The one Keir Starmer policy I want to see implemented in Scotland

Rory Hamilton says the route to national renewal comes through a holistic industrial strategy that starts with funding colleges and apprenticeships that lead to jobs in the renewable sector. This article is an expanded version of this week’s In Common article, featured in The National. You can subscribe to The National here: https://www.thenational.scot/subscribe/

"Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer arrives at Number 10 Downing St" by UK Prime Minister is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.12

When I was sitting my Highers at school I remember some teachers using college as a ‘threat’: if you don’t do well, you’ll have to go to Borders College. Now, I’m not sure what sort of motivation that was supposed to provide, but I’m confident that it would be fairly demoralising to hear your aspirations used as a threat against others.

So, whether you’re a fence-painter, raffle-runner, or half-time orange cutter or not, I hope you will also treat Keir Starmer’s announcement at Labour conference with cautious optimism. While education is fully devolved to the Scottish Parliament, I hope the Prime Minister’s commitment to two-thirds of young people gaining higher level skills through a university degree, further education or a gold-standard apprenticeship by age 25 brings a tone shift and policy change up here in Scotland too. 

The SNP have long clung onto free university tuition fees as a policy achievement – which today speaks more to the dearth of ambitious policy development since their first term. Free university education is a great thing and should indeed be championed and cherished, especially in the context of increasing tuition fees in England.

However, the often over-zealous championing of this policy has unintended consequences, especially when the efforts to tackle the crisis in higher education overlook extractive structures which underpins the current fragile model of universities. Indeed, tuition fees are not going to fix this in Scotland, as universities in England face the same challenges.

The policy of free university tuition is very much a legacy of Blair’s Britain, intended (rightly) to make sure that finance, and a young person’s background, was no obstacle to their ability to get a university degree (and by extension enter the middle class job market).

But this has not necessarily led to an increase in students from low-income backgrounds attending university in Scotland. There are a number of reasons behind this which debunk the argument against free tuition: firstly, the current university funding model is based around running universities like businesses, which means looking for ‘return on investment’ for ‘shareholders’, and doing so through attracting fee paying international students and building expensive and poor quality Purpose-Built Student Accommodation which has a broader impact on rents elsewhere (the fact this is also causing a crisis in England indicates that tuition fees in Scotland won’t fix the crisis here).

Secondly, just because tuition fees are no longer an issue for ‘home’ students, doesn’t mean that university doesn’t come with other cost-of-living issues, like rent, energy, and food, all of which have seen extortionate rises in recent years, while maintenance loans have themselves barely increased. Lastly, and perhaps, most importantly, the mentality that you must go to university or you’re deemed not valuable to society has been a pervasive unintended consequence and far from breaking down class barriers, has somewhat entrenched the class divide.

This is particularly acute, when one considers the recent fixation on the ‘unemployed, white, young man’ that Democrats in the US, among others, have been attempting to capture. The argument goes that we’ve spent so long trying to even out opportunities (not my choice of word) for people from discriminated against backgrounds, the disabled, LGBT+, non-white groups, even women (the horror!), that young white men fresh out of school without university prospects are being ‘left behind’ and as a result are turning to the purporters of a toxic masculinity based on Christian conservatism – the Andrew Tates, Charlie Kirks and Joe Rogans of the world.

Now, I’m not sure how much this holds up under scrutiny – it’s not like the structural inequalities that preclude, for example, young black men from going to university or having prosperous careers, have exactly disappeared. However, if you were pinning your electoral hopes on winning over this ‘manosphere-adjacent’ demographic, and avoiding haemorrhaging a generation of young voters to Reform UK, I would start with non-university career paths.

“Starmer would do well to place an emphasis on the quiet English materialist nationalism of apprenticeships and public ownership, rather than overt flag-waving.”

However, the devil will be in the detail to how this actually plays out. If the £800m targeted for 16-19 education, including a joined up post-18 education system with a unified regulator falls into the same trap of the university model of pumping colleges full of students without providing sufficient resources to support staff (of which there needs to be enough in the first place) in the delivery, we can expect a similar crisis to unfold.

Likewise, if there are no jobs to go to, or houses to support those jobs, what good will 14 new ‘technical excellence’ colleges be? Lack of jobs and affordable housing go hand-in-hand as reasons why rural areas and places like Inverclyde have seen depressing rates of depopulation for years.

And yet, the just transition offers the prime means to fix this problem. Not only is the private sector not investing in renewable energy at the rate it was suggested a market-led approach would lead to, but we have a huge skills shortage in filling the roles needed for a just transition of any value.

Expanding vocational training through a renewed emphasis on colleges and apprenticeships, backed up with genuine public-led investment in the renewables sector and an enormous programme of affordable house-building could not only be transformational for the economy (and may even result in the growth rates this UK government seem perennially obsessed with), but also underpin a successful electoral strategy.

Between this educational push, and the nationalising of steelworks in Yorkshire (Scunthorpe and recently Stocksbridge and Rotherham), there is a quiet English materialist nationalism which Starmer would do well to place emphasis on, rather than overt flag-waving.

The tagline of the government’s ‘Phase Two’ launch was the ill-thought out motto: ‘growth people can feel in their pockets’. The euphemism is laughable, but the materialist sentiment is bang on. The problem for the government has been delivery because of an over-reliance on the private sector and arbitrary fiscal rules in hock to ‘the market’. Ditching this for a public-led investment approach would support a renewed emphasis on colleges and apprenticeships and provide the renewal this flailing government so seeks.