Another Newport disasterclass

J’accuse blogs

The issue of student loan repayments has suddenly come to prominence in the last month or so thanks to the hard work of Oliver Dugmore, who competently articulated across a few different broadcast interviews how the Student 2 loan system is damaging the wealth accumulation for late Millenials and early Gen Z graduates.

Simply by drawing attention to this issue, Dugmore has already managed to get the Tories to adopt a new policy on Plan 2 student loans (abolishing real interest rate changes) and the government is apparently considering a set of policies to ease the financial burden.

The ice around the gerontocracy has melted, if only slightly, as the millennial generation - the oldest of whom are now solidly in their forties (including Badenoch) - finally begins to enter real positions of power in the media and elsewhere. The generation which protested student loans in 2011 are beginning to enter their Mythic period, and as a consequence open scepticism about elderly entitlements and concern about the finances of graduates are de rigueur.

What should follow is now a simple policy discussion about how to reduce this burden, whether through cuts to interest rates, as Badenoch proposes (disproportionately helping higher earners who have a chance of paying the total back before the loan expires) or through changes to the threshold which will mean lower earners pay proportionately less back. A straightforward political debate about redistribution. Old school. Clean.

But for the interlocution of one Dr Lawrence Newport. Newport, who readers will know has made a career out of coat-tailing on policy issues for the past year or so – and originally came to prominence by claiming that he was the first person to start tweeting about Bully XLs – released a video demanding that the government ‘release the data’ on degrees at specific universities and their average earnings, something called longitudinal education outcomes (LEO). Newport alleged in a petition on the LFG website (currently on a mere 1200 signatures) that ‘successive governments have refused to make the full records public’, asking elsewhere ‘the question: why are they hiding it?’

But there’s a small problem. The government does not hide this data at all. As the eminent academic and think tanker Nick Hillman has pointed out on X this information is freely available online, on government run websites such as Discover Uni. He advises 'Looking For Growth to ‘Google the dataset they’re claiming is secret’. Other education policy bods are also poking fun at Dr Bully XL and his band of drop shippers and marketing executives.

It’s obvious what has happened here. Newport has seen a viral trend on X, realised that he has nothing to add to it, and so has spent perhaps twenty minutes Googling around the topic before happening across LEO data, and believed there would be an opportunity to campaign on something meaningless so he could claim credit if the problem is ever solved. This is less morally egregious than his input on the grooming gangs crisis, when he tried to claim credit for the national inquiry being launched, but it is still a gross waste of resources and time.

Calling for ‘secret data’ to be released had some meaning, as a political campaign when it is used around data that the government actually has an incentive to keep hidden (for ‘community relations’ reasons). The Casey report, as an example, has stated that ethnicity data is not being recorded for many grooming gang perpetrators. It would be useful, for an anti-immigration meta-narrative, if the British government recorded lifetime contributions by country of origin as they do in Denmark. But Newport will never put his name to such a campaign, so instead his priority is finding out whether Jenny will be able to get a flatshare in Tooting if she studies Media Sciences at Warwick University.

It really is the height of all irony, by the way, that a graduate of ‘Kent Law School’ and ‘Royal Holloway’ is trying to campaign on low earning degree potential. Releasing the LEO data now won’t help you with your own lifetime earnings, Lawrence. If you want to sort that out, you’ll have to find some way of building a time machine.