Lord Redwood is a leading commentator on the economy and modern politics, a former industrialist, founder of an investment management company and a distinguished fellow of All Souls College Oxford
It is a strange myth that the three years people spend as undergraduates dictates their views, determines their skills and fixes their lives.
In the fast changing world we live in, every day is a day to learn something new, to battle your own ignorance and to embrace improved opinions and skills. I learned a lot more when I took private capital and free enterprise solutions to the governments of the world as a Director of Rothschilds, when I applied my investment experience to qualifying as a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments , and when I led a couple of international industrial businesses than I did as a student.
It is true if someone reads law or medicine the undergraduate experience is part of their wider and longer professional education, but they opt for a life of continuous study and experience in their chosen fields. For the rest of us a first degree may be a remote memory, with little influence over what we think and do now. Most of us needed to train and learn very different lessons once we got into in the world of work. The best things a university can impart to alumni is the need to be able to teach yourself, the skill to know where to go to be better informed about today’s challenges, and the self-criticism needed to acquire higher standards and better understanding.
It is true my three years of undergraduate history at Oxford did have four lasting effects on my views. I oriented my course through the limited choices we could make to pursue special interests in economic history and in the history of science and technology, appreciating their fundamental impact on living standards. The brilliance of the technology in the UK ‘s Industrial revolution and social and economic pioneering of entrepreneurs like Wedgwood and Cadbury were models of greater success.
That helped in my business career and as an MP.
We all had to take a paper on Political thought. I cannot remember much of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau though I had to master their principles and main works at the time. They had no influence over my personal political philosophy. The sixth appointed thinker was Marx. He did have a profound impact on me as I sought to expose the lack of history, common-sense and compassion in his evil and divisive creed.
I saw the haunting damage his ideas were doing to the lives of people in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. I started developing the freedom and free enterprise alternative, publishing my Popular Capitalism Manifesto in the 1980 s and taking it into Eastern Europe as the Berlin Wall came down. I explained how the period 1950 to the 1980s was a giant experiment between communism and a more free enterprise system based on personal liberty in the democracies. The freer societies became much richer, offering more comfortable lives. Anyone could travel from the US or UK to ask to live in the Soviet Union. People wanting to flee the poverty and tyranny of communism were shot trying to cross the border. Freedom won the Cold War.
We had to study general continental European history. I would have preferred to have studied American history. It was more relevant as background to understanding the superpower of the twentieth century, being a country of more importance to the technological success and defence of our own. The Oxford course designers included many European style socialists who thought the US too new and too brash to warrant general study. They wanted the UK inside the European Community and saw English history as a branch of European , probably disliking the later centuries when Great Britain became a global seafaring power. They wanted history in foreign languages to add to its cultural complexity.
This did also have a considerable influence over me.
The more I read of the attempts of the Romans, Vikings, French, Spanish, Dutch, Germans to create a European empire by force of arms with their invasion plans against England the more I wished to disentangle my country from damaging European politics.
The more I read of slavery and serfdom introduced by our Roman and Norman overlords, of the slavery in the German occupied Channels islands from 1940, of the sale of Englishmen into slavery by the Vikings the less I liked the continent’s past values. The bitter fight against new and liberating ideas by Galileo, Newton, Darwin and the others and the endless wars of religion were also a turn off, The course made me a conviction Eurosceptic. I voted to leave the EEC in 1975 in one of my first adult votes . Most attempts at creating a united Europe by arms or by diplomacy had caused endless trouble.
We also had to offer papers in what they called English history. It was of course GB history from 1603 and UK history from 1800. I loved the triumphs of our progress. I marvelled at our early limitation of royal power and establishment of legal rights. I admired the painful evolution of a universal franchise. I was humbled by the sacrifices so many made to see off Spanish, French and German attempts at European domination. I was relieved when Britain and our navy led the campaign to abolish slavery elsewhere.
What I learned of our past constitutional struggles was of great value as I and others led the Parliamentary fight to return our sovereign powers to people and Parliament after their usurpation by the EU. The English civil war they told me about became the war of the three kingdoms in later accounts. It prefigured the Brexit debates. Remain used Northern Ireland to hinder Brexit. Scotland voted a different way to England. I remarked that the Brexit rows were the civil war rows without the muskets.
It was a privilege to attend the university. Its great wealth of libraries and research materials were humbling and its intellectual. standards high. I did develop the history of science and technology I studied through two books I published. I took into politics the need to help defeat the evils of communist tyranny by the power of the pen. I held a determination that the hard won liberties of the British people should not be idly tossed away to a world of international treaties, overmighty quangos and the EU.
In today’s fast changing world graduates need to understand much of their real world education starts the day they graduate.