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Worthless Art

Ah, we're back to calling humanities degrees rip-offs, are we? What a semi regular treat that is.

There is a persistent strain of thought in British public life which runs thus: things are shit, blame clever people. When a politician needs a convenient punchbag, higher education is always a quick and easy mark. Everyone hates students, right? And those lecturers, bit up themselves, aren't they?

And so Kemi Badenoch, bereft of ideas, takes up the cudgels once more, because why not? It's not like she's got anything else sensible to say. Might as well try and score a few populist points. Cuh, English degrees eh? What use are they? 

Yes, this week, the erstwhile leader of His Majesty's Opposition decided to wander down a tired and well-trodden path and try to score a few points off the back of the much maligned Arts and Humanities. She's not the first, I highly doubt she'll be the last. She set out plans to a somewhat sparsely attended Conservative Party Conference to divert funding from degrees to apprenticeships. Not necessarily a dreadful idea in and of itself, but the language used was both telling and depressing.

Degrees in the humanities are "poor value" while apprenticeships are "worthwhile". This reduction of higher education into pure monetary value is the sort of philistinism that is very much in tune with the spirit of the age, after all, why learn to draw when you can get  Chat GPT to do it for you? But it is still exrmtremely short-sighted and reductive.

I'm not about to recite the well worn statistics of how valuable the creative industries are to the UK economy, you're an intelligent person, you're already well aware of that. You know that the economic arguments don't stack up, because you also know that it's not about that.

It's about sticking it to artsy-fartsy liberal types, telling them that next to thrusting, go getting industries full of jacked tech bros, the consolations of art are worthless, they are worthless, and that'll teach them for not voting Conservative.

It's all largely pointless display anyway, as Kemi will undoubtedly be handed the revolver and the glass of whisky before too much longer, so dismal is the Tory death spiral, but in its re-treading of such a tired path it's a salutary reminder that one of the great fault lines in society, like red v blue, town v country, Remain v Leave, is, as Neil Hannon once memorably out ot "elegance against ignorance, difference against indifference, wit against shit".

And as AI, trained as it is on the free consumption of great art, and unsustainable without it as fuel, threatens to overwhelm the creative industries with eh, that'll do slop, I think I'll stick with human creativity a while yet. Maybe it's pointless, maybe the tech bros and their glassy-eyed political cheerleaders are right, but it's not a side I want to be on. Give me difference and wit, any day of the week.

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