Young people have been stitched up by Blair’s university con.
New Labour pushed for a 50 per cent target for school leavers. It was achieved by creating loads of useless courses
During my leadership campaign, someone asked me to summarise my economic objectives in one sentence. I replied: “To deliver a high-growth, low-immigration economy.”
Right now, Britain has the opposite: a low-growth, high-immigration economy. It’s young people who are paying the price.
That’s why we’re launching our New Deal for Young People. We’re the only party that’s even thinking about them, because we understand that our economic and cultural problems are intertwined. You can’t solve one without the other.
Reform UK has tried to copy a lot of our immigration policy without doing the difficult thinking. They agree with us that deporting people who should not be here is a priority. But Conservatives know that alone does not turn Britain into a high-growth economy. It reduces public spending, it does not increase productivity – but our New Deal for Young People will.
The blame for our productivity problem can be laid at the feet of the Blairite settlement. For too long, politics has been run as if we’re still in the late 1990s.
Politicians hoping the world would stay the same: stable graduate jobs, stable career ladders, stable institutions, and a conveyor belt from school to university to a middle-class life. Blair pushed for 50 per cent of young people to go to university, and the Oxbridge-educated political class was too embarrassed to say no for fear of looking like hypocrites.
We didn’t get a nation of engineers and mathematicians. We hit the target by creating loads of useless courses. The result is obvious: young people loaded with debt and employers complaining about basic skills gaps. And while standards fell, parts of our university system started feeding the cultural rot.
You cannot build a high-growth economy on institutions that train young people to distrust reality and sneer at the society they are meant to inherit. Our New Deal for Young People is going to scrap the pointless courses, provide better offers and tackle the insidious debt trap. I started my degree in 1999, not long after tuition fees had been introduced.
I am horrified at what graduates today are dealing with, and this is one of the reasons millions of young people feel they’ve been stitched up. Plan 2 student loans, the system most people who started university from 2012 to 2023 are on, increasingly feel like a scam.
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