It has often been claimed during the course of this pandemic that it has highlighted social inequalities. This is true ; however, it has also demonstrated in stark terms how far the boundaries between the state and the market have shifted in favour of the latter over the past forty years. I will give just two examples.
Leisure centres have been privatised for some time. They are, therefore, dependent on current revenue ; and, in the absence of that revenue, the companies which operate them face severe problems, including finding the resources to undertake repairs etc. The government's strategy for future fitness and health, in the absence of public ownership of leisure facilities, depends on moral exhortation. For the government, this is not a problem, as local authorities have supervision of sport and recreation. However, even before the pandemic, access to such facilities was, for a great many peiple, for a variety of reasons, very problematic, partly for reasons of cost.
The funding model of the universities has been 'marketised', leading to their effective privatisation. Together with the increasing reliance of universities on overseas students, this has caused serious problems for universities during the pandemic. (This, of course, comes at a time when universities are already suffering from the loss of funding and collaborative opportunities due to Brexit). The disappearance of many arts and humanities courses from universities, particularly the newer institutions, points to another problem. For a government which is so fixated on the necessity of university courses to be utilitarian, the prospect of the citizens of supposedly 'Global Britain' possessing even less competency in foreign languages than at present should be alarming. But that assumption is of course naive ; the whole idea behind 'Global Britain' is not constructive engagement with other cultures ; it is the insistence that the rest of the world accepts the myth of British exceptionalism with obsequious gratitude.
The assumptions behind the transformation of students into 'consumers' is that they have perfect knowledge of both courses and of their future careers, and that the collective consequence of thousands of individual decisions will not be malign. As the historian of ideas and literary scholar Stefan Collini has eloquently pointed out in his book, 'Speaking of universities' (2017), these assumptions are fatuous. As he also points out, these threats to the university's purposes are not new, and have been apparent in the United States for a very long time. However, the previous model of funding for universities and assumptions about their social purposes, as set out in the Robbins report of 1963, did protect them to a large extent from the depradations of commercial imperatives.
These fundamental alterations in the relationship between state and market, and many others like them, did not arise from extended public debate. They were not mentioned in party manifestoes ; but, as political parties know full well, who bothers (apart from political 'geeks', such as this writer) to read them ?