On Thursday 3rd March, Tory Universities Minister, David Willetts came to give a talk on ‘The Coalition’s Vision for Science and Technology’ at Cambridge, one of the institutions he and his colleagues are busy vandalising. Here is a response from one of the people in attendance, poet and fellow Jeremy Prynne:
“Yes I went and I did try to listen to all of it. I am not accustomed to hearing politicians smarm up their audience, and so it was very painful and disgusting. Willetts has a fluent/glib performance style, anxious to flatter and butter his listeners, who to their credit seemed stolidly unimpressed. Much chat about rational analysis, fair choices, necessity for immediate and expedient decisions, no time for pausing or forward thinking, these reductions in cash outflow are fixed parameters (set in granite), and must be delivered in short order. That’s politics. But then, smile smile, we profile the likely consequences by analytic procedures based on empirical data, because we support scientific method (smirk smirk), of which Cambridge is such a shining example (try not to be sick). To claw back the rising cost of Higher Education through a graduate tax is not faute de mieux, it is intellectually defended as a deferred market which, because it shifts the burden forward, need frighten no-one, not even the poorest and most disadvantaged, isn’t that clever?
Imagine being told, age 25, that you’d got cerebral palsy and the treatment would cost you (noremission or discounts) an arm and a leg–but it’s ok, you can spread the payments over 20 years plus, so no cause for alarm. Smile smile. I got to ask him if, in the longer term, he thought there was a case that all Higher Education should be free, just as it had been for me as a young man; to which he replied, well the numbers of students are larger now, so it would cost a lot more. Don’t you see? Doesn’t that answer your question? Smile smile.
He was rapid and vapid in all his responses and never had to pause, even once, to think or consider: management of hard times requires strong adherence to traditional values; science is mostly done by bright people who can extract good incomes, of course they’ll never be super-rich like bankers and market spivs, but a community of rational proceduralists all getting on with their stuff can acquire their own rewards. They’re never going to be out on the streets without a job and near to desperation. That kind of thing doesn’t happen within the knowledge of intelligent people, like you and all of “us”. Also because they (you) are rational and professional, they don’t cause any trouble in the public domain. Did any of you have a few problems gaining access to this hall tonight? Well, sensible precautions had to be taken, and now here in the room it’s all OK and we can relax while I talk informally and on your wavelength, isn’t that so?
The whole practised rigmarole made me feel utterly sick, I didn’t want to be any part of this world, I just felt miserable at the total exclusion of even a passing thought for the rejected and damaged and rubbished margins of our success story, forging ahead as “we” are to a bright and bushy-tailed future. Smile.
Jeremy”
David Willetts disgraced himself a very long time ago, in the early 80s I think it was, over the deportation of the Hasbudak family. He neglected to reply to letters from a whole class of junior-school children; shameful in itself, never mind the appalling outcome of the long, well-argued campaign. Since then I have never seen or heard his name without feeling a little bit sick.