Photo: PeerPoint / Alamy Stock Photo
Welcome to Worst Hot Take of the Week – a column in which @MULLET_FAN_NEO crowns the wildest hot take of the week.
Reasonable take: Yeah, it would be good if labour was actually valued so that normal people have more prospects than "work in a call centre", "saddle yourself with 30k of student debt and probably end up in one anyway" or "key worker so undervalued that a second and often third job is required".
Brain rot: Getting a degree is now "irrelevant" and we should "retrain the nation" in order to plug the giant hole in the economy, says son of Tony Blair.
Advertisement
An op-ed in The Times this week graciously dispelled the myth we were fed during the Blair years that higher education would provide egalitarianism within Britain. The university degrees that hang pride of place in the "best room" of working class houses are now limiting Britain, the piece argued, as they are "irrelevant", meaning we should instead focus on "retraining the nation".To which I say: fine, but for fuck's sake could they not have found anyone other than the son of Tony "Education Education Education" Blair to kick us in the bollocks with a point the public has been making for the last 20 years? It is of surprise to no one that degrees are about as prestigious as one of those certificates you get for completing an escape room within the time limit.In episode MCCCXLVMMMCDXCIX of "Britain is definitely a meritocracy according to my uncle the Duke of Rutland", Euan Blair argued that furloughed workers should be trained up with new skills. Again, this isn't a bad idea in itself, but it's extremely grating to see it being made by the son of the grand architect of this higher education shit show, who runs an apprenticeship tech start-up with a homepage that reads "Started from the bottom now we're here".Is it the best we can do? Wheeling out the heirs of establishment figures and giving them a soapbox to say, "Sorry lads, turns out education is devalued now that my dad's political gesture of getting half of children into higher education has come to fruition."
Advertisement