• Tipping point

This article from The Guardian on 9 August describes an impending “tipping point” as a result of the fear that there may not be enough students to fill the university places available. The main problem is a fall in the lucrative and previously large number of foreign students.

Although there are a number of reasons for this, most commentators, including The Guardian, The Economic Times and Forbes, blame Sunak’s government, the latter source describing its restrictions on allowing family members to accompany post-graduates as being “perceived as unfriendly towards international students”: which is probably putting it mildly.

Changes in global economic and political factors also have a role to play in this and changes in, for example, the policy of the country involved or fluctuations in the value of its currency can have immediate and serious consequences. This is not such a problem if the students come from a wide range of countries but this doesn’t seem to be the case: The Economic Times suggests that students from four countries – India, Nigeria, China and Pakistan – account for about 70% of graduate visas.

As for overseas students, the House of Commons Library reported in May 2024 that “in 2021/22 there were 679,970 overseas students studying at UK universities, 120,140 of whom were from the EU and 559,825 from elsewhere. This was a record total, the ninth consecutive new record, and an increase of 37% or 184,000 in three years. The latest total was 24% of the total student population.”

According to Statistica, the number of post-graduate students as a whole has tripled between 2000 and 2021. In 1980 about one in seven people had been to university; in 2022 it was over one in three.

All in all,  we’re dealing with a serious growth industry which appears to have peaked.

For both under- and post-graduates, the UK is probably a good place to come to study. Many top-10 lists of universities exist but it’s rare to find any which don’t include most or all of Cambridge, UCL, Imperial and Oxford. The country is multi-racial and multi-cultural and, despite recent attempts by a few lunatics to undermine this, is tolerant of a wide range of social, cultural, sexual and religious beliefs. It’s very well served by airlines, the weather’s not as bad as people say and (so far) doesn’t suffer from unpleasant extremes. It’s quite small but not to the extent that you get overwhelmed, except perhaps in the large cities. We speak one of the world’s major international languages, have pretty good food (it wasn’t always so) and some of the best music. Many of us understand the offside and the LBW laws. These seem like real pluses and ones that I’m proud of.

Sadly, it seems, a number of universities have been counting on these advantages to an unhealthy extent.

From talking to a couple of friends who’re university professors, it seems that our universities – of which there were about 40 in 1980 and 164 now – have placed far too many of their chips on the square that promised a continued growth, or at least stability, of the lucrative foreign-student numbers. Some hired expensive staff or went on building sprees betting on low interest rates  – another miscalculation.

The result, as one suggested, is that “most unis will survive, though some may have to radically downsize and the remaining ones will see their staff lumbered with insane workloads”. The implication of the first part of this remark is that some unis may not stay the course.

An analogy might be a football club which does unexpectedly well for a few seasons and then chases the dream, signing players and backroom-staff on contracts that assume that results, attendances, performance payments and sponsorship revenues continue to grow. Leeds United did this in the early 2000s and it nearly bankrupted them.

Most football clubs are more prudent (if not more financially correct, as Manchester City might be about to find out), not least because they know that the government isn’t going to bail them out. (Nor, it seems, will the government bail out the unis.) It looks as though pretty much every university in the UK has been chasing the dream. Some are better placed to cope with the nightmare that might follow than are others.

A-levels day and its aftermath may provide a stern test not only of each university’s finances but also its ambition. Each wants to get the best students it can realistically attract and which its facilities and staff can realistically provide for. There’s no benefit in having too wide a range of abilities or expectations in any one institution, as otherwise some students will be bored and others left behind.

In these league-table-driven times, there’s also the matter of the university’s reputation, which is dearly won but easily lost. If you end up chasing the money and getting less good students, your income might survive for a year or so but your ranking will tumble and you’ll have a harder time attracting better students, better staff and more funding from other sources in future. This is the dilemma that many universities now find themselves in.

Given that so many more people are now going to universities than 40 years ago, all of this also opens up the question of what their role is. Centres of academic excellence and research, of course; but increasingly they are many more things to many more people: staging-post, time-filler, place of escape, rite of passage, gap-year continuation, social springboard and three-year party are just some. 

• Not amused

Liz Truss was last seen walking off stage at an event in Beccles, part of a series of public-speaking events in support of Donald Trump. She was taken by surprise when a member of the group Led by Donkeys lowered a banner behind her with a picture of a lettuce (a vegetable for which she’ll forever be associated following the Daily Star’s “Which will last longer?” webcam feed) and the message “I crashed the economy.”

“What happened last night was not funny,” she later tweeted, presumably with Mr Musk’s full support. She added that “far-left activists” were trying to “intimidate” her and “suppress free speech”.

A few points on that. I doubt the banner was meant to be funny, although it was certainly a lot more amusing than were her disastrous six weeks in power. Left- or right-wing has nothing to do with it: she made a huge mistake for which many are still paying. Reminding us of this doesn’t seem like suppressing free speech, which she appears to be confusing with being made to look ridiculous.

As for the other accusation, I can’t think of any other case of someone being intimidated by a picture of a lettuce. “Intimidation” is also an awfully good word to describe the effect that her “mini-budget” had on the world’s financial markets.

Her speaking tour will doubtless continue. LBC reported in September 2023 that she’d already pulled in about £250,000 from such events since she slunk out of Number 10. Nice work if you can get it; and ex-PMs can, regardless of the circumstances in which they left office. Enoch Powell remarked that all political careers end in failure; not if you can get on the chat circuit, they don’t.

• Repent at leisure

The right-wing riots seem to have stopped, although it may only take another atrocity to kick them off again. Some fairly stiff sentences have been handed out, including to one man who said that he thought he was taking part in a football celebration (the fact that he’d drunk 10 pints of cider may have led to this).

It seems odd that you can vigorously partake in an event under such false assumptions, but this does rather support my suggestion last week that it may be no co-incidence that these happened in a lull between the end of the Euros and the start of the domestic season of the beautiful game.

Some of the sentences have been handed down to keyboard warriors, one of whom is now doing time as a result of suggesting that mosques and the people in them should be torched. The ages of those charged so far range from 13 to 69. More cases are expected to come to court.

Severe as they are, I’m concerned that longer terms were handed out to people involved in the JSO protests and appeals are now under way. History will judge whether using Suffragette- or civil-rights-type action against the existential problems and corruptions caused by fossil fuels is a worse crime than shouting drunken and offensive rubbish while torching shops and libraries. I’ve made my mind up already.

Some deniers would argue that the climate-change myth is predicated on a lie: if so, it’s one in which a vast number of eminent scientists are complicit. The right-wing riots were started, it seems, by one woman in Cheshire who now admits it was all a horrible mistake.

• On the buses

The bottom of the street where I was born and grew up in the World’s End in south-west London was one of the resting places of the number 31 bus. Sometimes they would stand three deep waiting at the end of their routes before turning round and taking their strange and meandering journeys back up to Camden Town.

This became associated in my young mind with the strange name of this area – it was the world’s end so they could go no further. Back in those days these were, of course, the wonderful Routemasters, one of the most elegant and functional bits of transport design the country has produced.

Built (to London Transport’s design) between 1954 and 1968, they were only expected to last for 20 or 30 years. In fact, the last ones didn’t stop running on the official routes (there is still a heritage one) in London until 2019 and they outlived many of the horrible vehicles that were designed to replace them.

I can still remember the feeling of excitement when I was lifted up and for the first time allowed to pull the cord for the bell to a request stop, and the sense of pride when I was put in charge of the long ticket that the conductor produced out of his silver machine.

Best of all were the open platforms, allowing you to jump off or on when it suited you. I still remember in my 20s chasing the last number 19 of the day down King’s Road, grabbing the rail and being half dragged along for about 30 yards before the bus had to slow for a zebra crossing. It was almost as good as water-skiing.

You could hear them coming as well, the engine giving a particularly throaty growl shared by no other machine. They were beautifully designed, too, with, unlike their jagged successors, curves in all the right places. I loved them all but the 31 was always my favourite.

Part of its charm, indeed of several of others as well, was that it linked places that seemed otherwise to have no obvious connection. Someone had designed them, but it was often hard to see what logic had been employed. In some ways they seemed as pre-ordained and immutable as ancient jungle tracks. Certainly, attempts to change them were frequently met with frowns and head shakings; messing about with the routes was against the natural order of things and could only end badly. 

My affection for the 31 was not dimmed even when, sitting on the pavement outside the Hawley Arms in Camden one summer evening, one rode up on the kerb while taking a corner and ran over my pint. Duels have been fought for less, but I just shrugged and said to my friends, “Well, that’s the 31 for you.” I later agreed that it hadn’t been the most sensible place to be sitting.

At about this time I moved to south-east London and discovered there was another Routemaster that ended its route at the bottom of my street. This time it was perhaps even better: the number 1, no less, which ran from Surrey Docks tube station to Marylebone, near where I then worked. I was fond of going upstairs and sitting at the front, just above the driver. As we made our way through Southwark, the Elephant and the West End, there I was in seat number 1 on the number 1 bus. As a proud Londoner, it didn’t get any better than this.

Another thing that’s always loomed large in my imagination is the idea of deserted settlements. War, disease, demographic shift and historical accidents can all be responsible. Near to where my parents lived in France there was a village called Bramafan, which seemed to have no inhabitants at all. As a child, on any journeys there, I would hope we would pass through it and roll the syllables around my tongue as we passed through. My delight was increased when I was told that “bramafan” was the French, or at least Provençal, word for the noise made by a donkey. I certainly never saw any humans there.

There are also other reasons for abandonment. Pripyat, in what was then the USSR, is perhaps the most famous, abandoned almost overnight as a result of Chernobyl. Rather like looking at pictures of the cabins and public rooms of the Titanic, there’s something very sad but also horribly compelling in considering something built with great effort and expense which was suddenly deprived of its purpose. In both cases, nature has taken over: perhaps an encouraging thought, if one takes the long view.

No such re-wilding has taken place in the village of Imber on Salisbury Plain. In November 1943 the villagers were given seven weeks’ notice to leave permanently, the MoD having decided it represented the perfect place for training British and American soldiers in street fighting.

The promise was made that after the war they would be allowed to return, but this never happened. Some one-day re-openings take place but, for most of the year, the village is closed, still used for training and, one suspects, also being eroded by gravity, rust, ivy and damp. It looks very beautiful; but then forbidden fruits so often do.

What, you might be wondering, does this have to do with Routemaster buses? The answer is that every year since 2009 the summer opening of the village has, slightly surreally, also involved about 25 of London’s former red growlers transporting people from Warminster Station to Imber via a number of other Wiltshire villages and hamlets. Imberbus is the name of the now annual event which, as this article in The Londonist explains, started with “a tipsy conversation in a Bath pub in 2009” and was confirmed after “some schmoozing with the MoD’s top brass.” The proceeds from the event go to charity. This year’s event is on Saturday 17 August.

Many thanks to Roy Bailey from Great Shefford for drawing this to our attention.

Will I be going? Even without other commitments that day, I think the emotional toll might be too high. All those red Routemasters sailing out of the landscape of my childhood memory and across the Wiltshire landscape to pay homage to a village in which no one has lived for 80 years might be more than I can cope with. If any of the buses were number 1, 19 or 31 I’d probably well-up completely, or start chasing them down the road; or, once aboard, be thrown off for incessantly pulling at the bell rope.

If you go, however, do drop us a line to let us know what it was like. Good to see these two very different bits of the past, an iconic transport design and the build-up to D-Day, being celebrated.

• Why so hard?

Standing as an independent candidate in a general election is a very tough business. Unless you focus on a compelling issue like Gaza, saving Kidderminster Hospital or a dislike of Neil Hamilton MP, the chances are that you won’t do much to trouble the scorers.

In this article, Adrian Abbs (who stood as an independent for Reading West and Mid Berkshire in the 2024 election) describes several ways in which the dice are loaded against those who don’t stand under a party banner, and wonders whether things need to be made quite so hard. He proposes a few ways by which the playing field can be made a bit more level.

One remedy he suggests is that the Fixed-term Parliament Act should be re-introduced, as having more time to plan a campaign would put smaller parties and independents at less of a disadvantage.

I’m not sure I agree. In the USA, for instance, elections are always held on the first Thursday of every fourth November. As a result, the campaigning starts almost as soon as the previous results are announced. This is an exhausting schedule compared to our six-week contests and I imagine that those with less deep pockets are going to have their messages swamped whatever happens. It seems more than ever that God is on the side of the big battalions.

• Two old dragons

Trump and Musk had a bestie love-in on X recently which didn’t seem to go quite to plan as regards connectivity. During the call, the past and would-be PotUS offered Mr X a job on a “government efficiency commission”, which left the candidate purring to Musk as they joked about how many people he’d sacked (mainly involved in content moderation) after taking over Twitter.

It gets worse. Trump suggested, amongst other seemingly random off-the-cuff remarks, that rising sea levels would have the useful side effect of creating more ocean-front properties (just leaving everything else aside, this is wrong, as the less land there is the shorter the coastlines). The Guardian’s Oliver Milman described their chat as “the dumbest climate conversation of all time.” 

What’s really chilling is the validation each sensed they were receiving from each other. A number of nasty images spring to mind. One is of two crazy old dragons feasting off each other’s blood as part of a ghastly courtship in a dark cave. Individually, they’re scary and border-line unhinged. Together, they’re terrifying. 

Almost as bizarrely, Trump has also said he wants to offer former British golfer Nick Faldo a job at a Trump White House, though here Trump may have been hypnotised by his wife’s strident right-wing credentials and other charms. The Democrats’ claim that team Trump is “weird” is seeming more true by the day. Some stronger definition might be needed.

 • And finally…

• According the The Guardian, “train drivers and the UK government have reached a deal that could end more than two years of conflict between rail operators and unions, during which wide-ranging strikes have led to weeks of misery for passengers.”

• A lovely story from Beckenham, where popular local road-cleaner and Elvis fan Paul Spiers was crowdfunded the cost of a holiday to Portugal but was forbidden from accepting the donation by his employers as their contract with Bromley Council prevented staff from accepting gifts or incentives. Fair enough, perhaps, when one remembers the sometimes menacing demands that were often made for Christmas boxes. Up stepped an enterprising travel company, On the Beach, which set up a competition for a holiday in Portugal with the entry condition being that the winner must love Elvis, be between the ages of 62 and 64, have a surname of Spiers, be a street-cleaner in Beckenham and be loved by their local community. This, it seems, was an offer his employers could not, on his behalf, refuse.

• The football season has hardly started but already the continent’s champions Real Madrid has added the European Super Cup to its groaning trophy cabinet by beating Europa league winners Atalanta. With the men’s national team having won the Euros and Olympic gold, and the women being world champions, Spanish football seems to be in a good place. It’s hard to see anyone stopping Real adding to its haul of 15 Champions Leagues. Only Manchester City (if it can escape penalties as a result of alleged financial malpractice) seems to have enough firepower and experience to stand in its way. The sport needs another unlikely triumph as has been provided by the likes of Leicester, Montpellier and Beyer Leverkusen in the last decade or two. On the European stage, though, this seems highly unlikely, particularly given the Champions League’s new structure. 

• This article on the BBC website describes how the World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the mpox outbreak in parts of Africa a public health emergency of international concern. Is this the next pandemic? I don’t know if sodium cyanide will kill the virus (much as Trump’s helpful suggestion that injecting bleach would deal with Covid). If so, people living near the canals in the Walsall area will be pleased that a local factory recently released quite a lot of the stuff into the local waterways. A precautionary measure against mpox, perhaps…