Blairism promoted education as a private good, something that bettered the individual, and as a national economic good, something that would make the UK’s businesses more competitive in the global market. Just as the benefits to the individual were often stated in cynically economic terms (higher average earnings for graduates), so the benefits to business were often framed in the sanctimonious language of personal merit: striving for excellence, winning through innovation. The disorientation induced by this juxtaposition of sanctimony and cynicism was in many respects the cultural signature of Blairism; indeed, many people are still confused.

The purported rationale behind Tory cuts to education is broadly consistent with Blairite values. Insofar as education is a private good, it is up to individuals to pay for it (and the more they pay, the more demanding and discriminating they will be, driving up “quality”). Insofar as it is an economic good, it should prioritise the needs of business, which apparently are for technologists rather than semioticians. Individuals who can’t pay, or who want to do things the “business value” of which is not immediately apparent, will find that their education is not considered to be important. Obviously it’s the outrageous callousness and narrow-mindedness of this that has got everyone up in arms, and rightly (and admirably) so. But the line the Tories are pursuing is essentially a reckless, arrogant intensification of an agenda that was already in place before they took power. When it comes to the question of what education is good for, there is a deep underlying consensus between the two parties.

What would break with that consensus, and what some of the students in occupation up and down the country have been trying to think about and articulate, would be some notion of education as a public good. A public good brings benefits to individuals who participate in it, but has a common value separate from its private value to those individuals. As an aside, we urgently need a better way of talking about this than the “trickle-down” theory of the propagation of learning. The point is not that you indirectly derive a private benefit from my education, but that we both uphold the public value of education as being in the common good. It may be that a public good is, in the last analysis, an economic good, but this can only be admitted on the condition that we regard “the economy” politically, as the collective material organisation of human affairs, rather than narrowly in terms of the performance of the FTSE 100.