Kemi the Conqueror? Something of an embroidery…

In defiance of the generally accepted laws of geography, everything in Birmingham seems slightly further uphill than everything else, so however fast you travel, it always takes more time and effort to get anywhere than you think it should. The Conservatives gathered here for their conference this year know the feeling. They are clearly enchanted with their leader Kemi Badenoch – her visage is prominently plastered around the place, and there’s an 80-foot-long fake Bayeux Tapestry of which she is the star, presented like a genuine historical relic in the Exhibition Hall – but the country is taking rather longer to walk that path. Her personal ratings trail Andy Burnham’s by a distance. Perhaps the public is as lost as the delegates in the overheated maze that is Birmingham’s ICC, the sort of conference centre Escher would build.

Badenoch has apparently decided that her road to popularity goes through the lives of young adults. Her Kemi-to-the-fore confidence and aggressive wishful thinking are both on show in her interview for this week’s Spectator. In it, Badenoch, not her Shadow Education or Shadow Welfare Secretary, unveils that a big part of her offer to the country will be a Get To Work scheme for those under 25 – which will bar young adults from claiming Universal Credit upon leaving education, instead requiring those without a job or moving on to a new phase of education to undertake mandatory work activities for six months. If after that they still haven’t clocked the need to work, they get a Subsistence Allowance, and, in a way not elucidated in the article, steps will be undertaken to make these people “more the responsibility of their parents than taxpayers”.

All this is red meat to Tory members – a lovely woman I got talking to in the overspill queue for an event spoke movingly about a career spent working with young people, mentoring them, protecting them from online harms, and cherishing and supporting their careers, before concluding with a firm injunction that what worked best was “exemplary punishment” for those who did not conform. She did not seem very impressed with my attempts to suggest that this would encounter certain practical difficulties, not least the ongoing dilapidated nature of our economy that means jobs aren’t in such plentiful supply for us to be starving people into them.

Worse, the most likely outcome of such pressure is young people signing up for FE or HE courses they do not wish to do, to access other forms of support – which is one of the reasons this misfire is so frustrating. There is surely a better way to use our colleges and universities as part of a government policy that takes a proper interest in the space between the end of schooling and the beginning of adult life.

England massified its university system without considering what it would mean that a large proportion of young people now transition to adulthood within the university system, with the guidance and support that implies, while the rest took what they could get in the job market. Giving due attention to the totality of young adults – whether at 18 they find HE, FE or work (or worklessness) – is perfectly sensible, if curiously not in keeping with Badenoch’s small-state instincts.

But doing so does require a whole tertiary system approach: knocking down artificial barriers within the system, streamlining the regulatory environment, making it possible for students to move between the different tertiary realms as their aspirations change – so a nineteen-year-old who realises their college course was the wrong choice can switch to an apprenticeship or a degree without starting again from scratch, or a final-year undergraduate can find work-relevant training in their local college – and offering intensive support to those who need it when they need it. Sustained implementation matters more than “tough love”. And confronting that challenge means getting to grips with what isn’t working across HE, FE and in-work training, and the role the last Conservative government played in making that so.

Speaking of which, here is David Willetts, moving smoothly from HE-related event to HE-related event, a genial assassin returning repeatedly to the scene of his crimes, patiently explaining why the consequences of his reforms as Universities Minister – which now include eye-watering student living costs, exceptional institutional indebtedness, and a whole generation of Plan 2 loan holders in revolt – are mostly a result of people not understanding how good his ideas were. To give him his due, Willetts clearly cares for both the sector and its students, but in the manner of the paterfamilias disappointed rather than angry with his progeny – and definitely in no way responsible for their plight. His knock-down, drag-out bout on the economic returns of degrees with Amanda Spielman, once Ofsted chief inspector, now Tory frontbencher, was a real conference highlight – if there’s ever a rematch, the tickets will be harder to get than a look at the real Bayeux Tapestry at the BM.

But neither a thorough reckoning with the party’s past nor a compelling policy offer is on the cards – and, frankly, even if they were, neither seems likely to be enacted. Notwithstanding Badenoch’s magnificent hubris, no one here believes power beckons. At one point, Sir John Curtice explains that, two years on, the party is still polling below its 2024 result, the worst in its history. Shadow ministers are in no hurry to stake an urgent claim to a red box: while many Tory MPs pop up on panels displaying a genuine keenness to know more about the topic, this is rather more in the manner of enthusiastic interns on their first day of a job they do not fully understand and are somewhat mystified to have been given, rather than those who expect to be seeing the inside of a ministerial office any time soon.

The entrance to conference is dominated by an enormous poster of Badenoch’s face. Behind it is a large empty space where very little is happening. It is, as policy offers go, a fair summary.