In the past few years, such tests have become unavoidable for any aspiring professional. As of 2017, 75 of The Times’s Top 100 UK companies used psychometric assessments as part of their recruitment strategies, and the year before last, the global industry that designs, administers and coaches these tests was valued at over nine billion dollars. No one can escape, if they want to get on in the white-collar world. University students regularly shell out sums greater than the average termly maintenance loan on slick preparatory courses, and adult career-switchers often have to take multiple days off work to participate in whatever “assessment suite” has been dreamed up by their prospective new employer.

The purveyors of these tests certainly seem sure of their efficacy. Pearson, the multi-billion-pound market-leader, informs prospective buyers that such tests are “seen as a successful tool for predicting job success”, and that “research shows that organizations can predict over 70% of performance [sic] by using the right tools”. Those professionals who have done well by them are equally optimistic: “It’s basically all about being logical,” a corporate lawyer tells me. “It suits me, because I have a very logical brain.”

Yet despite such convincing testimonies, it remains remarkably difficult to extract from these tests any kind of philosophically robust procedure. One study of one of the most popular “critical thinking” formats found that candidates with formal training in logic and the philosophy of language might actually be at a disadvantage compared to their more ignorant counterparts. What, we might reasonably ask, is going on?

Though there are, these days, nearly as many test formats as there are HR departments, a few clear market-leaders have emerged. The most widely assessed capacity seems to be “critical thinking” — a largely undefined term that seems to have something to do with reading chunks of text and sorting valid inferences from invalid ones. In the UK, at least, the most popular rubric is the notorious “Watson-Glaser” format, which forms the major criterion for entry into professions like law, but also underpins many of the verbal reasoning tests used in the educational system, such as TSA tests employed by Oxford and Cambridge and the UKCAT test that guards the gates of medical school. It is also comparatively ancient, originating in America’s Progressive Era, the high point of race realism, eugenics, degeneracy theory, and a host of other now-unfashionable beliefs in man’s capacity to measure and taxonomize his fellow man.

Here is a paradigmatic Watson-Glaser test question, which I have adapted from Pearson’s own website:

Statement: Two hundred school students in their early teens voluntarily attended a recent weekend student conference in Leeds. At this conference, the topics of race relations and means of achieving lasting world peace were discussed, since these were problems that the students selected as being most vital in today’s world.

Based on the statement above, evaluate the following inference: “As a group, the students who attended this conference showed a keener interest in broad social problems than do most other people in their early teens.”

A) True
B) Probably true
C) Insufficient data
D) Probably false
E) False

According to Pearson’s own marks scheme, this statement is “probably true” — “because, as is common knowledge, most people in their early teens do not show so much serious concern with broad social problems.”

But is this common knowledge? Having worked in a school myself, I am struck by the fact that, if anything, young people in this country are more attentive to broad social problems than their jaded elders, often saturated in online political talking-points to the point of downright unteachability. In fact, a plausible case can be made that the best answer is C) Insufficient data, on the basis that there is nothing about students’ interest in the prompt.

Such issues may seem trivial, but they stem from a deep philosophical incoherency in all the major critical thinking formats. Tests claim to be assessing analytic ability — that is, the ability to draw conclusions from logical premises, according to the ancient form of the syllogism: A is B; All Bs are C; therefore, A is C. But there is no “probably” in a syllogism. What ends up happening, then, is that applicants are invited to bring outside judgments about semantics and the probabilistic relations of natural facts on their answer.

This raises the question of what criteria the test-takers are meant to use to make such judgments. The preparatory course-providers set up complicated rubrics that they claim will help their students sort everything out: “Understanding the difference, between common knowledge (allowed in the inference section)” reads one handy guide on a popular site called JobTestPrep, “and other types of knowledge (not allowed) is what ultimately allows you to find the correct answers to questions”. Thus, from the fact “Dan is standing at the bus stop” we can make the “common knowledge” inference that “he is probably waiting for the bus” (other possibilities, such as “he is sheltering from the rain” are here deemed to be wild and unreasonable). We cannot infer, however, from the fact that “She is driving a BMW” that “she is probably rich”. This is not “common knowledge”, but “general knowledge” — which, apparently, is a totally different thing. Even if we wrap our heads around these distinctions, not one marks scheme I have consulted acknowledges that the word “probably” could just as easily denote a semantic uncertainty as an epistemological one. Candidates with a background in philosophy of language, for example, would likely perceive that words like “rich” are relative and depend on context; they would thus be more likely to include hedging words like “probably”, and thus fall afoul of the marks scheme in a different way.

In other critical thinking formats, this blindness to the way in which logic is underpinned by semantics yields even sillier results. Consider this question, from the “evaluation of arguments” section of the JobTestPrep website:

Evaluate the answer to the following question as STRONG or WEAK:

Q: Should a company grant its employees some free time to spend in any manner they choose?

A: No — employees are likely to use the free time to clean their homes, run errands, and meet with friends, and thus bring no benefit to the company whatsoever.

According to JobTestPrep, this is a strong argument. “It is important, as it refers to the benefit the company might (or might not) get from this policy.” Here, the “common knowledge” required is nothing less than a total and unquestioning identification, on the part of the test-taker, with the mercenary ethos of the shareholder corporation. The idea the word “should” might denote any other type of obligation — moral, perhaps — is totally impermissible.

The procedures underpinning the test-setters’ categorizations are not just difficult to divine: they are completely arbitrary. The poor test-takers end up desperately trying to channel the spirit of the test, spending vast amounts of time (and, conveniently, money) on test-prep programs in the hope of acquiring an instinctive sense of what the test-setting mandarins do and don’t think is self-evident. Needless to say, such arbitrariness encodes into the tests an immense cultural bias. If you come from a background similar to that of the test-setters, then you’ll likely do well. If you were raised in a different environment where, say, people are taught to believe themselves to have moral duties that extend into the limited-liability corporation, you will likely fail.

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Even more tellingly, the shiniest, newest professional aptitude tests increasingly do away with logical deduction altogether, and instead simply measure the test-taker’s spontaneous identification with official rubrics. This procedure is the core of the “Situational Judgment Test”, or “SJT”, that dominates hiring in healthcare and human resources, and even forms a major part of the UK Civil Service’s Fast Stream exam. In the SJT, it is the candidate’s “character” that is assessed, via an online widget that dreams up hypothetical workplace conflicts and asks candidates how they would respond. Test-takers are exhorted to “research company values” in advance — and, essentially, parrot the company’s own HR policies back at it.

Clearly, what this really amounts to is a perfect recipe for workplace conservatism: the company hires graduates who do exactly the kind of thing the procedures tell them to do, always. This would be one thing if the Civil Service was a paragon of leanness, efficiency and innovation. But does anyone in the UK really think this is the case? Incidentally, several civil servants inform me that almost no one in the Civil Service believes in the Fast Stream exam: most of these hiring practices were dreamed up by private outside consultancy firms with an obvious financial interest in the Civil Service’s stultification.

This institutionalized skull-measuring has the potential to wreak catastrophic effects. It is no secret that the UK is facing a slump in productivity, its vast firms with their swollen internal bureaucracies rapidly being overtaken by competition abroad. Thomas Piketty and Katharina Pistor have argued convincingly that most of what counts for growth these days is really sterile manipulation by the administrative class: changing the legal rules surrounding one’s assets to increase their value, lobbying for new schemes to siphon public money into one’s latest quixotic startup. Brett Christophers, meanwhile, has shown how the biggest, most profitable companies these days are more interested in extracting rents than making profits, precisely because no one is doing or making anything new or exciting enough to sell. Few, however, have noted that these are exactly the pathologies we would expect to find downstream of a selection procedure that prizes ploddingly interchangeable candidates and systematically overlooks those who think differently. How many of the UK’s sclerotic institutions could be rescued by taking in people who are able to think critically, rather than people who are good at “critical thinking”?

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When I put these objections to defenders of such tests, the response is uniform. Even if their methodologies aren’t fully understood, the Pearson website assures its doubters, the fact remains that such tests predict success; they are highly correlated to something called “outcomes”. Yet, when I look, there don’t seem to be robust studies proving anything of the sort — not least because the supplest and most interesting thinkers probably don’t score well enough to be given jobs in the first place. In any case, this fêted correlation could be attributed to the simple fact that “critical thinking” tests reliably weed out a few illiterate candidates. The results of a spelling test would correlate to professional success, too.

Arguably, given the well documented racial and social disparities in the UK’s professional services sector, so too would outright prejudice. One of the most astonishing facts about the literature defending the Watson-Glaser test is that it actually acknowledges that this is the case: different cultural and ethnic groups tend to achieve vastly different results. Of course, this is entirely to be expected if most of what is being measured is the test taker’s cultural proximity to the test-setter; the high priests of psychometry, however, remain determined to find a way to make their discipline seem compatible with the egalitarian ethos of the average HR department. One report by Imperial College London admits that “Pearson Vue’s own literature on the Watson Glaser Critical Thinking Assessment reports… ethnicity ha[s] been previously associated with differential group performance on the test,” only to observe that “there was no difference between groups when predicting [career] progression”. Thus, the report concludes, the playing field can be leveled via various baroque DEI initiatives. In other words: yes, the tests seem to be racially biased, but you needn’t worry because the tests don’t actually work, so you can impose whatever quotas you like in the name of compliance without feeling too guilty. Conveniently, most of the companies that sell professional assessment suites seem to be hawking “equality and diversity” services too.

Ultimately, professional assessors are guilty of making not one, but two of the great philosophical errors of our time. First, they mistake the fact that tests give quantifiable results for the idea that such results are somehow objective. Second, they assume that facts about the world can be derived from pure logic, without any theory of semantics intervening. These assumptions run rampant in the culture these days, animating everyone from online IQ fetishists to drab technocrats who think that everything can be solved with a nice, healing dose of economics. Anyone with a shred of philosophical training knows enough to question them — indeed, if one traces back the genealogy of “critical” thought far enough, one arrives at the work of Immanuel Kant, whose entire philosophical project aimed to show how “pure” or “logical” reasoning is always infected by a priori structures that it cannot itself justify.

Sadly, however, academic humanities like philosophy seem to be the one type of discipline that employers are determined not to take into consideration in their hiring procedures. This is a shame: to an unparalleled extent among branches of human knowledge, the humanities involve a questioning of abstract categories and measurement systems by which we parse and understand the world, and a consideration of whether the questions we are asking in our more mundane, technical pursuits are even the right questions. They are thus the perfect antidote to the inane proceduralism, the waterlogged bureaucracy, the creeping sense of stagnation, that haunt the contemporary workplace. If people really want to galvanize an organization, they should start trying to rediscover some of this critical, humanistic spirit, and do away with whatever crude new solution the latest smarmy consultant has sold them. Ditch Watson and Glaser; hire a few Kant scholars instead. Maybe then, one day, the students in college cafés like mine will be able to close their test-prep software and get back in the libraries where they belong.

Fast forward 31 years, and I’m walking in there again, surrounded by security and being chased by photographers, accidentally dressed like a cut-price Kendall Roy from Succession. The image will make national front pages the next day. (Hilariously for our mutual friends, one of the presumed bodyguards is in fact my fellow philosopher friend Rob.)

Hustled by the Union’s reassuringly military-sounding bursar into a secret upstairs room in the building, I check Twitter. Rishi Sunak has tagged me in a supportive tweet. This will be the least weird thing to happen to me all day.

The morning had not started brilliantly — two consecutive trains cancelled, and I’d had to scramble around to find a local taxi driver who didn’t mind a four-hour round trip to London at short notice. By the time I made it, fairly late, to the driver taking me to Oxford, I had already aged several years.

Looking back, the younger version of me didn’t like the Union much, and I hardly ever went there. An institution completely independent of the wider university, it is mostly devoted to having debates. Back then, I thought it was an intimidating and archaic place, full of strident, cocky types who all wanted to be Prime Minister. I didn’t feel it was really for the likes of shy, awkward, comprehensive-schooled me. I certainly didn’t imagine that I’d one day be interviewed by its president about my views on gender.

I switch up my Kendall-Roy look to business-casual in a tiny bathroom, and then chat to committee members and Union staff. They seem excited but tense; occasionally, one wheels away to talk urgently on the phone. At one point, there is a muttered conversation about the welfare rooms being manned and ready to receive visitors. I wonder if that might be a slightly problematic verb to use.

For a while, as we wait, there is dead silence outside in the street, and I start to suspect that the whole thing is going to be rather anticlimactic. Eventually I hear the familiar sound of chanting outside and feel oddly relieved. At least I know this script — and not only from my former workplace.

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Last November, I participated in a debate at the Oxford Union’s fellow institution, the Cambridge Union. There was a protest, and an attempt at disinvitation there too. So it seems I’m now a veteran of Oxbridge’s least athletic student Varsity match — and though it pains me to do so, I’m afraid I am going to have to declare the Light Blues the winner.

The motion we debated at The Other Place was not about sex and gender at all, but about whether there is a right to offend. Spoiler alert: I was on the side that argued that there is. The atmosphere as I entered that chamber was sombre and tense. Throughout the event, various young people bobbed up and down to denounce me, mostly for things I hadn’t ever said or written and didn’t believe.

Some appeared to think I was arguing that offence was a positive duty rather than a right (I wasn’t). Others didn’t care what I was saying, or indeed what I had ever said, but just wanted to feel the thrill of the pointed finger. In an update to the traditional mediaeval scenario, one organised chap read out his prepared denunciation from an iPad.

Protestors outside could be heard banging drums loudly, providing an unsettling percussive accompaniment to the speeches inside. The volume of drumming and yelling would increase each time I spoke, as coordinating messages flew between audience members and protestors.

Cambridge also provided a stunning bit of theatre: an undercover non-binary student called Kass cunningly disguised as a six-foot-plus man in a tuxedo. The results of Kass’s intervention upon my emotional equilibrium can be seen in the Channel 4 documentary Gender Wars, which coincidentally aired on the same day as the Oxford event.

Under false pretences, Kass had auditioned to speak for my side of the motion, arriving at the Union in full male-associated attire and dining convivially with me first, before sensationally dropping the act in order to denounce me as “disgusting” to everyone in the chamber. And things only went downhill from there. I was the only female speaker in the debate. Standing at full height next to me during their speech, Kass described to the audience how frightening it was to walk about the streets of Cambridge at night thanks to women like me.

In comparison to all this, the Oxford audience this week barely made any effort to make me feel awful. In fact, they offered enthusiastic applause as I entered the room. And in an unprecedented turn of events, many of my main objectors seemed actually to have read my book.

Even the four protestors who tried to create a rumpus inside the building were relatively meek. One stood up and shouted something, then left. Two others also shouted slogans rather apologetically, unfurled a flag, and threw some leaflets before hastily exiting too. The most intrepid of the four, dramatically unveiling a “No More Dead Trans Kids” T-shirt, used superglue to stick one hand to the floor right in front of me, but still complied docilely when five police officers — armed with blue plastic gloves and solvent, a lot of forms to fill in, and some very patient smiles — eventually arrived to sort it all out. The careful act of glueing itself seemed a bit Blue Peter.

After a nervous build-up, I started to enjoy myself, and it appeared to me that others in the chamber did too. There was a full and frank exchange of views, including some robust criticism of my position. Intellectual blows were landed on both sides. The Union President cornered me on an academic study that I didn’t know much about, while I managed to confuse him about which sense of “gender” he meant exactly (though, given the infinite flexibility of the term, who can blame him?). Various students queued up to quiz me on what they perceived to be errors in my reasoning, evidence base or attitude. I answered as best I could.

It seemed to me that the four protestors were not representative. I could be wrong, but I got the feeling that many in the chamber were pushing back against the sort of tired and hyperbolic cliches usually wielded to shut them up. Certainly, there was little apparent sympathy in the room for the superglued superhero, eventually escorted out to the sound of good-natured cheers and some booing. At times, the atmosphere bordered on riotous rather than rioting.

I found all of this quite promising. And even during the earlier Cambridge event, there had been another hopeful sign, not featured in the documentary. When it came to the moment for those in the packed room to file out and vote, the majority voted for our side of the motion, and the existence of a right to offend.

At both Cambridge and Oxford, I also had several enriching encounters with staunch defenders of my right to speak. A lot of these were with young gender-critical feminists, fired up by noticing the obvious inconsistencies and injustices in a supposedly “kind” worldview that tells women to put their own needs last. Some wanted me to sign their copies of my book. Others were keen to tell me their own stories of horrible social shunning for their beliefs.

One first year Cambridge student told me that, after writing a mildly gender-critical blog in defence of me, she had been ostracised and shamed by all the other women in her college year group, as well as by her own tutor. Another story I heard on Tuesday was about a young lesbian who had read my book and watched my talks, decided to defend my free speech publicly, and been kicked out of the Oxford LGBTQ+ student society as a result.

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Other supportive students in Oxford, neither feminist nor anti-feminist, just seemed fed up with being emotionally blackmailed into stifled silence by a small group of childish and histrionic narcissists — among which they doubtless would include the occasional lecturer. And from within each Union, the committee members responsible for inviting me were totally impressive, standing resolute against pressure and showing exemplary resilience in the face of harsh criticism from some peers.

And I’m afraid I have even more disappointing news for those with unhealthy emotional attachments to the present culture wars. There were — indeed, undoubtedly still are — plenty of students who feel like this at my former workplace. I know they are there, either because they told me outright at the time, or because they demonstrated it to me via the open, inquisitive way they conducted themselves in the classroom.

I am sure that such students exist in every single UK university at the moment; I suspect there are thousands of them out there right now, muttering inwardly while listening to ever more dramatic tales of self-centring woe from fellow students, or eye-rolling inwardly as their lecturers give them pious homilies.

These students are a largely untapped asset to the project of detoxifying the current discourse around identity politics. Thanks to their relative youth, they tend to be sensitive, curious, idealistic but not fanatical, and genuinely want to understand the world. But they also want to play — with ideas, with jokes, with each other. Many have sufficiently rebellious or anarchic instincts to shrink from blatant attempts to manipulate and guilt-trip them. They are sick of being imprisoned in other people’s shame, guilt and paranoia. All we have to do is set them free.

This is not the fatuous argument, made by opportunistic identitarians and anti-woke warriors alike, that we should “listen to young people” — usually made while smoothly guiding listeners to exactly those young people whose views happen to coincide with their own. Nor is it the pretence that we oldies should just shut up and listen to young people generally, no matter what they say — as if today’s youth had miraculously gained hitherto unknown oracular powers, what with all that gaming and watching of TikTok videos. Of course, we shouldn’t be shy of arguing robustly with younger generations, when they talk what appears to be nonsense. They can both dish it and take it. The question is: can we?

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In looking at some of the media coverage of my Oxford trip, it’s striking to me that certain journalists’ idea of balanced reporting is to interview, on one hand, Stock the supposedly offensive speaker, and on the other, students who say they feel threatened and frightened by my terrifying words. (The rough format goes as follows. Student: “I just feel exhausted constantly having to justify my existence every day!”. Interviewer: “What do you, Stock, say to the students who feel exhausted having to justify their existence every day?” Me, looking at said students, apparently with enough energy to drum and chant for hours: “Erm … I’m not sure. Maybe get their iron levels checked?”.)

Yet these are not the only students who have interests at stake. There are those who long to have robust arguments and vigorous disagreements with peers and elders, free from the fear that they will say something offensive and be punished accordingly. But these students don’t seem to get interviewed remotely as often. I don’t believe it’s because they wouldn’t speak to the media, in principle. Or at least — I think that if we collectively made it easier for some of them to ask for such things, greater argumentative disinhibition would become a more accepted norm quite fast, and a generation would collectively breathe a sigh of relief.

I don’t know how the younger version of me would look at present committee members, so impressively self-assured and full of vim, but this version of me (the Kendall Roy wannabe, that is) looks on with great affection and respect. In standing firm and holding a space where students are free to engage with big ideas in time-honoured, age-appropriate ways — whether by arguing, shouting, laughing, emoting wildly, or indeed glueing themselves to wooden floors — they are doing the world an enormous service. Perhaps we can relax a bit about the future after all.

W-3: A Memoir is the result of Bellow’s advice. At first Howland “did not have the energy for such reflections”, but as she recovered she digested, leashed and channelled her misery, observing, like a panopticon, every detail of the ward and its inhabitants: the gangs of student doctors “marching in with their stethoscopes jutting from their pockets”, the “dusty, disabled equipment propped up in corners”, the overflowing ashtrays, the basket weaving, the thin-legged black cleaning staff “thrusting their mops with a strange listlessness”.

Following the book’s publication in 1972, Bette Howland was launched in the literary firmament. Over the next decade she produced two books of short stories and was lauded with prizes, including a MacArthur Genius Award, after which everything went silent. No more publications, no more praise. By the nineties, Howland (who died in 2017) had disappeared altogether and her masterpiece was cast into the oubliette of forgotten books. Then, in 2015, W-3 was found by a literary editor in a dollar box in a second-hand book shop, and a new edition was published this Spring, which is when I discovered it myself.

The timing could not have been better: the world of Covid-19, with its regulations and mayhem and the way in which it has turned us all into inmates is just like W-3. Howland’s memoir is a metaphor for the pandemic. “Let me explain right away,” she says of W-3, “that I didn’t belong here. But that goes without saying, no one belonged here.” This alone might serve as the epigraph to the last 18 months, during which none of us has belonged in the place in which we found ourselves, which for many has been in front of a screen, staring all day at our own distorted visages.

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The patients in W-3 belonged to a tight “community” in a large teaching hospital, itself a unit of a sprawling gothic university, which also happened to be where Howland, before her suicide attempt, had worked as a part-time librarian. Now a full-time member of the institution, Howland found herself, like a Russian doll, occupying less and less space in her own life. Sound familiar?

The first thing she noticed about W-3 was that despite being told there were “no rules”, the “air was thick with them”. There were rules everywhere, attached to everything. The rules came mostly from above, but the patients ruled themselves in after-dinner meetings where they requested various freedoms, such as permission to take a bus journey or to meet up with a friend.

In Howland’s first meeting in W-3, Sydney is chairman and Fran is secretary. “Fran read the minutes very loud and fast, holding the notebook up so I could see her black eyes moving. She wore a shower cap over her curlers; coarsely graying hair.

‘Any additions or corrections?’ she asked in a challenging voice.

‘Actually, I think I’m supposed to say that,’ Sydney said, glancing at the notes of parliamentary procedure he was crushing in his fist’.”

No one has anywhere else to go or anything else to do, and meanwhile Trudy keeps interrupting:

“‘Hey! I’ve got another question! When do I get to talk?’

‘So far,’ Sydney observed, ‘you’ve been doing more talking than anybody else’.

‘Oh fuck. Fuck you. I know all about these meetings. Don’t worry, I’ve been to plenty of meetings. I bet I’ve been in more nuthouses that you have. So you don’t have to go getting stuck up with me about your dumb meeting!’“

These community meetings are not unlike what I imagine the Cabinet meetings to have been like during the recent crisis: Boris Johnson, with his “go to work, don’t go to work” directive, might have been schooled in W-3.

But they are even more reminiscent of the Extraordinary Meeting of Handforth Parish Council, called by two councillors “following the refusal of the council chairman to call such a meeting,” which went viral in February. Remember Jackie Weaver being told ‘to “read the standing orders! Read them and understand them”?  All zoom meetings are like nuthouses. You have no authority here, Sydney.

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Howland also noticed that in W-3, despite the amount of time spent grooming themselves, “everyone looked essentially the same — peculiar”. The inmates kept up appearances while looking dreadful. The women, like “birds in a barnyard,” wore clownish quantities of make-up: black eyebrows, red cheeks, “eyelids like wilted butterfly lids”. Hair, which always looked “wrong”, was controlled by tongs, towels and wigs. The kitchen smelt of burning hair; even the cleaning staff wore wigs. One wig, crooked and silky black, rested on a patient’s head “like a roosting wing.”

“Clothes”, however, were the focal point of the female patients. “On W-3, all inmates were expected to wear ‘clothes'”, and “clothes” meant anything that was not hospital garb. One woman swished down the corridors in a sleeveless evening gown and a single opera glove, because self-care proves you are still sane.

I read W-3 while lying in my pyjamas. Like many people, I wore pyjamas all day throughout the pandemic because lockdown meant “no rules” as well as nothing but rules. I would have worn a wig if I had one. Like other women in my neighbourhood community, I accessorised my bedclothes when I exercised the dog. Feathers in our greying hair, bangles on our wrists and slippers on our feet, the dog-walking sorority circled the local park, shouting through our masks while waiting for our animals to bend their legs and shit.

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When I met my Creative Writing classes on Zoom, I put on a jumper in order to look sane. My students, on the other hand, kept their cameras off so that no one could see what they were wearing or where they were living or who they had reverted to being. They too were occupying less and less space in their own lives, most of them now spending 24 hours a day in their childhood bedrooms, beneath faded Snoopy duvet covers and the florescent stars their mum put on the ceiling 15 years ago to help them sleep at night. In emails to me they described despair, depression, deepening levels of panic as their debts accumulated and their worlds closed in. For four solid terms I talked to row upon row of black squares, an oubliette of forgotten people.

The only student to put on her camera was a girl who sat up in bed in a negligee as though caught unawares on camera. Ready for her close-up, she wore full make-up: orange foundation, false eyelashes, big pink lips, her hair coiffured to within an inch of its life. There was a connection, I thought, between the excessive performance of presence in W-3 and in this student’s bedroom, and the otherwise excessive performance of absence in the seminars. When the whole community is sick, on-stage and off-stage become versions of the same thing.

“Cook and eat your misery,” I counselled my seminar groups, just as Bellow counselled Bette; harness your ward and its inhabitants. One or two of them did, but for the most part they lacked the energy for such reflections. The bulbs had all blown leaving nothing but darkness. Except, as Bette Howland said of her own state, “it wasn’t dark — it wasn’t anything”.

Then I got glandular fever when I was 14, and spent six weeks mostly in bed. I was blessed with the damascene insight that no one could make me go if I chose not to. And so, I stopped. I learned that there was a threshold of non-attendance at which an intervention would be staged, and showed up just enough to avoid that. Otherwise, I claimed to be generically “ill”. No one really believed this, but no one really seemed to mind.

I stayed at home, listening to morbid records, writing diaries and reading in the garden. I did adequately in my GCSEs, and barely adequately in my A-levels. This stung my pride, but didn’t seem to matter. Whatever I was supposed to be, it wasn’t going to happen here, in the countryside, where there was one bus to town every two hours. This was not my place, even though it was the only place I’d ever known. University was where the Sarah Project would truly begin.

And it did. I started an English degree, and it was immediately clear that no amount of going to school would have been better preparation than my years of skiving. Six contact hours a week and as many novels as I could consume in the meantime? I knew how to do this! When I discovered that I didn’t like my course (too much theory), I just worked harder and got better marks, so that by the end of my first year I could offer my clutch of firsts around to other universities that would never have looked twice at my A-level grades.

I ended up, not exactly coincidentally, transferring to the university that my boyfriend was attending. And then, two weeks into my second year, I found out I was pregnant. Two days after that, I realised I was going to have this baby. I didn’t experience this exactly as a choice, though I know it was one. I experienced it as knowledge. Whatever had made its home in my belly had made me a mother, and I would have to catch up with that.

Even as the person who made that decision, I find it hard to reconcile the ambition I had at 20 with the will to throw my lot in with maternity. All I can say is that I believed I was equal to anything then, and my life so far had shown that I could overcome whatever obstacles I put into my own way. The baby would go to nursery (I assumed there would be a nursery). I would go back to university (I assumed this would be possible). The Sarah Project would continue, with some light amendments.

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By James Rebanks

It’s difficult not to be conspicuous as a pregnant student. When I came back for my third year, I would introduce myself to classmates and find out they already knew me as “the pregnant one”. Well, they could hardly have missed me, with my huge belly and my dreary, hated uniform of Mothercare tunics. I understood that I wasn’t like most students, and I didn’t really mind.

For most people, university — or an arts degree at least — is the first time in their education that they realise what I realised laid out in my bed at 14, with a raging fever and a furious lymph system: no one else can force you to do this. You can choose not to. Outside my first Victorian tutorial, my peers joked about how they simply hadn’t had time to get through Middlemarch over the summer break. I had read it during breastfeeds, resting the massive paperback on the small body of my baby, trying to coax his appetite into sync with the chapter breaks.

I read the chapter where Dorothea Brooke visits her sister Celia, who has just become a mother. Dorothea watches Celia “watching the remarkable acts of the baby”, hardly knowing the person her sister has become. I felt like both sisters at once, besotted with my child and simultaneously astonished to observe my own besottedness. But I felt only annoyance for most of my classmates, who had nothing but time and no inclination. What had they come here for if they didn’t want to do the work?

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Given my time again, I wouldn't choose journalism

By Sarah Ditum

More disconcerting still was the realisation that I didn’t belong in the same world as my tutors either, even as I started to fit myself for lecturing as a profession. (I wanted to write but a baby seemed an insuperable barrier to getting into journalism and academia was right there, offering me funding.) The ones who were parents were, mostly, male. For female early-career academics, the trade-off seemed impossible.

If you could complete your doctorate in three years, you still had a race to convert insecure and underpaid jobs into a proper departmental role before your fertility began to fade. I felt, smugly, that I’d carved a private path through the system, then realised I had not. The most senior women tended to be childless. This is a bit less true now than it was in the early noughties, but it’s still the case that having a baby is about the worst thing you can do for your career as a woman in academia.

I had a sturdy faith in the myth of my own exceptionalism, but not sturdy enough to believe that I was so much better than every other woman with a university career. I survived through my BA and an MA, and a little way into a DPhil, for the same reason I failed to sink myself at school and college: because there was a system that believed I would eventually succeed. I did not just “get to university”: I was carried. Teachers guided me, despite my great reluctance, through the admissions system. My parents had hand-couriered my paperwork when I was in danger of missing deadlines. And I did not just “complete my degree”. I had support — most importantly, the backing of my boyfriend, my family and my boyfriend’s family; but also, a generously subsidised and excellent student union nursery on campus.

It mattered as well that my tutors did not want to see me fail, and when I finally fell out of university it was because my doctoral supervisor simply could not deal with me having another baby: he called me a child bride and stopped answering my emails. Still, in a way, that disinterest was a relief. Before then, I had had to learn that there is nothing quite as suspect as the person in authority who takes a special interest and then takes a bit too much.

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Oxbridge is killing journalism

By Justin Webb

Part of the problem, nowadays, is that no one seems entirely sure what universities owe their students: complete protection from all distress, or benign neglect. Then universities minister Sam Gyimah argued that institutions should see themselves acting “in loco parentis”, with particular responsibility for the mental health of their students; but he also claimed that students were being coddled by a “culture of censorship”, suggesting that campuses were if anything too protective of their charges.

Those two apparently conflicting positions might be closer than it seems. Students are treated increasingly as consumers — they want and expect their university to look after them, and universities write policies on wellbeing and inclusion that suggest they can meet this demand. The necessary resources, however, rarely exist. A fully funded psych service is expensive. Trigger warnings and no-platforming come cheap. They may not be moral and they may not be effective, but they allow beleaguered lecturers to believe they’re discharging their duty of care, even if deferring to student demands ultimately only traps young people in permanent adolescence.

In the last few years, I’ve done some teaching at university, and the rawness of students — the childishness of them, in the safety-rails-on simulacrum of an adult life that university offers — can be painful to see. I’ve sometimes felt the same annoyance with my own classes that I did outside that Middlemarch seminar: why are you here, if you can’t manage your own life?

But the bargain of university has always included the promise that it will form you in the last stage of your growing-up: you become a part of it and emerge, finally, as a fully matriculated member of the bourgeoisie. It was never only about the education, and students will always be liable to do slightly dumb things. That might be trying to protect themselves from the literal violence of people with ideas, or it might be having a baby. The duty of a university is to see that neither of those decisions can keep someone from becoming the adult they could be.

For those of us who had been attending protests for years, usually against austerity, this one felt different. It was exhilarating, and a far cry from the institutionally organised marches where we forced ourselves through the streets holding the prescribed banners and drearily chanting the prescribed slogans. At Millbank and in the weeks that followed, we were transformed into subjects with our own agency, and the chaos and uncertainty of those days was experienced as the opening of possibilities that extended beyond the protests themselves.

In Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher wrote that, “the tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again,” and this felt like one such event. The next day, NUS President Aaron Porter wrote an article in the Sun in which he described the disorder as “despicable” and that sharpened our swords against the ranks of careerist New Labour bureaucrats (a look at his subsequent CV is dispiriting; this class is still disappointingly employable).

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The leftist magazine Tribune describes Millbank as “one of the most important demonstrations in British political history”, striking a blow at “the nerve centre of the British establishment”. They are certainly right that it has taken on “mythic significance”, judging by the numbers who claim to have been there compared to the relatively small number of people who actually stormed the Tower.

For the few weeks following, protests and occupations spread over the country, culminating on December 9 when the bill was passed and we were kettled on Westminster Bridge until gone midnight. There was no food, no water, no toilet, and the rallying cries passed from joy, through defiance and anger, to desperation. As we were finally released into the night, including school-aged children hundreds of miles from home, we had to walk one-by-one through a tunnel of riot police shining a light on our faces and taking our photo. Any face coverings, worn to protect anonymity, were forcibly removed. We had lost, and the government and police had won. We had been humiliated and it felt like the end.

But it was not. Tribune argues, rather meekly, that Millbank’s legacy lives on through its participants: “Many took on important roles as trade unionists, climate activists, Palestine and Kurdish solidarity workers, disseminators of alternative media, organisers of migrant and refugee campaigns, and senior officials in the Labour Party.” This is another way of saying that Millbank did nothing but reproduce the ranks of the professionally ineffective Left. Tribune should be more ambitious: Millbank’s real significance was much more serious. Though we couldn’t see it at the time, it marked the emergence in politics of a class faction that was just coming into view and is even now transforming our country: the graduate without a future.

During the dead period of the noughties, protests stuck to a tried and tested formula. We would march through central London, before gathering in Trafalgar Square to hear from Left-wing veterans like Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn while Trotskyist parties competed to sell papers and sign up the uninitiated. It was all pretty harmless, an alternative to a trip to a National Trust property for a different subset of the middle classes.

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By Paul Mason

There was the odd exception. A year before the Millbank protests, in Spring 2009, I remember skipping school and protesting against the G20 summit in London. A window was smashed and a police officer pushed a bystander, the newspaper vendor Ian Tomlinson, to his death. But this was on the way out; the tired tail-end of 1990s radicalism temporarily given a new lease of life by the recession, and it marked the last moment when the Left was defined by its opposition to globalisation. For the most part, rallies conformed to our cynical characterisation of them: not so much A to B, as A to Benn.

Millbank changed all that. We were no longer content to participate in ritualistic set pieces that achieved nothing. And it was also something new for many of its participants. This wasn’t another protest about Middle Eastern conflict, instead it related directly to our material conditions.

In the months and years that followed, a new class consciousness was born. Not among the idealised proletariat but among the immiserated sons and daughters of the middle class. Of this new set, the Deterritorial Support Group were the sharpest. They pranked the world media into believing Slavoj Žižek and Lady Gaga were close friends. They exposed Johann Hari’s plagiarism and accused him of “policing the boundaries of acceptable thought” and the liberal-left as representing the “left wing of capital.” One of their members explained to the Guardian that “without the specific historical and economic conditions I live under, I don’t feel I would be involved in this sort of thing.” Instead, he would “probably have a mortgage or something”. More often than not their agitprop stung because it was accurate.

And it spoke to the depths of our radicalisation and disillusionment with mainstream politics. The coalition government implemented the reforms but in truth they were coming even if New Labour had clung on in the 2010 general election. This was a bipartisan reform implemented by a generation who had paid nothing for their education. To top it off, the Liberal Democrats broke their pledge to oppose any increase in tuition fees. This had a prolonged effect on a generation’s trust in mainstream politics and Nick Clegg’s disappearance from the UK scene and new career as Silicon Valley executive can be understood as a form of exile – if not a particularly painful one.

Millbank was our year zero. Some of the DSG had voted for the Lib Dems in 2010, and one had even been a member. It was the disenchanted demographic to which they belonged that propelled Jeremy Corbyn to his leadership of the Labour Party and without it he may never have won in 2015. Instead it would have been Yvette Cooper or Andy Burnham managing Labour’s decline.

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By Graeme Archer

Yet 10 years on, the movement Millbank gave birth to has crumpled. Its predictions – that scrapping EMA and trebling university fees would put off poor kids from college and university respectively – have been proved wrong. The Left has descended into internecine conflict and the policing of individual behaviour. The collective joy and mutual self-interest of those early days has gone. There is a distinct irony that this radical energy was assimilated by the electoral project of Benn’s most loyal acolyte. With that comprehensively crushed in December and Jeremy Corbyn suspended from the party he led, it is hard to see how the fragments of the new Left can pick themselves up again.

The old Left is back to where it started, too, with a few thousand members spread across a few dozen organisations. Were it not for the coronavirus restrictions, I have no doubt that they would be organising their next ‘march against pandemic austerity’, the placards would be out calling for ‘the people’s vaccine’, and the paper sellers of the Socialist Workers’ Party would be setting up their stalls in Trafalgar Square in search of new recruits…

And yet, though the more interesting elements have dissipated, something has changed. The Left is formally defeated but it remains – in its cultural form – more influential than ever. Many of those radicalised at Millbank have graduated from higher education institutions and are reshaping our national political discourse. At the expense of a playful politics of collective self-interest, however, has come the importing and regurgitating of the life-draining successor ideology from the United States, an ideology which every power we claimed to be protesting against 10 years ago has embraced wholesale.

In 2010, we felt as though we were at the precipice of something real. History was re-emerging from its long slumber and it was finally possible once again to imagine radical futures, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams attempted to do in the briefly influential Inventing the Future. Their book, published in 2015, seemed at the time like the beginning of a newly ambitious Left modernism. We can see now it marked the end of a short chapter. Today, the Left is shattered and poses no serious alternative to liberal, capitalist modernity. That challenge comes from the Right, while the Left is reduced to dragging cultural institutions ever further down the rabbit hole of intersectionality. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

The phrase ‘mental health’ appears in almost every news story about the new restrictions placed on students, and recurs in statements made by officials. Larissa Kennedy, President of the National Union of Students, said on BBC Radio 4’s PM that “we need to think carefully about the implications for mental health for students”, while the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, Willie Rennie, insisted on BBC Radio Scotland that “mental health support” should be made available by universities. The students themselves echo this vocabulary, with freshers telling journalists of their “history of anxiety”, or using oddly clinical language to describe this unpleasant introduction to university life. One young woman, for instance, described how isolation had “unfortunately” led to her “experiencing mental health issues”.

We might expect an 18-year-old to use more prosaic words when she is far from home, living with strangers, banned from leaving her accommodation, and now facing the prospect of Christmas without her family. Words like ‘sad’, ‘angry’, ‘upset’, and ‘lonely’ spring to mind. But over the past several decades, these ordinary words have been crowded out by medicalised words that seem to give an aura of authority. This new discourse speaks not of ‘sadness’ but of ‘depression’, not of ‘worry’ but of ’anxiety’, and not of ‘happiness’ but of ‘mental health’.

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There are several factors at play here. One is the steady expansion across the globe of American psychiatry — well documented in the book Crazy Like Us by Ethan Watters — which has led to both the medicalisation and the Americanisation of forms of emotional distress that in other times and places have been considered an expected part of the human condition.

The American Psychiatric Association publishes a diagnostic manual, the DSM (now in its fifth edition), that is used the world over as the bible of psychiatric diagnosis. The DSM sets out in cool, logical bulletpoints the steps by which a person’s dysfunction or distress becomes pathological. A diagnosis of depression, for instance, requires either a “depressed mood” or a “loss of interest or pleasure”, accompanied by three of the following: weight loss or gain, physical slowness, fatigue, feelings of guilt, poor concentration, or recurrent thoughts of death. Tick, tick, tick, tick: congratulations, you’re mad.

Tellingly, the so-called “bereavement exclusion” — which excluded a patient from a diagnosis of depression if he or she had been recently bereaved — was removed from the fifth edition of the DSM, meaning that ordinary grief is now technically considered a disease. Some forms of mental illness are easily distinguished from everyday experience, but others are not, meaning that ‘pathological’ can be distinguished from ‘normal’ only by drawing a line on the spectrum of severity, and that line can easily slip. Meaning that, as the outspoken critic of over-medicalisation Allen Frances puts it, “normality is an endangered species”.

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By polly Mackenzie

There is a slightly conspiratorial, anti-capitalist way of framing this psychiatric concept creep, a framing that leans heavily on the role of Big Pharma. I won’t dismiss this theory, but nor do I believe that it tells the whole story. Yes, in a privatised healthcare system, doctors have an incentive to prescribe medication that patients don’t really need, but we also have to acknowledge that medication, effective or not, is often what patients desperately and loudly want. An old friend of mine who works in mental health services once told me that although she and most of her colleagues were signed up to the so-called social model of madness and distress — which understands mental illness as not just biomedical, but also as a product of the social environment — most of their patients didn’t want to hear it. They wanted to take a pill and feel better. They didn’t want to be told that they were suffering from what some medics darkly refer to as ‘Shit Life Syndrome’.

The huge rise in the diagnosis of depression, anxiety, and other slippery conditions among young people is often attributed on the Right to over-sensitivity. The ‘snowflake’ narrative suggests that these youngsters are either exaggerating their distress, or that it has been induced in them by a political ideology that discourages resilience. There is some truth to the idea of mental illness as status symbol, as we can see from the fashion for including one’s psychiatric diagnoses in one’s Twitter bio, frequently found alongside pronouns, an anime avatar, and rainbow and rose emojis. In a social hierarchy constructed around marginalised identities, identifying as mentally ill can certainly boost one’s victim status.

But for the many young people who really are sad, vocalising that sadness by ‘identifying as’ mentally ill also offers another advantage, and one that the critics of the ‘snowflake generation’ often miss. The clinical social worker and psychoanalyst Lisa Marchiano describes the appeal:

A  diagnosis carries with it a sense of absolution. It isn’t our fault that we have anxiety or depression. Forces beyond our control have conspired against us… when our diagnosis becomes an important part of who we are, we are encouraged to abdicate responsibility for our plight. We are adrift on life’s turbulent currents, without blame, but also without agency.

The psychiatrist Lewis Kirshner argues that while madness was once considered “an existential possibility present at the margins for every person”, in contemporary society we understand it as a sort of biological taint, present from birth, that will sooner or later announce itself in the form of symptoms. Thus the presence of this ‘identity’ is outside the individual’s control, they are (as Marchiano puts it) “adrift on life’s turbulent currents”, and temporary remission is available only through drugs or talking: publicly, in an effort towards destigmatisation, or privately, to a therapist. The trouble with this understanding of mental illness is that there now seems to be an awful lot of ‘biological taint’ present in the population since, according to Kirshner, approximately half of Americans meet the criteria for a major psychiatric disorder at some point in their lives. If fully half of us are irredeemably mad, maybe there’s something else going on?

A new book, The Lonely Century by Noreena Hertz, poses an interesting challenge to the ‘biological taint’ theory by suggesting that loneliness is both responsible for a huge amount of the emotional suffering that attracts psychiatric diagnoses, and that its prevalence is a consequence of recent historical trends: family breakdown, the rise in both domestic and international migration, the disintegration of civil society, and our increasing dependence on the internet, particularly social media. We are social animals, and loneliness makes us very, very sick. While the elderly are particularly vulnerable to it, the young are also suffering terribly. Those ‘snowflake’ young people on Twitter are telling the truth when they write about their profound unhappiness. It’s just that they’re using these feelings as evidence of their special, oppressed status, rather than seeing themselves as part of a lonely generation in need of better company.

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Perhaps the reluctance to face up to this peculiar sadness induced by 21^st-century living is because the most reliable remedies to loneliness are disturbingly traditionalist: get married, have kids, live near your extended family, go to a weekly religious service. Hertz points, for instance, to the surprising longevity of the Haredim, an ultra-orthodox Israeli community who, despite being disproportionately poor, overweight, and sedentary, live significantly longer than their peers. “Community,” Hertz writes, “the value of which was so repudiated by neoliberal capitalism’s focus on individualism and self-interest, seems to have a health benefit of its very own. And for the Haredim, community is everything.”

If we accept Hertz’s diagnosis of what really ails us, then we should look differently at the unfortunate students locked away in their halls of residence, and indeed the many other people locked away from the world as a result of Covid-19. First, we should do away with the clinical language of ‘mental health’ and its false sense of legitimacy, and return to words with more emotional resonance, particularly the word ‘lonely’. Second, we should think of isolation, not as something that might aggravate the psychiatric symptoms only of those with a ‘biological taint’, but rather as an unbearable imposition on any person, given our deeply social natures.

So, instead of using phrases like “experiencing mental health issues”, we could instead be more straightforward: “I want to see my friends and family, and I can’t, and that makes me sad because I’m a person who needs affection and companionship, just like anyone else.” You don’t need to tick off a checklist in the DSM to know that people need company — it’s a need as fundamental as sunshine.

This paralysing lack of certainty means carefully laid career plans have gone out the window. Owen Griffiths, a graduate who recently achieved a first in his degree at Bournemouth University, had a job lined up at a communications company but he tells me the employer “pulled the plug last minute because of budgetary uncertainties”. He has since sent off more than 150 applications and had numerous interviews for PR/public affairs firms. But so far to no avail.

Graduating during a recession can leave a lasting impact. According to the Brookings Institute, the combined graduate classes of 2008, 2009 and 2010 in the United States lost more than $330 billion in earnings over the 10 years following the global banking crash. On average, workers who graduate into recessions have lower earnings and worse professional prospects than their peers who finish university during better times.

My personal story resembles that of many other millennials. I went to university during the great expansion of higher education in the mid-2000s. I entered university during a time of boundless economic optimism when Tony Blair’s New Labour government had proclaimed an end to “boom and bust”. And yet, a few years later I emerged from university into the biggest recession since the Second World War. The subsequent wage slump saw workers taking home less pay in real terms than they had when Blair won his second general election victory in 2001. Between 2008 and 2013, the real median hourly wage for 25-to 29-year-old UK graduates fell by just under 20%.

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Moreover, while increasing numbers of people are going to university — in 2017/18, 50.2% of English 17- to 30-year-olds had participated in higher education — the median wage differential between graduates and school-leavers has stayed at around 35% for the past 20 years, leaving some, such as the writer David Goodhart, to question whether university is the best career route for many young people. As Goodhart writes in his new book, Head, Hand Heart, some young people who end up taking obscure subjects at second-rate universities “are not suited to higher education and would do better going straight into jobs”.

After finishing university myself, I managed to secure my first journalism jobs off the back of dozens of painstaking applications. There were nearly 70 graduates competing for each vacancy at the time and I felt more than a little lucky. Like many others of my generation, I spent the proceeding years accumulating a modest material stake in society. By the final three months of 2019, average weekly pay for British workers adjusted for inflation had risen to £512 — the highest since March 2008. But the rising tide did not lift all boats at an equal rate. Pay for workers in their thirties remained at 7% below the pre-crisis peak in 2019.

With hindsight, perhaps workers such as me should have been more grateful. Just two months into the new decade and Covid-19 was surreptitiously spreading among the British population. Six months on and Britain is tentatively leaving a recession so severe that it is without historical precedent. With winter approaching and further lockdowns on the cards, we don’t yet know whether the economy has hit rock bottom. And with so much economic uncertainty in the air, students are having to reassess their futures as graduate schemes are postponed or cancelled.

“I had secured myself a good position in a graduate programme but because of the current economic circumstances around Covid-19, my position was cut,” one recent graduate tells me.

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The graduate, who asked to remain anonymous, says he lives in one of Scotland’s “most impoverished council areas, Inverclyde, and so [the] general outlook around here is pretty poor”. He’s since taken up a temporary job as a customer service adviser because he has a young son — “so being out of work just isn’t an option”. He tells me he is “really not enjoying it” and is considering applying for work at a nearby Amazon warehouse.

Elsewhere, jobs that would have attracted perhaps a dozen applications before the pandemic are today attracting thousands of job-seekers as unemployment climbs (the biggest rise in unemployment so far has been among 16- to 24-year-olds, 76,000 more of whom are unemployed compared to 2019). This figure is expected to rise significantly as furlough finishes at the end of October.

Every graduate I spoke to for this piece had seen offers of work placements vanish since the start of the year. Sabrina Miller, a journalism graduate who at the beginning of 2020 had several work experience placements lined up, has seen them all cancelled.

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“I’m nervous about the fact that I haven’t had much work experience,” she tells me, “and nervous about the uncertainty and instability in the print journalism industry at the moment.”

Sabrina is realistic about the situation but disappointed nonetheless. “People are dying, I’m not pretending that graduates have it worse at the moment,” she admits. “[But] it’s annoying and frustrating for people on the bottom rungs.”

Previous recessions bear out the lasting damage downturns can do to a person’s long-term career and earnings prospects. As the Resolution Foundation recently noted about the aftermath of the 2008 crash, “many of those who entered the labour market during the crisis have seen their pay packets permanently scarred”.

In contrast to the politics of a decade ago, there seems to be a broader consensus today among policymakers about the need for the government to make fiscal interventions to shore up the flailing economy. The austerity approach that followed the 2008 crash had already gone out of fashion by the time of the 2016 Brexit referendum, replaced by a new awareness in Westminster about the plight of the ‘left-behinds’ in the provinces.

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Covid-19 has ripped up what remained of the old neo-liberal economic consensus — though what will replace it we do not yet know. However it seems likely, as I wrote for UnHerd in June, that the post-Covid landscape will resemble the post-World War Two era more than the economic status quo born of the 2008 recession. Boris Johnson has already promised that workers will not face another round of austerity in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Another major difference between the class of 2011 (the year in which I graduated) and the class of 2020 is the crippling uncertainty facing today’s cohort of graduates. Even during the worst days of the 2010s when Eurozone economies teetered on the brink, there was a sense that normalcy would soon return in the form of economic growth.

The resultant inability to plan ahead has arguably contributed to a rise in mental health problems among Britons of all ages since lockdown began in the Spring. Young people are being blamed for the recent spike in coronavirus cases. Yet it is the young who are arguably making the greatest sacrifice in putting their prime years on hold for the sake of older generations who enjoyed those same opportunities — unencumbered by draconian lockdowns — in the past. According to a recent study, young people, women and those with young children, saw their mental health worsen the most during the recent lockdown.

“There’s no sense of progression. I think the stagnation has really, really hurt a lot of people,” says Owen Griffiths when I ask how his friends have been coping.

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To the government’s credit, Johnson has promised to help young people with a £2 billion scheme to get them into jobs. This represents a welcome break with the policies of the previous decade when it felt at times as if slogans such as ‘The Big Society’ were deployed to offload problems back onto local communities.

But for the graduates I spoke to it is the prevailing uncertainty that’s having such a brutal impact on wellbeing as we head into winter.

“I’m not fussed about not being able to make enough money to live on,” says Thomas Hollands, a 2019 graduate who was furloughed from his consulting job in March and who tells me he’s been doing “various random things” since then to bring in a modest income.

“The thing that stresses me out is not being able to see three or six months into the future. That’s the scary thing. You’re looking forward and there’s nothing.”

As some B-listerer turns on the lights on Oxford Street, and the television offers up another excruciating visit to Mrs Brown’s Boys, I generally have prophet Isaiah running on a loop in my head. “The people who have walked in darkness will see a great light.” My job is to point to that light, to hold it up and offer it as hope to those living in darkness. But it can get lost amid all the twinkling light pollution of the season and I worry that my role as the local master of ceremonies for Christmas cheer is too complicit with the spirit of bacchanalian bonhomie that obscures the simple story of God coming into the world as a child.

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This year it may be different. Christmas is under threat, they say. “Without real leadership from the feeble @churchofengland Christmas simply won’t [sic] be Christmas,” the political journalist Isabel Oakeshott tweeted out this week. To which the Archbishop of Canterbury — I imagine properly cheesed off — was driven to reply, sarcastically: “Thanks Isabel, we’re all very pro-Christmas in the @churchofengland.”

Thanks Isabel, we’re all very pro-Christmas in the @churchofengland. At Christmas we celebrate God’s love for us in Christ, who shares in all our troubles and joys. I pray it brings us together, as it has in past times of joy and sadness, and doesn’t become a cause for division. https://t.co/enAaV9GIj8

— Archbishop of Canterbury (@JustinWelby) September 22, 2020

This is one exchange among many. The lights won’t be on this year. The fireworks have been cancelled. The pubs will close early. The journalist Rachel Johnson even suggested a return to prohibition, banning the sale of booze. Students, we now hear, might not be released home for the holidays. There will certainly be no large family gatherings. So a pall of winter misery is about to envelop us. Christmas is being cancelled.

There have always been two Christmases, of course — the Christian one and the secular one — and they exist in an uneasy yet symbiotic relationship. The Church grumbles that Christmas has become too commercialised and ever so slightly resents the appearance of drunken strangers sniggering at the back of at midnight mass.

For their part, the non-churchgoing world complains when the Church refuses to acquiesce to the season of generalised sentimental benevolence that is used to sell hard-up people stuff to give to people who don’t really want it. It’s a season they believe starts sometime at the beginning of December (but about now in the shops) and which ends with a roasted bird and an orgy of ripped paper. Indeed, even the timetables of these two Christmases are entirely different. The Christian Christmas begins the very day that the secular one ends. As the star appears over the stable, most people are snoozing on the sofa.

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With the advent of Covid, this relationship is becoming one of open hostility. One prominent cleric, Rev Miranda Threlfall-Holmes commented in response to Oakeshott: “You don’t get to tell us to put lives at risk just because you want a nice carol service to complete your Good Housekeeping view of ‘a good Christmas’.” And the Archbishop re-tweeted, signalling his approval.

You don’t get to tell us to put lives at risk just because you want a nice carol service to complete your Good Housekeeping view of ‘a good Christmas’.

— Miranda Threlfall-Holmes (@MirandaTHolmes) September 22, 2020

Of course, I understand their irritation. I often share it. I hate Slade and Mariah Carey. I hate those smug, religion-lite “season’s greetings” cards from politicians and their perfect families. I can feel the grump coming on as I write these words. But there is nonetheless a problem with my reaction. For better or worse, we are the established church. This means we have a duty of religious care even to those who do not darken our doors — yes even to those with a Good Housekeeping view of Christmas. We are not a membership club for the religious, we exist for the benefit of non-members. And this means we are the purveyors of Christianity both in the espresso form (neat, for the aficionado) and the latte form (diluted with warm milk).

This tension is embodied in the question of how regular churchgoers relate to the folk religion that surrounds them. And from the perspective of the sort of Christian life that has been schooled by exposure to regular Bible reading, prayer, confession, and the whole pattern of the Church’s year, the latte version is not just thin and insipid, but often seriously misguided.

The folk religion of Christmas doesn’t generally appreciate the astonishing and — from the perspective of the Jewish understanding of God from which it emerges — even blasphemous idea that God almighty, the creator of Heaven and Earth, might appear in a smelly shed, shorn of all his divine superpowers. God-become-human is a terrifying prospect, with Heaven emptied, and all the hope of the world invested in a tiny, defenceless child.

By the time the Church reads out the story of Jesus and his family running away to Egypt to escape Herod’s murderous rage, the folk religion bandwagon is already packing up its toys for another year. They have missed the point that the vulnerability of the infant to worldly violence is a sinister prefiguration of the bloody end this child will one day meet. It’s not just a festival of bouncing babies. It’s a festival that prefigures the shadow of death.

And it’s important to get that bit because otherwise the message of the angels — “fear not” — doesn’t really make much sense. “Fear not” said he “for mighty dread had seized their troubled mind,” we will sing. And what more appropriate message could there be as we prepare once again to walk through the shadow of death, as Covid stalks our land?

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How Advent became peak late capitalism

By Polly Mackenzie

Christmas is not an escapist fantasy that gives us all a little break from the gloom in which we are enveloped. It is a direct response to the land of death. As St John puts it in that famous reading that ends every carol service: “What has come into being with him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”

The church is widely perceived not to have had a good Covid crisis. Many have criticised it for substituting too much soft left social commentary for proper theology, preferring to channel the message of a fearful lockdown than the ‘fear not’ message of the angels. And there is something to this. But at Christmas the message is distinctive and counter-cultural: despite all our failures as priests and bishops, God is faithful. The church only survives because even when we are rubbish, God is not.

Often, this message gets lost because Christmas comes too early and knocks out the season of Advent. Advent is that period of waiting, where we sit with our own fears and hopelessness, with our own vulnerability to death and failure, looking out for something that will speak words of hope into our desperate times and deepest fears. Unless we are prepared to sit in that dark place for a while, the light of the new dawn will get missed.

I do not subscribe to all the religious snobbishness about folk religion. Nonetheless, there is potentially much to be gained by the cancellation of all that cheap Christmas cheer that takes place mid-December. The light appears to those living in darkness. If we can allow ourselves to stay in this dark place a while longer, without easy distractions or analgesics, we might hear a very different story to the one we think we know.

In 1919, as WB Yeats’ wife lay sick with the deadly Spanish flu pandemic that took the lives of somewhere between 17 and 50 million people around the world, he wrote those famous words: “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. Over a century later, that poem, The Second Coming, speaks spookily into the nightmare of our condition. As does that enigmatic ending: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”

No, Christmas is not cancelled. In fact, this could be the best Christmas ever.

Early in 2007, as he prepared to replace Tony Blair, Brown made a trip to India to talk about its place in the world and its dealings with the UK. Brown being Brown, his starting point was big-picture economics and history, which is why he was talking about China.

Remember, this was 13 years ago. No one outside the telecoms sector had heard of Huawei. The coronavirus was years away. Xi Jinping wasn’t even a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. The world was waiting to see what China would become.

At this point, predictions that the BRIC group of emerging economies would attain global prominence were still novel, with India and China considered future superpowers. Somewhere in a chat with travelling reporters about the India trip, Brown was drawn into comparisons with China, which he (correctly) suggested would lead in economic growth.

But, someone asked him naively, what about democracy? A historian by training, Brown argued that over time, an ever-richer China would be “drawn into” the Western system of international trade and finance. That might not mean elected government in Beijing, but it would make China a relatively normal country to deal with, part of the club of developed nations in most important ways.

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By Helen Thompson

The following year, as PM, Brown went to Beijing for the first of several visits, hailing the possibilities for mutual enrichment from UK-China trade. During the great financial crisis, Brown repeatedly tried to weld China into a new global architecture, hoping that its emerging economic might would help steady a Western order teetering under the weight of debt.

Brown was succeeded in No 10 by David Cameron. In his early days as PM, Cameron had a meeting the Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan people whose country China claims as its own. That 2012 meeting put UK-Chinese relations into deep freeze, and Cameron spent the next three years seeking a thaw. In 2015, he declared a “golden era” in Anglo-Sino relations, drank pints in a Buckinghamshire pub with a visiting Xi Jinping, and signed Britain up to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. As an ex-PM, Cameron has spent some time trying (with, shall we say, mixed success) to establish a $1 billion UK-China investment fund.

This week, Boris Johnson decided to set aside warnings from American politicians and some of his own colleagues to allow Huawei, a Chinese telecoms firm, to help provide the country’s future telecoms network.
Brown, Cameron and Johnson are quite different politicians and very different characters. Yet all three have reached what is essentially the same view of China: engagement is in Britain’s interests.

My reason for starting with Brown’s prediction that China would gradually normalise in its dealings with the West is that this analysis underpinned a great deal of Western policy towards China in the past couple of decades. Consciously or otherwise, many of our leaders have dealt with China on the basis that working and trading with China is the best way to draw the Chinese into a world order that was largely built by Western nations over decades in which primacy flowed peacefully from Britain and its empire to the US.

That, I suggest, is quite a bet to make, possibly the biggest gamble of the post-Cold War era. And right now, it is not looking like a winning bet.

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China under Xi has largely defied those optimistic predictions about normalisation. Much of that is down to Xi himself, who has captured power within the Chinese Communist Party more comprehensively than most analysts expected. The Chinese system isn’t democratic but it is still intended to have checks and balances. Xi has largely set them aside and established a personality cult around his leadership.

Meanwhile, technological mastery has allowed China to expand state oversight and control to levels scarcely understood by many in the West. Far from moving towards Western norms, China has moved further away from them in the past decade. That smiling Chinese gentleman who cheerily supped a pint with David Cameron in The Plough near Princes Risborough is the near absolute-ruler of a regime that has imprisoned a million of its own people in re-education camps and controls the everyday lives of a billion more to an extent that actually deserves the over-used term “Orwellian”.

All of which rather raises the question: just who are we kidding when we think we have influence over China?

More importantly, the unspoken assumptions that “they” will become more like “us” have combined with distractions such as Brexit to obscure a more pertinent — and uncomfortable — question: how much influence does China have over Britain?

The Huawei decision has brought one bit of that iceberg-sized question into view, but much more lies unseen beneath the surface. The 5G network may be the technological sinews of a modern economy, but a modern Western democracy like Britain relies on other, more important, sorts of wiring too.

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By Bill Hayton

One of the sinews of modern Britain is its education system, which does not just provide education but income and, sometimes, influence too.

Once upon a time, British leaders liked to think that education was a vital aspect of the country’s “soft power”, in part because by educating people from other countries who might use their education to achieve wealth and power at home, Britain was creating future allies and partners.

In 2014, for instance, a House of Lords select committee (chaired by Lord Howell, then father-in-law to Chancellor George Osborne) concluded: “The UK’s education sector is a major contributor to the UK’s soft power. Students returning to their home countries can be the UK’s “greatest ambassadors”.

If that view were correct, what would be the significance of recent figures showing that there are now more than 130,000 Chinese students at UK universities? They are the biggest non-EU group of students, and far more numerous than the 27,000 Indians studying here.

Chinese student numbers in the UK are up a third in five years. Has British soft power over China risen accordingly? Or have those rising numbers meant the precise opposite, that Chinese influence over Britain has grown?

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By Mary Harrington

The Chinese student population of Britain is a significant contributor to the HE sector, paying much higher course fees than British peers. At some universities, one in ten undergraduates are from China and half of all students on some postgrad courses.

Analysis by Times Higher Education suggests that Chinese fees total £1.7 billion, around 5% of all university income. Some institutions derive more than 10% of their income from Chinese students.

Not long ago, the prevailing official view of such figures would have been either indifference or even mild celebration at significant export earnings and the scope for soft power projection via Chinese graduates of British institutions.

But slowly, that view is shifting. More British politicians are considering a simple fact about Chinese students: they are, by and large, in the UK at the whim of the Chinese government. Should Beijing decide to slow or even stop the flow of Chinese students — and thus, money — to British universities, what effect would that have on those universities? And what could or would the British government do in such a situation?

These questions should be central to British thinking about engagement with China, yet they have mostly been addressed by a few foreign policy specialists; the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee last year investigated Chinese influence over British universities. That is a good example of parliamentary scrutiny working well, but also one that raises questions about why what is essentially a matter of domestic policy (the integrity and autonomy of British institutions) was considered by a foreign affairs body. Doesn’t China’s potential sway over an important bit of Britain count as a domestic issue?

These questions are quietly troubling parts of the British intelligence community but not yet, by and large, MPs and peers.

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Huawei and, to a much lesser extent, the university issue has focused a few political minds on Chinese influence, but how many people in Parliament have looked in detail at the experience of Australia’s recent dealings with Xi’s China?

There obvious differences between Britain and Australia in a Chinese context: Australia is closer and more important to China, and home to a significant Chinese community. Yet the Australian experience of Chinese influence should still be studied more closely in the UK, and not just in the context of education. Australia’s universities are even more dependent on Chinese money than Britain’s, and face painful questions about whether they have allowed their teaching and research to be swayed in favour of Chinese interests. There are darker stories too, of academics who say things China doesn’t like facing abuse and of sensitive Australian scientific and technical research being used to enhance China’s domestic surveillance state.

There are also questions about Chinese interference in Australian politics and dramatic warnings from Australian spooks. Duncan Lewis, a former head of the Australian intelligence service, said in November that China is seeking to “take over” Australia’s political system through its “insidious” foreign interference operations.

Such warnings have, in turn, sparked active debate in Australia about whether it is racist to raise concerns about Chinese influence. If such concerns receive more attention in the UK, ask yourself what the way we conducted our national conversation about Brexit suggests about our ability to sensibly debate our relations with China.

Professor Kerry Brown of King’s College London, a leading China expert and a former British diplomat in Beijing, says Australia’s experience offers a clear lesson to Britain over China: “Ensure you know the tale that you want to tell about yourself before you dally with a country which will already be clear about the story that they have for you.”

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Do we have such a story? Or have we collectively undertaken a hugely significant set of interactions with an emerging global power without anything resembling a strategy?

Chinese money helps sustain British universities. Chinese technology will help sustain our telecoms networks. Chinese investment is flowing into London’s prime real estate market and commercial property too: much of Canary Wharf is Chinese-owned. So too are football clubs, wind farms, oil rigs and much else besides.

Gordon Brown had a point when he said that is a “huge opportunity” to be had in British engagement with China. But perhaps it’s not primarily an opportunity for Britain.

Sometimes the most important thing about these deals is that they’re bad choices by Chinese investors, who end up losing cash on failing British firms: Pizza Express, House of Fraser and Thomas Cook have all had Chinese investment. And in general terms, being open to international investment remains overwhelmingly beneficial to Britain.

But China is different. Despite those fond notions that it will become more “normal” and play by our rules, it is not doing so and shows no sign of doing so.

It is important not to overcook this analysis. Caveats abound when considering Chinese influence. First, all big countries want to influence other countries and there is nothing inherently wrong with that, though no other authoritarian state has the sheer clout of China. Second, China isn’t always very good at meddling and influencing: attempts to bend others to its will can and do backfire. Third, China has little to gain and much to lose by overdoing its influence work; things like the rule of law make countries like Britain and Australia wealthy states worth trading with — unravelling the deepest wiring of Western states would do little to benefit China.

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Fourth, and possibly most important, China’s actual aims via its influence policies are not wholly clear. Yes, some talk excitedly of Xi’s Chinese Dream amounting to a global vision but that does not mean China seeks global dominion. Strategic conflict between China and the West is possible in this century, but that does not mean it is inevitable.

And of course, the whole edifice could yet crumble: the party may lose its grip, demography, an environmental or health disaster, or some as yet unknown systemic threat could jam China’s economic engines.

But not yet. As things stand today, Xi’s China is attempting, with fair success, something that a Western worldview might consider impossible: achieving first-tier wealth for hundreds of millions of people without also granting them political freedom. And that wealth begets power and influence over others.

The three most important words in British politics in this century to date have been “Take Back Control” and our current national project is, in theory at least, dedicated to restoring the sovereign autonomy of the country, Britain’s elected leaders once again making the final decisions about things that affect Britain and the British.

Yet even as politicians have fixated on Brexit and Europe, they have — often without much reflection or debate — set the country on a course where some of the decisions that can affect Britain and the British will be made in China.

On top of that, the soaring cost of tuition places a disproportionate debt burden on poorer students, who are less likely to have help with living expenses from family; they graduate £57,000 in debt, compared with the £42,000 debt of their better-off peers.

We need a new approach. One that will reduce the total number of graduates to better fit the UK’s employment requirements, while levelling the economic playing field between rich and poor and improving the quality, attitude and employability of new graduates.

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Why liberal feminists don't care

By Mary Harrington

My radical policy would make university degrees fully government-funded, including living expenses, but make them contingent — for the entire UK student body — on prior successful completion of two years’ public service, either in the military or (for conscientious objectors) the NHS.

To make it work, we would need to widen the definition of military service beyond the frontline. After basic training, young people might drive minibuses on unprofitable public transport routes in rural locations, help fill in potholes, or provide Meals on Wheels to the elderly. It would be important to provide accommodation — as much for esprit de corps as to act as a social leveller — as well as food and a small stipend. There should be no impediment to public service on grounds of economic background.

For egalitarian reasons, it would be essential to ensure service tasks were assigned rather than chosen, as a precaution against the sharp-elbowed middle classes pulling strings to ensure their offspring received a cushy posting. And the scheme would need to offer roles compatible with mobility issues or other access requirements, for young people with disabilities.

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Why do it? As things stand, academics describe a student cohort that has been so over-praised by parents and teachers that they believe themselves automatically entitled to good grades. They approach education as paying customers, which feeds the entitlement, and drives grade inflation. Eliminating the consumer dynamic would be the first step in getting higher education back on track.

The MoD’s Army Leadership Code describes its values as “Courage, Discipline, Respect for Others, Integrity, Loyalty and Selfless Commitment”: two years spent internalising these values, while rising early and doing as you’re told would be good preparation for taking undergraduate life seriously. And a little practice in the art of temporarily subordinating personal desires in pursuit of the public good might not hurt either.

It would put some off applying. This is no bad thing. It would be a quick and easy way of reducing our surplus of graduates. Filtering out those young people without the character to complete two years’ public service would also raise the calibre of those graduates, ensuring they’re ready for the challenging world of work.

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The policy might also improve access to top universities for the less well-off, by deterring their more highly-strung and overparented middle-class peers from applying. Research has linked helicopter parenting — a distinctly middle- and upper-class behaviour — to increased neediness and lack of self-reliance in students. Requiring young people to commit two years to communitarian service would either reduce the number of fragile middle-class university students in favour of their more self-reliant, working-class peers — or else cure them of their fragility. Either outcome would be a net benefit to universities, which are currently experiencing a crisis of mental health issues as well as student entitlement.

The policy would doubtless cause outrage. But an inverted version of it already exists in the UK, in the form of the Army Undergraduate Bursary — which offers up to £24,000 paid throughout your degree, conditional on completing a subsequent year at Sandhurst and three years’ service as an officer. Similar schemes to the UK army bursary operate in many countries, including Turkey and the USA.

Objectors might also complain that housing, feeding and paying two million young people for an extra two years, on top of funding their university education, would be prohibitively expensive. But the outlay needed to facilitate two million young people performing public service would hardly be money wasted.

In any case, higher education is subsidised by the taxpayer even now to the tune of nearly £4bn. If we take into account the fact that only 17% of students are ever forecast to pay back their full student loan, this figure is much higher. The government is just keeping that £100bn of mostly bad debt off the books. Why not re-route it?

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By Polly Mackenzie

At present, the system of tuition positions higher education as a transactional good, sold to student consumers on the basis that the ‘graduate premium’ outweighs the cost of loan repayment and as such is worth the investment. This approach has been justified on the basis that it has improved access. But so far, marketising higher education has neither improved the quality of degrees — quite the opposite — nor done much for young people’s employment prospects apart from raising the bar for the ‘graduate premium’.

Restoring full funding for university education in exchange for civic participation would level the socioeconomic playing field for applicants, and also reintroduce an older understanding of education not as a consumer good but as a public good that benefits all of us. It would also underline the fact that the purpose of higher education is not personal enrichment but to train the future leaders of society for a lifetime of service.

Those wishing to embark on a life of leadership and public service should see no hardship in performing some of this upfront, while those seeking only their own selfish advancement would be welcome to study overseas, at their own expense.