Universities need overseas students to cross-subsidise the domestic ones. The best way to solve this problem would be properly to fund domestic higher education funding.
There is also a strong case for believing that it is risky if you have almost half of adults not paying income tax – the position we were approaching by the end of the Coalition.
To make progress over the coming year, the Party needs to reach out to more voters and the danger is that fighting culture wars just puts people off.
Conservatism is not some doctrine deduced from some authoritative text by a great thinker or leader of the past. What comes first for Conservatives is not the theory, but the practice.
The key problem is stagnation. Margaret Thatcher’s reforms promoted mobility and opportunity. Now we are an economy which doesn’t change enough.
Does Taylor Swift have any rights over songs created in her style by Large Language Models? As we have such an extraordinary cultural heritage here and a dynamic creative sector, we are particularly vulnerable.
These 18 year olds may not wish to do a full honours degree. But it should be far easier for them to be funded to get to level four or five – Higher National Certificates, Higher National Diplomas etc.
We don’t want our children to grow up in a stultified, caste society where the only way to wealth and opportunity is to inherit it from parents.
Our university courses should look more like those in other countries and assume less specialist prior knowledge. Maybe the arrival of the Government’s four year life long learning loan is an opportunity for change.
Space is useful. It enables us to communicate, to navigate, and to track what is happening on earth. And there is now a surge of Space activity. Instead of being dominated by Government agencies getting into the detail of technology design, there are now entrepreneurs running flexible low cost projects.
The Government is now trying to make T levels the main vocational alternative to A levels. It is not clear that they can take on such a big role.
Many contributors have focussed on strengthening the family and the civic institutions=. That is an important strand of Conservative thinking. But there is also some basic economics behind the growth of the state as well.
But there is also some basic economics behind the growth of the state as well.
This leads us to the biggest danger of all – that the Conservative Party thinks it can fight a cultural war on the side of apprenticeships which are good against universities which are bad.
There are British unicorns and tech start-ups which would not be around but for the original plan. Such an agenda is key to boosting Britain’s economic performance today.
It is younger home owners who are proportionately most exposed to the costs of higher mortgages in relation to their incomes and the value of their houses.