The False Dichotomy of Brains Vs Hands

Kemi Badenoch wants to divide thinkers from makers - but the country needs both, not fewer of either.

This is Bearly Politics - an independent publication about politics, power and the persistent urge to bang one’s head gently against a desk. I’m The Bear - healthcare strategist by trade, writer by accident and permanently on the brink of an eye-roll. If you’re new here, welcome. If you’re not - thank you for coming back.

---

Today, was planned to be a writing off day. I have been posting somewhat, some may say, relentlessly over the past week or so, and have to admit, even I am getting a bit tired of seeing my name pop up when I send the test emails out to make sure my posts are at least partly legible¹.

Except, as with all good plans of mice and men, this one went straight out the window the moment I was doing my early morning browse of the news and updating myself on what’s happening, specifically, in politics.

And that’s when the below headline caught my eye:

I mean, who could resist²?

Kemi Badenoch, the official leader of the opposition and embodiment of “I’m not mad, I’m just ideologically disappointed” has taken it upon herself to “curb access” to university degrees that seem “low value.” According to Badenoch we’ve got far, far too many people studying terribly silly things like humanities and not nearly enough learning “real” skills.

It’s an incredibly Tory idea this, isn’t it? Stare a complex social problem straight in the eye and then decide that the true solution is to punish the people who are least responsible for it. The British steel industry collapses? Has to be the fault of sociology students. Economic stagnation? Clearly the philosophies bunch again. Some people are grumbling about migration? Point wildly towards some English students.

The argument goes something like this - the UK doesn’t need more historians, writers or, god forbid, language students, we need “real” skills. People who can do “real” things - like fix boilers, weld, lay bricks and fix things. Which, to be fair, we really do.

What we don’t, however, need is the condescending subtext that runs underneath it all:

University is for the soft-handed elite, while trades are for everyone else.

Because here’s the thing - I would have loved to work in a trade. In another life, I could easily see myself being a carpenter³. Not in that patronising “salt-of-the-earth” kind of way that politicians like Badenoch seem to imply when they talk about “real” jobs, but because there’s something that’s extraordinary in the mastery itself.

Watching someone plan a plank until it gleams or carve a joint that fits so incredibly precisely that it might have been born that way is as close to poetry as the matter of this gets. There’s a rhythm and a joy in it - you work the grain instead of against it, learn to fix your mistakes and try not to lose a thumb in the process.

Photo by Craft Kitties on Unsplash

I am, outside of my own woodworking fantasies, very happy to champion vocational training, but what I won’t champion is using it as a stick to beat everything else with. The problem with Badenoch’s proposal is that it hinges itself on what is a glaring false binary - “useful” qualifications that make money and “fluffy” ones that apparently don’t.

It’s an incredibly childish and narrow way to see the world, because the fact of the matter is that a healthy country needs both joiners and judges, coders and care workers, welders and writers. The economy just doesn’t function without a healthy mix of both groups of these people.

But the Tories have an especially strong knack for turning any subject into a hierarchy of worth - if they’re able to measure it, and especially if they can monetise it, you are pretty much guaranteed that they will moralise about it.

A degree in engineering? Productive, yes, please.

A degree in English literature? Utterly wasteful, in the bin with you.

A degree in PPE? Glorious - provided, of course, that you then use it to run the country straight into the ground.

The gall of it would be funny if it weren’t so predictably on brand, and as ever with the Tories, cruel on top.

What’s also quite ironic about the situation is that the leader of the party of free-marketeers is now demanding central planning of education on a scale that would make a Soviet Politburo blush. My question to them is, if the graduate market is truly as ruthlessly efficient as they claim it to be, why does it need a chaperone? If degrees in philosophy are truly so useless, the invisible hand of capital would have strangled it out long ago, no? And yet despite years of Tories railing against “soft degrees” has still not managed to get rid of them - Universities are still out there, teaching these subjects and even producing some of the most employable, creative and socially literate people in the country.

And that’s the bit that the Tories never quite seem to grasp - the humanities, social sciences and language studies don’t just train students to do a specific job, they purposefully train them to think. To adapt - to deal with ambiguity. The sort of skills, as policy makers, you’d think that they would appreciate in a country’s population.

Before the pandemic, the UK’s creative industries were worth well over £100bn a year - that’s more than aerospace, automative and life-sciences combined. That’s made up of theatre, design, publishing, music, film, architecture, advertising, games, media. There are entire worlds built by people who had the audacity to take “low-value” degrees.

There is, however, a deeper issue that’s at work here - and it’s one that goes back to the Iron Lady herself. Thatcher, during her time as leader of this country didn’t just cut funding in the eighties (though she did do that with glee), she planted the seed of the idea that learning for its own sake was indulgent. Any knowledge gained had to be justified, in some way or form, economically. In her mind, humanities departments were ornamental, the arts were for hobbyists and languages were for effete men who wore corduroy trousers.

Ever since then this suspicion of education from the right of the political spectrum has metastasised into the reflexive anti-intellectualism that we see now - every university is a “woke factory”, every social scientist an avowed Marxist and every historian a traitor to the empire.

But, even below that, there’s another layer to this, because the antipathy from the Conservatives towards higher education is not just about that the supposed efficiency need to justify study - it’s about control.

The problem with an educated population, in the eyes of the Conservatives, is that universities tend to produce people who not only ask questions, but know how to ask them - and terribly inconvenient questions at that. Questions about corruption, inequality and power when these same people use their skills to connect dots that Tories would far rather have unconnected. People who don’t, as is their wish, clap on cue.

That’s the real offence.

And yet, there’s something that makes this whole argument even more unfair - the way in which it cheapens trades themselves. By turning vocational education into a political weapon, Badenoch and people like her make skilled work sound like a punishment. “Not clever enough for university? Grab that wrench.” It’s insulting to everyone.

Real craft requires intelligence, geometry, dexterity and pride - all the qualities that the Conservative party has historically viewed as suspicious.

It also exposes something that the Tories will never admit to - at least not out loud: class disdain.

When the right talks about a “low value” degree, what they really want to say is “working class people doing things they were never meant to.” It’s not that they dislike universities per se - they adore them when they’re Oxbridge teaching PPE. They just dislike the idea that students from Wolverhampton or Bradford would dare study politics or literature and then use that to question power. If you come from poverty, your education is supposed to make you employable, not opinionated.

The justification for this endeavour of theirs is, of course, wrapped up in the most self-congratulatory double-speak imaginable.

“We’re just trying to protect students from debt.”

The sheer brass neck of that coming from the same party that tripled tuition fees now desperately clutching its pearls about affordability is enough to make your head spin. If the Tories actually gave a shit about debt they’d be supportive of restoring maintenance grants, call for the lowering of fees, create policies to rebuild technical colleges and give us a plan to fund proper apprenticeship programmes with decent pay, except all of that would require something that’s in tragically short supply: foresight, investment and an actual respect for working people.

Instead, they choose the route of feeding the resentment machine - they turn trades into a weapon and curiosity into a threat.

They sell people the fantasy that the problem isn’t inequality, austerity or their own mismanagement while they were in power for fourteen years - it’s students studying the wrong thing. It’s another quiver to the bow of the politics of division - turn the welder against the writer and tell them they’re enemies, opposites, instead of allies.

And what’s probably the most frustrating thing of all is that this isn’t even anything new from the Tories - it’s the same script they’ve used before, dusted off and slightly reworded every decade or so.

“Back to basics.”

“Hard-working families.”

“Skills not studies.”

All the same old dog whistle, wrapped in the same familiar, cloying moral superiority.

In the end though, it all comes down to the Conservative’s greatest fear - the messy world that an education creates. A world in which deference to them is replaced by query. The fear that a society that can think for itself is much harder to lie to - and thereby, so much harder to control.

So yes, by all means, let’s fund the lathe, let’s train more electricians, builders and engineers - they’ve never been more necessary to rebuild everything that the Conservatives spent fourteen years breaking and neglecting. But let’s also fund the libraries, the art schools, the languages and the literature, because without those, we won’t know what’s worth building in the first place.

---

This publication is powered by caffeine, mild annoyance and readers like you. There is no corporate backing here (not even a modest cheque from Mr Soros, though I live in hope). If you found this worth reading, please consider a funded subscription.

Or if you’d prefer, please feel free to share this with someone who enjoys a bit of political masochism with their morning coffee.

Either way, thank you for reading.

1. “That damned Bear, again!” I say as I see my own name come up in my inbox.

2. I mean, normal people who don’t wake up at 5 in the morning to doomscroll could, but the less said about that the better.

3. I love myself a good bit of wood, me.