RISHI SUNAK has said — again — that universities should focus on degrees with earnings potential. So farewell then English literature, history and indeed Sunak’s own degree in politics, philosophy and economics.

It begs the question of what the modern Tory Party is.

In 1961 a Tory government commissioned the Robbins report into higher education. It was released in 1963 and the proposals were accepted, leading to a significant expansion in the number of people going to university.

It was however the 1964 Labour government that actually implemented them, and created a series of “polytechnics” which in due course became universities themselves.

A key part of the Robbins report argued that university places “should be available to all who were qualified for them by ability and attainment” (the so-called Robbins principle) and that such institutions should have four main “objectives essential to any properly balanced system.”

These four were “instruction in skills; the promotion of the general powers of the mind so as to produce not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women; to maintain research in balance with teaching, since teaching should not be separated from the advancement of learning and the search for truth; and to transmit a common culture and common standards of citizenship.”

In 1963 British capitalism was expanding and looking for a broadly educated workforce.

In 2023 the Tories, with less than 200,000 members, are no longer a national party but a clique focused on short-term profit (often for themselves). Who needs rounded citizens with a liberal education in that context?

The point has been underlined by Tory MP Miriam Cates, who is part of the hard-right New Conservatives group. She has argued that too many people are getting degrees and many are not inclined to vote Tory.

According to a Times columnist, a reason for the revolutions of 1848 and 1917 was that there were too many educated young people who had no role in society.

This year marks the 60th anniversary of one of the landmark books of socialist history: EP Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. It remains in print today.

Under Sunak’s plans to defund “low-value” education, including many of the ways that mature and underprivileged students find their way into higher education, that book would probably have never been written.

From 1948 until 1965 Thompson was an extramural lecturer at the University of Leeds. He would travel across the West and North Ridings of Yorkshire to teach working-class students in evening classes.

In the preface to the famous book he notes: “I have learned a great deal from members of my tutorial classes with whom I have discussed many of the themes treated here.”

During the day Thompson would research in local archives the material that makes the book a rich source as work covering the late 18th and early 19th centuries to the 1830s.

It is a salutary thought, that under Sunak’s diktat, the university extension classes Thompson taught and their modern equivalents would not exist — and the framework for the Making of the English Working Class likewise would be absent.

There is a wider point where history meets current politics. Will Labour commit again to the “Robbins principles” and find the money to ensure that students from disadvantaged backgrounds can still get access to a liberal education at university?

After all, Keir Starmer says that one of the key things Labour is for is “ambition.”

It’s a practical question. At Brighton University 25 lecturers face redundancy.

Their subjects? History, humanities and literature. Subjects of great educational value. Will Starmer back the UCU’s fight against job cuts?

Keith Flett is a socialist historian. Follow him on Twitter @kmflett.