My Conservative Home article
It is a strange myth that the three years people spend as undergraduates dictates their views, determines their skills and fixes their lives.
In the fast changing world we live in, every day is a day to learn something new, to battle your own ignorance and to embrace improved opinions and skills. I learned a lot more when I took private capital and free enterprise solutions to the governments of the world as a Director of Rothschilds, when I applied my investment experience to qualifying as a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments , and when I led a couple of international industrial businesses than I did as a student.
It is true if someone reads law or medicine the undergraduate experience is part of their wider and longer professional education, but they opt for a life of continuous study and experience in their chosen fields. For the rest of us a first degree may be a remote memory, with little influence over what we think and do now. Most of us needed to train and learn very different lessons once we got into the world of work. The best things a university can impart to alumni is the need to be able to teach yourself, the skill to know where to go to be better informed about today’s challenges, and the self-criticism needed to acquire higher standards and better understanding.
It is true my three years of undergraduate history at Oxford did have four lasting effects on my views. I oriented my course through the limited choices we could make to pursue special interests in economic history and in the history of science and technology, appreciating their fundamental impact on living standards. The brilliance of the technology in the UK ‘s Industrial revolution and social and economic pioneering of entrepreneurs like Wedgwood and Cadbury were models of greater success.
That helped in my business career and as an MP.
We all had to take a paper on Political thought. I cannot remember much of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke or Rousseau though I had to master their principles and main works at the time. They had no influence over my personal political philosophy. The sixth appointed thinker was Marx. He did have a profound impact on me as I sought to expose the lack of history, common-sense and compassion in his evil and divisive creed.
I saw the haunting damage his ideas were doing to the lives of people in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. I started developing the freedom and free enterprise alternative, publishing my Popular Capitalism Manifesto in the 1980 s and taking it into Eastern Europe as the Berlin Wall came down. I explained how the period 1950 to the 1980s was a giant experiment between communism and a more free enterprise system based on personal liberty in the democracies. The freer societies became much richer, offering more comfortable lives. Anyone could travel from the US or UK to ask to live in the Soviet Union. People wanting to flee the poverty and tyranny of communism were shot trying to cross the border. Freedom won the Cold War.
We had to study general continental European history. I would have preferred to have studied American history. It was more relevant as background to understanding the superpower of the twentieth century, being a country of more importance to the technological success and defence of our own. The Oxford course designers included many European style socialists who thought the US too new and too brash to warrant general study. They wanted the UK inside the European Community and saw English history as a branch of European , probably disliking the later centuries when Great Britain became a global seafaring power. They wanted history in foreign languages to add to its cultural complexity.
This did also have a considerable influence over me.
The more I read of the attempts of the Romans, Vikings, French, Spanish, Dutch, Germans to create a European empire by force of arms with their invasion plans against England the more I wished to disentangle my country from damaging European politics.
The more I read of slavery and serfdom introduced by our Roman and Norman overlords, of the slavery in the German occupied Channels islands from 1940, of the sale of Englishmen into slavery by the Vikings the less I liked the continent’s past values. The bitter fight against new and liberating ideas by Galileo, Newton, Darwin and the others and the endless wars of religion were also a turn off. The course made me a conviction Eurosceptic. I voted to leave the EEC in 1975 in one of my first adult votes . Most attempts at creating a united Europe by arms or by diplomacy had caused endless trouble.
We also had to offer papers in what they called English history. It was of course GB history from 1603 and UK history from 1800. I loved the triumphs of our progress. I marvelled at our early limitation of royal power and establishment of legal rights. I admired the painful evolution of a universal franchise. I was humbled by the sacrifices so many made to see off Spanish, French and German attempts at European domination. I was relieved when Britain and our navy led the campaign to abolish slavery elsewhere.
What I learned of our past constitutional struggles was of great value as I and others led the Parliamentary fight to return our sovereign powers to people and Parliament after their usurpation by the EU. The English civil war they told me about became the war of the three kingdoms in later accounts. It prefigured the Brexit debates. Remain used Northern Ireland to hinder Brexit. Scotland voted a different way to England. I remarked that the Brexit rows were the civil war rows without the muskets.
It was a privilege to attend the university. Its great wealth of libraries and research materials were humbling and its intellectual. standards high. I did develop the history of science and technology I studied through two books I published. I took into politics the need to help defeat the evils of communist tyranny by the power of the pen. I held a determination that the hard won liberties of the British people should not be idly tossed away to a world of international treaties, overmighty quangos and the EU.
In today’s fast changing world graduates need to understand much of their real world education starts the day they graduate.
September 10, 2026
You’ve had a wide and varied career, unlike the dross that rules us now.
It’s plain the only study they did was Marx.
I couldn’t believe yesterday when Burnham said Defence wouldn’t be funded before welfare.
With Bonds hovering around 6% I think we have a day of reckoning coming soon.
September 10, 2026
Well, this is an interesting article which explains much about the origin of our kind host’s political views
I graduated from university in the late 1970’s, during Margaret Thatcher’s reign. With 3 million unemployed and 27% inflation there were, as this summer, few job opportunities for graduates. I had to return to my parent’s house, where board and lodging were requested as both of them were unemployed
The local Labour Exchange (these days called a “Jobcentre”) found me a job as an assistant gardener, working for the council. This was manual labour outside in all weathers, mowing grass verges, weeding flower beds, edging plots and maintaining Victorian graves (“in perpetuity”) in a local cemetery.
By dint of good timekeeping, hard work and, having a cheerful disposition, I was promoted to Assistant Gravedigger. It was two years and dozens of applications before I eventually found a junior position in my university field.
September 10, 2026
So you suffered from the socialist disaster that Mrs Thatcher had to take on and recover from.
I’m please to know that your experience speaks to how truly dreadful the consequences of Socialism are, and what determination and focus it requires to recover.
You will know why we are all transfixed as the PM views the 70s as the Socialist golden era, and seeks to best it.
September 10, 2026
Yes Lynn, many people forget the total horlicks the Liebour government had made before 1979. As a tradesman I left the uk in 77 because I’d had enough of the unions, 3 day week etc and I returned over 20 years later. This time we were treated to the traitorous Bliar and his march through the institutions. Since then successive ugovernments have failed to row back in the socialist state which leads us to where we are today. Bankrupt and friendless. I’m glad I never went to University.
September 10, 2026
Well Thatcher partly took it on but did little about many of the rigged markets in transport, education, health care then made the appalling error of appointing John Major who failed nearly all his O levels as Chancellor and then let him join the ERM burying the party for three terms. We have suffered full socialism ever since for 40 years.
September 10, 2026
In receipt of public sector pensions then. Must be nice.
September 10, 2026
Re graduates today..Yes and they must also take into account that views from the past authors who actually made it into the canons were often biased and led by the church.Of course students are taught to use the selection of works as sources to argue between and that is a fairly closed shop as many publications would simply not have been allowed.
Politics today though are being led by the anti British,the latest punishment is a threatened stop to pensions calling them benefits.This is reverse thinking.Millions of people have paid NI all their lives to governments who have received the public’s ‘Benefits ‘ .The government has used and abused the benefits we have given them and now want to steal the money again.
September 10, 2026
I don’t think you have led an “average” career or life path!
Most undergrads who like you are not well-connected, but don’t have your natural advantages (intellect, drive, etc) settled down into unexptional careers amongst similar-thinking individuals. They keep largely to their class and preserve their prejudices.
In today’s world the job for life – outside of the public service – is gone, so nowadays they need to learn new tricks along thecway, it’s true. But by and large – as you describe about yourself – their attitudes have been baked in by the time they graduate. This is not a good thing, when “faculty” is infested by marxists.
September 10, 2026
Today many of the philosophers are also physicists and combine up to date science discoveries with social impact.For example they look at particle entanglement and apply it to the future.Quantum theories also take into account repetition in rituals causing neuroplasticity and shaping future events.
Galileo still features and his macroscopic, observable universe,but time itself is being challenged.We need to get it right.
September 10, 2026
I too learned much more once I was at the sharp end and paddling my own little canoe through the realities of life.
But I agree that we need to know history in order to avoid it’s repetition.
The last time aliens came in an ever increasing number of small boats and landed illegally in our island, those Britons on the beach included Arthur ap Uther and Lancelot ap Ban.
Those in the boats were the Saxons.
September 10, 2026
Life long learning is important as is rigour and standards enforced while being taught. This sets the baseline for a questioning attitude in later life which determines the difference between accepting information and doctrine or developing opinion.
September 10, 2026
One of the merits of the Butler Education Act was its acceptance of the different needs satisfied by universities, which were there to teach you how to think, and widen your knowledge, and technical colleges, which had the purpose of teaching skills. Something my housemaster at school used to bang on about ad nauseum, was the difference between Education and instruction; it bored me at the time, but looking back, l think he had a huge point.
Something in politics that hit me quite early on, was the lack of any questioning of the Labour postwar agenda of nationalisation. It seemed to have general acceptance, and l remember asking my father, who l knew had just caste a Conservative vote, why he did so if he agreed with Nationalisation, which he had told me he did.
The doubts l had always had, came into full focus when l was involved in moving a stockbroking General Office from the City to Chingford, to save money, and discovered the extreme difficulty of getting the nationalised telephone service to do anything at all. Sir Keith Jiseph and Margaret Thatcher came as a huge blast of fresh air, and l find it very hard ondeedcwhy anyone should want to u.do what they achieved by taking us back to the 70s.
September 10, 2026
It is not so much what they study at university but what people choose to study indicates what sort of the different intelligences and enthusiasms they have. If you look at the very different choices the two genders make at A level this is is rather clear cut:-
Subjects with the Highest Share of Female Entries
English Literature: 79.2% female vs. 20.8% maleSociology: 77.0% female vs. 23.0% maleEnglish Language and Literature: 76.4% female vs. 23.6% malePsychology: 75.4% female vs. 24.6% maleArt and Design: 75.3% female vs. 24.7% male
Subjects with the Highest Share of Male EntriesComputing: 81.0% male vs. 19.0% femalePhysics: 76.5% male vs. 23.5% femaleFurther Mathematics: 73.6% male vs. 26.4% femaleEconomics: 69.6% male vs. 30.4% femaleDesign and Technology: 67.0% male vs. 33.0% female
September 10, 2026
Is the indoctrination of young minds into various mad religions not perhaps an evil form of child abuse?
The Two Miliband brother were fathered by Ralph Miliband a Polish Jewish immigrant. He was a Marxist intellectual and native of Brussels who fled Belgium during the Second World War. He graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford and later from the London School of Economics. Miliband became first a television journalist, then a Labour Party researcher and a visiting scholar at Harvard University, before rising to become one of Chancellor Gordon Brown’s confidants and chairman of HM Treasury’s Council of Economic Advisers.
What a disaster the Gordon Brown Era was and the two Miliband’s especially Ed are a disaster too. Did they have their immature minds indoctrinated? Was this child abuse – nature or nurture?
Buried very near Karl Marx in Highgate cemetery it seems. But was the Father indoctrinated too as a child?