by Chris Patten
Seven years later Mr Powell made another speech, in Birmingham. Again there were classical allusions, this time most notably to the Sybil’s prophecy in Book 6 of the Aeneid, ‘I see wars, horrible wars and the Tiber foaming with much blood.’ Why so? Because of mass immigration. And this time the sentiments were heard far and wide. They echoed from factory floors to docks to council estates to saloon bars and gentlemen’s clubs. This time Powell had hit the political jackpot. No more olive trees or English oaks. This time the talk was of ‘excreta pushed through letter boxes’ and ‘grinning piccaninnies’. As far as Powell was concerned, what bound the English together now was not memorialized in brass and stone, it was an indigenous people under siege in their own homes.
Is that not invariably true, in our country and in others? Beleaguered nationalism rises up to smite ‘the other’ – in some countries Jews, in others different minority religious or racial groups, in others still immigrants in general. The outsider both threatens and partly comes to define our identity, and as that begins to happen we lose our foothold on a slippery slope. Values that we thought really did define us now seem tiresome luxuries that are too expensive and damaging to cherish and espouse. Lines that were once drawn with determination suddenly acquire an elastic flexibility. That is how it begins, the erosion of our civic humanity. That is how it begins everywhere. But where, for heaven’s sake, does it end?
Perhaps we are about to discover in America. As a self-confessed pessimist, I am surprised to find myself moderately optimistic, that the nationalism which accounts for much of President Trump’s support as it did for the Brexit vote, is not (whatever the tone of the inaugural address) going to turn America into an introverted, dangerous force in the world, both economically and in security terms. Nationalism in Britain would be bad for Britain; nationalism in America would be bad for the world as well as for America.
Brexit and Trump do have roots if not in precisely the same ground then certainly in adjoining plots. Will nativism make America great again? America is great already. America can only be enfeebled from within. Any decay and decline will be home grown. The real question is whether America forgets what has made it great: the values of freedom and the rule of law that shaped it and helped it to shape so much of the history of the rest of the world; the culture, technology and scholarship which took humanity to the moon and the masses to the movies; the military and diplomatic powers which gave the world leadership through both storm and tranquillity. America is the only country that matters absolutely everywhere. With American leadership things can get done and sorted out, as they were thanks to Marshall Aid, the Atlantic Charter, NATO and the WTO. Still today there is so much for other Western democracies to work out with Washington. What, for example, should be the relationship (if any) between the values that America and other free societies place on human rights and the day-to-day conduct of foreign policy? Where is force acceptable to deal with a common problem and what legitimization does it require? How best can we deal with failing states, which pose great dangers to us all? When the rest of the world chooses to ignore a problem, can America and its Western allies ignore it too? Without American leadership – as Europe and others should recognize – it will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to solve any of the big problems in our world. And that will hurt America as well as the rest of us. America needs to remember that it cannot go home – not without losing an essential element of its identity and weakening and demeaning itself.
On Britain’s side of the ocean, enthusiastic Brexit supporters will surely need to reflect in due course whether we may be buried next to our old friends rather than grow together alongside them. As ‘global Britain’ quits the EU (its biggest market) it inevitably becomes more dependent on large countries elsewhere, above all America. But this is an America whose government presently stands four square against so much that Westminster still needs and says it wants, from free trade and effective international institutions to a strong EU, albeit one without Britain. The rest of Europe inevitably sees Britain anxious to play lickspittle to President Trump. This is surely not the best way of winning friends in Europe at the outset of a difficult negotiation. But then, we appear these days to be happy to sacrifice European goodwill in return for a supportive tabloid headline or some partisan advantage. Events as much as design have seen Britain apparently give up what has been for decades the centrepiece of our definition of our national interest – holding out one hand to Europe and another to America.
How much this balancing act will be affected by the outcome of the 2017 election will be for some time unclear. But the reasons for calling the election were, as I have suggested, rooted in more domestic considerations, above all the management of the Conservative Party. No one really knows whether Mrs May had been motivated principally by the desire to strengthen herself in standing up to right-wingers who wanted a hard Brexit or in managing more moderate critics who hoped for a more accommodating outcome. What tended to be overlooked in Britain’s customarily introverted debate was that the other twenty-seven member states were in the driving seat in the negotiations and had their own domestic politics to take into account.
11
Poobah
Behold the Lord High Executioner
A personage of noble rank and title –
A dignified and potent officer
Whose functions are particularly vital!
Defer, defer
To the Lord High Executioner!
W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado
‘Il Magnifico’
Title of the Rector of a university in Italy
I was first called a Grand Poobah – indeed one parliamentary sketch writer called me the Poobah’s Poobah – when I became Chairman of the BBC Trust in 2012. The intention was to suggest that I had so many exalted offices (though they did not actually include being Lord High Executioner or Lord High Admiral) that I could not possibly give the required time to beating up the lefties at the BBC. There was also a suggestion that this particular post was bound to be held by an establishment figure with metropolitan, liberal sympathies who would connive at the BBC’s corruption of the nation’s morals and distortion of its politics. It was true that if you aggregated all the things I have done in my life it is, to borrow again from Gilbert and Sullivan, quite a ‘little list’. But most of these things – advisory roles, chairmanship of occasional weekend conferences and so on – did not prevent me putting in three to four days a week at the BBC for three years. For a Catholic, as my wife explains, I have been bitten deeply by the Protestant work ethic. It is, for example, a failing that I do not really take weekends off, though I go away for proper holidays during which I usually write, walk or garden.
The Poobah tag was probably most relevant because of a subsidiary meaning originally intended by W. S. Gilbert: it was meant to mock those who take jobs that have impressive titles but do not carry much real authority. That has never really worried me: the jobs have been worth doing even if they packed little executive punch. The one exception was the post which triggered the joke, chairmanship of the BBC Trust, and that was because everyone else thought I could do more than was in fact possible. Actually, I was of the same opinion, as I will shortly describe.
As a constituency MP, I became interested in higher education because we had a first-class new university in Bath. In Hong Kong my interest in universities deepened. As Governor, I was Chancellor of about nine universities, including two that are today in the world’s top fifty. This was naturally a great honour, but I thought it was rather an absurd one. I had to remember which cap and robes went with each institution; and luckily only turned up in the wrong outfit once. More importantly, it seemed to me to make more sense to allow universities to choose their own ceremonial heads. But they were not having it. There was a suspicion that I would give up most but hang on to one or two, implicitly creating two divisions of academy. So I left things as they were, did degree-awarding ceremonies at each university every year, and much en
joyed seeing the role that universities were playing as a part of the rite of passage for Hong Kong’s youth. Typically, half or more of the students graduating came from families that lived in social housing, and a great number of them came from recent immigrant families. Given the number of those to whom I gave degrees in those days and subsequently I reckon I may have distributed more degrees than any other human being, sometimes in football stadiums, sometimes in a Victorian hall or Wren theatre; there must now have been nearly a hundred such occasions.
When I came back to Europe, it was not long before I was gowned again. Our eldest daughter had been very happily a student at Newcastle University. As a result I had been to the university several times and had given one or two lectures there. In 1999, I was invited to become Chancellor and responded enthusiastically.
University chancellorships differ enormously. One thing common to all is that the Chancellor does not actually run the university. As Harold Macmillan, one of my predecessors as Chancellor of Oxford, used to say, ‘Everyone knows that the Vice-Chancellor actually runs the university, but if you didn’t have a Chancellor you couldn’t have a Vice-Chancellor.’ The role begins with ceremonial functions like presenting degrees. It ranges far and wide beyond that from chairing committees, to fund-raising, to endless speech making to alumni and others, to giving general advice.
Newcastle is an excellent research-based university, one of the prestigious Russell Group of twenty-four British academies which together earn about two thirds of all UK research grants and contract income. Newcastle itself is a tough and handsome city; its university has a number of very strong research areas (like medicine) and plays an important role in promoting the north-east of England, which has had to adjust to wave after wave of generational change in industry. The high point of every year for me was the graduation ceremonies, which mostly took place in July, invariably in the sort of weather which has so many Geordies heading for holidays anywhere that can guarantee sunshine. At the end of each ceremony, held in the rather gloomy main hall of the university, I would give a little speech to the new graduates and to their families and friends who had come in their summer-best outfits to celebrate the success of their children. My speech usually referred to the underfunding of higher education in Britain, despite which, I noted, we had the second-best system in the world. The general enthusiastic support for these remarks contrasted with the continuing low priority given to higher education and research in the allocation of public funds. We had paid for the massive and welcome expansion of higher education, especially after the Robbins Report in 1963, by reducing the funding for each student. Universities managed by depressing salaries – traditional informal comparisons with the civil service were simply abandoned. At the same time, workloads were increased and facilities degraded. The Treasury called all this an increase in university productivity. Given the importance that families attached to higher education, I never quite understood why universities had not been more successful in putting their case for more support. Talking to the students who were graduating, I was struck by the large proportion who were still the first in their family to go on to higher education.
One of the additional tasks taken on by universities in the last few years has been to go out to schools, in and beyond their own regions, to try to broaden access, persuading young people from poor backgrounds and indifferent schools to apply for university. Newcastle did a lot of this: for example, with well-run summer schools every year. Those who passed through these special courses were able to enter the university with slightly lower qualifications than would otherwise have been required. The scheme worked well: those who benefited from it generally did excellently in their university studies. The biggest problem for the university was the poor quality of much of the secondary education in the north-east of England and the low aspiration levels of school leavers. There was an additional problem for Newcastle in my years there which made it difficult to meet the government’s target for social balance at the university (with bad attendant publicity). Newcastle had an excellent classics department. There were more former private than state pupils studying classics precisely because the availability of A Level teaching in classics in state schools was so limited. It would of course have been madness for Newcastle for this reason to run down or close a first-class department in the university. Though if it had done so, it could easily have met the government’s social-balance target.
Newcastle faced the same financial challenges as other British universities. There are four ways that universities can be funded – by taxpayer support, by private benefaction, by research and grant income, and by contributions from students. We now use all four methods. As taxpayers we are less generous to higher education and research than the USA (and several other OECD countries) and private philanthropy is of course much less than in America. Our universities are excellent at earning research income, though this may now be threatened in the medium and long term by our departure from the EU. While the evidence is mixed, the increase in student fees does not seem so far to have discouraged young people from poorer backgrounds from applying to go to universities; indeed, it looks as though proportionally more deprived youngsters from England have applied for university than from Scotland, where university education for local pupils is free. But whether the huge loans that students have taken out will ever be repaid in full, or anything like it, seems rather doubtful.
Newcastle had a more simple political culture than Oxford. The Vice-Chancellor could (with some diplomatic care) make decisions, pull levers and get things to happen. At Oxford, one of the greatest universities in the world, there is a very different political culture. I became Chancellor in 2003 after the death of Roy Jenkins, and until 2009 looked after Newcastle as well with no conflict of interest but a lot of work. I was approached to stand for the post at Oxford by two eminent Balliol Fellows, Adam Roberts and Dennis Noble, who I think had heard me give a lecture at the university not long before. They asked if I would throw my hat in the ring in what is these days a contested election in which all graduates of the university can vote, choosing someone to do the job for life. (I used to say ‘like the Pope and the Dalai Lama.’ Nowadays, after Pope Benedict’s resignation, I can only mention a comparison with Tibet’s spiritual leader, which probably further annoys the easily annoyed Chinese foreign ministry.) Adam and Dennis put together an impressive list of supporters and, come the two days of voting (in person only), I felt fortunate to win against a distinguished field of opponents. It was a serious campaign. One of my opponents had a PR firm in tow. All four candidates had websites and we all subjected ourselves to a lot of press and university interest. The campaign was more about personality than policy, though there was a side debate about tuition fees.
Oxford democracy does not end with the election of the Chancellor. Indeed, it barely starts there. University politics can be a complex and bloody pursuit as those who have combined public service and academic careers often attest. Henry Kissinger was always clear that Harvard, where he had been a professor, had been a very good training ground for Richard Nixon’s Washington. Before him, Woodrow Wilson, when he retired from the presidency of Princeton University to run for the governorship of New Jersey (he later became President of the USA), announced his resignation with the statement that at his age he thought it was time to give up active politics. Oxford University even more than most other universities depends on the mobilization of consent among a community of scholars, some of whom inevitably view any deviation from what has happened in the past with suspicion. They are not always wrong. The old Oxford joke – ‘How many Oxford dons does it take to change a light bulb?’ ‘What do you mean, change?’ – is unfair. The university usually gets to the right runway eventually, though the journey sometimes involves a great deal of circling the desired destination first, sometimes in heavy cloud. But the question, ‘What do you think the university’s strategy should be?’, has first of all to deal with the primary question for some academics of whethe
r it is appropriate for the university to have a strategy at all.
Dealing with exceptionally clever people, many of them naturally holding strong opinions, requires an exquisitely sure touch – and occasionally, just to get some essential decisions taken, a Vice-Chancellor has to risk breaking some crockery. What makes the governance of this democratic academy more difficult still is that the university consists of almost two score of independent colleges with (in many cases) centuries of history, their own treasure chests and their own institutional personalities, from people’s communes (think of Paris in 1871) to guided democracy to theocratic state. There would be no university without the colleges, autonomous as they are, and they usually recognize that the reverse is also true. They provide a home and a real community for undergraduates and resident graduates. This is vital but the cost only amounts to about 10 per cent of overall university financing. Yet the colleges have great authority, not least as the principal repository of alumni memories and often affection. So Oxford, with its very strong colleges, is one of the few institutions where power does not necessarily follow the money. The colleges and the university have to work very closely together, and a university leader has to twist the Rubik cube this way and that in order to align the various parties.