I’ve still got it (somewhere) at 50
University lecturers are Leftwing… who dat hunk it? Apart maybe from the Pope and that bear who does his business in the woods. The Adam Smith Institute’s condemnation of “liberals” (cue Lady Bracknell voice) dominating our lecture halls is hard to grasp, because it’s not the right-on socialists we ought to worry about these days but the touchy “alt-Right” students. I know which I’d rather be stuck in a lift with.
What is going on? Getting upset about liberal academics is like complaining about the weather or political correctness at the BBC; it’s just the way things are. End of.
Young people are supposed to be motivated by passionate, if imprecise, notions of what constitutes fairness, and driven by altruism not monetarism.
Take Jacob Rees-Mogg: a fine fellow of a parliamentarian and a decent human being, but I think it fair to say he was probably a very peculiar youth and, as the anachronistically posh president of the Oxford University Conservative Association, anathema to a great many of his real or faux-Leftie contemporaries.
He has grown into his politics, which now suit him marvellously. The typical trajectory, however, is for students to grow out of their early beliefs as they become better acquainted with the world, and start getting hammered by income tax.
With luck and judgment, those strident student activists eventually evolve into electable politicians. But until then, university is a place where debate of every hue ought to flourish. Does it matter if that nascent politicisation is to the Left or the Right, as long as there’s engagement?
Possibly not, but I think it’s a great deal healthier to begin from a base of energetic, perhaps jejune optimism than to be a buttoned-up 18-yearold preoccupied with fiscal conservatism.