down.”
However, even without a specific visa crackdown, the anti-immigration mood music around a Reform government – and its social consequences – could see international student numbers decline. As Menon put it: “If we see a marked increase in racism, you’re going to start struggling to attract people from India and Nigeria”.
However, others in Birmingham were phlegmatic about the prospect of university closures. Although mindful of the effect on jobs and livelihoods, Gullis said that if universities went under then “so be it”. And Starkey takes a similar view. Asked what the government should do to solve the sector’s financial crisis, he said: “Let it take its course. There’s nothing as good as bankruptcy.”
Confident that “the local economies will survive”, he added that universities “are going to face the necessary consequences of living beyond our means, and this is going to require an enormous act of pruning”. He would like to see the sector both diversified and cut to “about a third of its current size”, with a “revised incremental fee structure” based on each subject’s graduate premium.
“What I wanted to see was the equivalent of what you have in America,” Starkey said: “State universities and state colleges with cheap and cheerful courses. Instead, we have this preposterous notion that everywhere should be a research university and that everywhere should be a residential university.”
For her part, Fox conceded that “the economic situation is so dire in this country that the only thing that might keep some certain towns open is the local university”, but the former revolutionary communist described that situation as “basically a kind of state-subsidised way of keeping people in work” that is “not productive labour” and is “substituting real economic development”. She predicted there could be “tension” under a Reform government over that issue.
Torbitt sees such a government as “inevitable”, and the presence of a number of leading thinktanks – and advertisers – at the conference does suggest that that prospect is being taken more seriously by mainstream institutions than it has been previously.
Equally, Reform is starting to spawn its own intellectual trappings. For instance, James Orr, associate professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge and close friend of US vice-president JD Vance, is one of the party’s key policy figure and is chair of the new, pro-Reform?.
But the presence at the conference of climate change deniers – such as American thinktank the Heartland Institute, which sponsored a panel – will worry scientists; Donald Trump has and described global warming as a hoax.
Universities’ status as potential political whipping boys under a Reform government prompted Menon to urge universities to engage with the party to learn what its objectives are and to try to build relationships ahead of the next election. And on the evidence of this year’s party conference, that sounds like sound advice.
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Like it or not, universities would be wise to make sure, at the very least, that they are much better represented at next year’s event.
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