Stephen Bush: Jo Johnson’s university ‘free speech’ problem is simply imaginary I have a recurring nightmare that is horrifying and mystifying in equal measure: that I am about to take my […]

I have a recurring nightmare that is horrifying and mystifying in equal measure: that I am about to take my A-Levels or my university finals, but thanks to the passage of time, what I know now about the court of the Russian Tsar or the development of an imperial identity in eighteenth century Britain wouldn’t fit a small cup.

The dream is horrifying because I am faced with the prospect of failing the exam and losing my job and mystifying because they coincide neither with periods of stress in my real life nor do they return me to a period of particular stress.

If I dreamt about, say, my GCSE Maths exam, or on the eve of a make-or-break work decision, that would make sense to me. But as far as I can tell, the nightmare has no basis in reality at all.

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Jo Johnson, the minister for higher education, seems to be suffering from a similar terror, but in his nightmare, he returns to university to find himself bound and gagged, unable to express his opinions freely thanks to the censorious students that plague modern Britain, unable to hear a dissenting view without retreating to a “safe space” or slapping a trigger warning on it.

Quango state

“There is no evidence that today’s students are any more intolerant of dissenting opinions than the generations that came before”

Fortunately, the minister has a solution: his newly-minted quango, the Office for Students, will be able to fine universities if their students are found to be insufficiently supportive of “free speech”.

There are a number of problems with Johnson’s approach: the biggest is that the problem is imaginary.

There is no evidence that today’s students are any more intolerant of dissenting opinions than the generations that came before and a great deal of evidence to suggest that they are at worst, equally supportive of free speech and in some cases, more tolerant of free expression than the generations that came before.

Every reputable poll shows that the under-25s are more liberal, both socially and economically, than the generations that came before them.

Not only has Johnson stuck his oar in, his solution targets the wrong people, by levying fines upon universities themselves

It is true that among the eccentric minority who go into student politics, restrictions on the right to a platform are increasingly popular.

But as Johnson ought to remember from his own time at university, politically active students have always been more intolerant of right-wing opinions than either the public or even their fellow students.

That’s why his own brother, Boris Johnson, ran for the presidency of the Oxford Union not as a Conservative but as an environmentalist, just a year after the election of 1983, the only election in the modern era in which the Tory party won a majority among the under-21s.

Johnson’s solution barks up the wrong tree

Students unions have always been a cocktail of views that are now so accepted that everyone pretends they never disagreed in the first place – the moral abhorrence of the apartheid regime in South Africa, for instance – and ones that even their proponents have largely forgotten, such as the necessity of Joseph Stalin’s murders of his own people.

Both were commonplace opinions among the student politicians of the 1970s. Ministers then, who were rather more sensible than Jo Johnson, kept their noses out.

Not only has Johnson stuck his oar in, his solution targets the wrong people, by levying fines upon universities themselves.

As campus radicals tend to be at loggerheads with their universities anyway – that’s sort of the point of being a campus radical – that’s a lot like trying to deter burglary by announcing that anyone who is robbed will have the rest of their possessions confiscated.

Both the Tory preoccupation with the imagined risk to free speech and on the political predilections of students more generally are a result to the trauma of losing their majority earlier in the year.

Free speech isn’t the Tories’ real problem

It is true that younger voters were instrumental in the loss of the Conservative parliamentary majority. But the misconception is to see “younger voters” as voters under the age of 25.

Younger voters actually means everyone under the average age in the United Kingdom – that is, everyone under 40.

The Conservative electoral problem actually went up as high as 45, and the party did badly among all voters still in fulltime work. With the exception of their 1983 high watermark, they have always done very badly among students.

The real Tory problem isn’t that the young are being taught to dislike the right at university or that they are becoming more intolerant.

There are a number of problems with Johnson’s approach: the biggest is that the problem is imaginary

It is that the economic trends that used to define voters only in the first quarter century of their lives – a precarious existence at work, a transient existence in the private rented sector, and stagnant wage growth – are beginning to extend into people’s middle age.

Fixing those problems are difficult, however, but demonising students and taking a couple of quid off universities is easy. 2018 could be a year of Conservative renewal, but only if they tackle the hard questions.

Stephen Bush is special correspondent at the New Statesman

@stephenkb