This is profoundly chilling. As it happens I did a degree which was vocational with subjects that helped me throughout my Business career. But that is far from the only way. University is about so much more than providing you with a toolkit for employment.
But it’s the “earning potential” which sent a chill down my spine. Maybe in Sunak’s world, heavily influenced by his time in the United States, success in life is measured by “what you make” – in American parlance. But don’t we need people who are motivated by more than their paycheck?
Perhaps it will come as a surprise to Sunak but millions of people in Britain choose a vocation rather than a job where they can maximise their wages or salaries. Teachers, nurses and a raft of other people across the public and private sector choose to work in a job to make a difference not to feather their nest.
Universities offer courses to equip people with a vocational bent to prepare themselves for careers where “earning potential” is way down the list of priorities. I have young relatives in teaching, nursing, midwifery and other professions who studied these subjects at university. They are probably all bright enough to have had a well-remunerated career, like Sunak, in Financial Services. But they preferred to work somewhere where they could make a difference.
When I extolled a career in the public sector because of its favourable pension arrangements a friend said to me that he disagreed because “someone has to create the wealth”. This is a common fallacy and one that Rishi Sunak seems to share. We live in a mixed economy where there is a mutual dependency between the Public and the Private sectors. Whatever job we are in we are part of the national wealth creation process.
Many years ago when I lived in The Netherlands the son of a Dutch friend of mine was studying the Poplar tree at University. He had done so as an undergraduate and was now going even deeper on a post graduate course. I don’t think that the “earning potential” for poplar tree experts was very high but this young man was very satisfied by this rather esoteric area of study. Mr Sunak would want to turn him into a banker. Which would’ve have been a shame don’t you think ?
Paddy’s Blogs in a crazy world 
Sunaks education at Stamford Business School seems to have changed his life. Had he gone to the Sorbonne in Paris perhaps a different man would have emerged? What he is proposing is turning everyone into bankers. The suggestion is utterly preposterous.
I read social science at Uni and that also change my life. It made me understand better human existence and how destructive unregulated market capitalism can be. How its system is structured to leave behind a large section of a nation’s population and condemn them to poverty whilst a minority become fabulously wealthy.
That is the kind of system Sunak and his cronies seek to defend and proliferate.
That is why they destroyed Britain’s relationship with the EU. An organisation that seeks to regulate capitalism’s excess and create a fairer, better-balanced world.
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