In my apocalyptic Dairylea-driven nightmares, the AI-driven Death of Human Civilisation is announced by some fire-birthed heraldic demon, rising from a boiling lake of lava with shining skin of ebony and chrome, a writhing cobra and an egg-timer held in its two outstretched fists. Time’s up, suckers! But instead, the Death of Human Civilisation was announced at two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon on LBC radio by Pimlico Plumbers founder Charlie Mullins, a self-made tax-fearing Reform donor with Rod Stewart hair and the perma-tanned hue of the Dubai-domiciled, and not a cobra or an egg-timer in sight. Perhaps it’s the banal full stop 300,000 years of evolution deserves. This is the way the world ends. Not with bang, but a whimper.
In 2023, the OBE-nominated businessman sent out a tweet saying “someone should kill Sadiq Khan”, and announced plans to move to Spain or Dubai to avoid tax, but now is considering returning to the UK to stand as a Reform councillor because he fears Labour’s tax plans. (But remember the problems with the UK economy are all caused by immigrants.) Perhaps LBC’s Shelagh Fogarty should have made Mullins’s loyalties clear before she canvassed his opinions on the AI revolution, as if he were just an ordinary everyday multimillionaire Reform-donating plumbing magnate like you or me.
Mullins spoke a lot of sense, and it was strange to hear our collective AI-induced doom spelled out not in the clipped tones of a world-wrecking Bond villain, but in the cockney argot of the cheery Londoner, Jim Davidson intoning the Apocalypse of John from an oak tree on Peckham Rye. “It’s dirty hands versus clean hands,” the Reform donor explained, “and if people aren’t prepared to get their hands dirty they’re going to be out of work. Come away from clean hands and get dirty hands! Why would someone go to university now knowing that in four years AI means there won’t be a job for them? Why aren’t they doing an apprenticeship?”
The discussion unfurled into an analysis of the “worth” and “value” of education, but in purely financial terms. At no point did anyone make the case that the knowing of knowledge can and should be an end in itself in a civilised society; that universities were once set up to preserve and extend knowledge as an end in itself, irrespective of whether doing so enhanced the financial future of the student; and that we trashed the whole notion of what further education can be for when we subscribed to Tony Blair’s ugly “the more you learn, the more you earn” doctrine in the 90s. If only Blair had said “the more you learn, the more you contribute to the collective knowledge and understanding of human civilisation, providing a bulwark against those that would exploit our ignorance to do us harm”. But he didn’t say that. Maybe because it doesn’t rhyme.
Mullins understands implicitly how, in responding to Blair’s doctrine of dosh and business’s demand for a business-ready workforce, universities have lost their way. “Anybody with a few quid used to go to university but it’s old hat now,” he said, a little triumphantly. “The jobs are not there. Universities are just a business. All they want is bums on seats.” He’s right. When Thomas Hardy’s lowly stonemason in Jude the Obscure dreamed of joining the university and becoming a scholar, it wasn’t to be in a paying customer relationship with an educational service provision organisation pledged to improving his future earning potential. He wanted to study because “his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings were small”.
Perhaps Mullins thinks tolerating Holocaust denial is a small price to pay for more woodwork and metalwork on the national curriculum
But Mullins is wrong that “anybody with a few quid used to go to university”. In fact the opposite was true. You didn’t need a few quid to get educated even 40 years ago, back in the days of full grants, local authority assistance, cash-in-hand holiday jobs and cheap accommodation, and the flowering of postwar British arts and ideas reflected the influx of vibrant lower-income talents into previously sealed citadels. I recently came across an online comment recalling the student me as “a scholarship boy who was out of his class element”, a description I don’t recognise at all, even though I had never eaten a roll with lettuce in it or drunk a cappuccino before I went to college.
I attended university on a full grant from a single-parent family because I wanted to study Anglo-Saxon literature, an ambition my own father described as “a total waste of time” (even though the Asian Dub Foundation single Comin’ Over Here, which sampled me reciting the ninth-century poem The Wanderer, rose to the top of the charts in 2020 raising money for Kent Refugee Action Network). But was it fair that the ordinary taxpayer subsidised my desire to contribute to the store of human understanding in the abstract, rather than generating money? Luckily, that’s not an issue Mullins is entitled to an opinion on, as he left the country to avoid paying tax.
Mullins believes that Reform is the party to shore up the education system to reflect AI’s reshaping of the employment marketplace. Calling himself a “100% Reform supporter, now more than ever”, Mullins described Farage’s shadow cabinet as “business people who have come from the bottom upwards. They have common sense and they know what they are talking about”, despite the fact that three of the five, including Nigel Farage, were born into wealth and privilege. In just under 35 years, Richard Tice, for example, has clawed his way up from being given a job at his multimillionaire grandfather Sir Bernard Sunley’s Sunley Group property company to become CEO of the property investment firm Quidnet Capital Partners, and currently splits his time between his Skegness constituency and his Dubai home. It’s a real rags to riches story and Richard Tice is a total Dick Whittington.
It was sad, on the day news broke that Reform’s Matt Godwin’s still-unscathed byelection campaign manager, Adam Mitula, said he would “never touch a Jewish woman” and queried the numbers of Jews gassed in the second world war, that Fogarty didn’t ask Mullins if Reform’s “common sense” included tolerating Holocaust denial. Perhaps Mullins thinks tolerating Holocaust denial is a small price to pay for more woodwork and metalwork on the national curriculum.
Reform has already made it clear to Bangor University that a Reform government would cut its funding unless it allows any youth fascists that invite themselves to speak there to appear unopposed, and I can’t help thinking Reform would love it if further education were rendered non-viable by AI’s effect on the learning market. It’s an uncomfortable statistical truth that the less well-educated you are – not the less intelligent you are – the more likely you are to vote for Farage. Spend three years reading and, as long as you don’t use ChatGPT to write all your fucking essays, you will inevitably emerge with the ability to see through the lies and sophistry of fascists like Farage. Or maybe it’s just that the opportunities education used to guarantee made the educated feel like stakeholders in a society that Reform voters feel offers them nothing. That’s still no excuse for wanting to burn migrants alive, though, like Reform’s conference star Lucy Connolly said.
By the end of Mullins’s interview, his attempts to frame his dislike of education as being based on practical considerations began to evaporate and reveal some deeper resentment. “Stop listening to these boring old sods that have gone to university and know nothing,” he shouted as Fogarty faded to the news. “Half of them can’t even cross the road on their own!”
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of this year,, and Stewart will be opening for Scottish punk pioneers the Skids on 14 March in Portmeirion as part of the band’s Absolute Weekend