Overpaid university bosses show what is wrong with Starmer's Britain

Yahoo

08-02-2025

It's certainly taking some getting used to, this age of unparalleled nonsense from on high.
Just when you think you can't hear anything stupider and meaner – Starmer's pledge to plaster over beautiful bits of countryside with electricity pylons nobody in their right mind wants; an anti-Islamophobia task force that seems set to introduce blasphemy laws in Britain; the decision to axe a dirt-cheap programme of Latin tuition at state schools to save little more than £1 million per year – you hear that the vice-chancellors of our universities, who are busy sacking vast swathes of staff working in departments deemed non-remunerative enough (sorry, humanities; sorry, nursing; sorry, languages) are earning bumper salaries.
The average pay package for university bosses in Britain is now £340,000, a more than inflation-busting increase of £40,000 since the 2020-21 academic year. Top earners were the heads of Leeds University, at £694,000, and London Metropolitan University, at £595,000.
The figures recording the richly fattening salaries of their bosses comes after universities announced up to 10,000 further redundancies. Already this year the chopping and squeezing has continued, with 1,000 layoffs between four universities, including two in the Russell Group. No fewer than 90 universities are currently 'restructuring' through layoffs.
This alone should make the VC salaries a matter of public outrage. The annihilation of departmental staff is the result of the massive failure of universities, and the UK, to attract enough students and make them pay, a situation not helped by the Tories' curtailment of foreign students' visas.
But it's not just this. It's also the pervasive wokeness that has sapped a once vibrant national scholarly community; the poor running of courses with staff either overstretched or underperforming, and all of it mired in unfriendly and ubiquitous tech platforms.
You'd have thought the heads of this mess would be punished, not rewarded. It doesn't even have to be about punishment but about the greater good, since the taxpayer helps out so much. Why don't the universities halve the pay of the VCs and save a department or two?
Then there's the minor detail of what a vice-chancellor actually does. Nobody I've ever spoken to has been able to answer that question. If they're meant to run an educational business then they're clearly failing.
If they're meant to keep morale up and oversee unity of purpose, a scholastic culture of sorts, then that's also a fail; morale among academics is at an all time low.
But if their sole duty is making pathetic comments about how the university supports this or that hideous woke move, or initiative, then they do deserve an A*.
In most British universities there have been truly disgusting, unprecedented shows of student anti-Semitism since October 7 – this week the Jewish Chronicle exposed some of the experiences regularly endured by Jewish students on UK campuses that make the blood run cold.
Leeds, Cambridge and Oxford have been among the worst offenders, clearly fostering a culture that encourages such behaviour, and failing to take a strong stand on it.
In the US, President Trump is making any university that fails to mop up its foul anti-Semitic messes pay dearly – financially.
In the UK? The heads of the universities where Jewish students are called 'baby killers' get bumper pay. All of which suggests that half a million per year is a gravy train that is very hard to justify.
It's not just timing and optics. The bigger issue underlying all of this, of course, is the insane overpaying of the bureaucratic class in this country. We have a dying economy, with stagflation – caused by the unholy mixture of high inflation, stagnant growth, high unemployment and low productivity – highlighting how we have utterly lost our economic way.
The country is held back by a litany of stalled infrastructure projects, from a third runway at Heathrow to the plan to build a vital tunnel (the Lower Thames Crossing) between Essex and Kent to ease chronic congestion, which has been kicked around the long grass for 36 years and cost £300 million for the planning application.
Benefits bills are bulging, with the Office for Budget Responsibility warning we cannot keep providing such costly free services of such poor quality.
Small businesses, meanwhile, are punished, and dying, thanks to Rachel Reeves's war on firms that hire small numbers of staff. The rich and ambitious are flocking elsewhere, along with our greatest brains, put off by the climate around innovation and business in science and technology, and the foolish, harmful funding decisions of our once great centres of science.
Labour preaches about growth, but hasn't the foggiest what that really means. As such Starmer sounds like a wind-up doll, set to repeat growth-related buzzwords. If he did understand, he'd be doing everything in his power to create a Britain in which pay reflects skills, merit and hard work, and above all, results. He'd be making it easier, not harder, for the private sector to go gangbusters, so that ordinary, even out-of-work citizens of this isle, could dream of riches and success – and, with enough hard work, attain them.
Instead, he's pursuing a deranged path to 'growth' through bulging the state, and the only beneficiaries of this bloating anti-market mode of governance are the very people who should be paid less, if not entirely sacked, American Doge-style: the bureaucratic fat cats who sit in their comfy chairs pushing paper around and doing nothing for the health of our services or economy.
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