Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

What Scottish professors have to fear from Nicola Sturgeon’s power grab

The SNP is binding universities closer to the state. Don’t expect it to stop there

In the grounds of Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University stands a one-tonne sculpture. Roughly hewn and about five feet high, it carries in its top corner an ill-carved sun. Beneath it are some words of Alex Salmond, half-sunk in the sandstone, as if they were the thoughts of a Scottish Ozymandias:

‘The rocks will melt with the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scottish students.’

This clunky celebration of SNP -policy should raise a few doubts. Free higher education is not free for all in Scotland. Edinburgh can afford to pay the fees of only 124,000 students in Scottish universities. Their contemporaries might have the grades, but they must go elsewhere because Scottish universities need fee-payers from England and Wales to balance their books. More pertinently, the Heriot-Watt stone ignores the class warfare in Scottish education. To fund free university education for largely middle-class students, the SNP has hit the budgets of the further education colleges of the working class.

But the biggest question is the most basic: what the hell is a university doing plonking a lump of rock covered with party political propaganda on its campus?

Scottish universities are meant to be independent, but the SNP will not allow them to stay that way, for a reason that lies at the root of its political success and wider failure.

On the one hand, it is the best election-winning machine in Britain. It has majority control of a Scottish parliament, and possesses nearly every Scottish Westminster constituency. Its opinion-poll ratings are so high that Scotland can seem a one-party state. For all that, the SNP lost the independence referendum, the one vote it had to win to justify its existence. If it is to win next time, if indeed there is to be a next time, the SNP has to achieve what we old Marxists call ‘hegemony’: the cultural as well as the political domination of Scottish society.

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