UEZ 2024 – photograph mounted on 16mm reboard
University Enterprise Zones (UEZs) are specific geographical areas in the United Kingdom where universities engage with Local Enterprise Partnerships to provide business incubator spaces and stimulate economic growth by the application of university backed innovation. The dangers of corporations making incursions into the UK’s public education system are the same as the pressures wrought by private healthcare/big pharmaceutical companies on the NHS, chronic underfunding means public institutions become effectively hobbled to the point where corporations step in to ‘rescue’ failing institutions from fulfiling the social contract. Education curricula is in danger of being dictated by corporations and governments working hand in hand to fulfil economic growth targets, effectively preventing those less well off to seek work in low skill sectors with low pay rather than high skill sectors with higher pay. As the arts and humanities become severly underfunded, so do the aspirations of the those who desire to build a career in the creative industries. By the government’s own estimates, the creative industries contribute around £126 billion to the UK economy.
In 2020 the UK Government scrapped a ballet dancer reskilling ad criticised as ‘crass’. The Tories Culture secretary Oliver Dowden distanced himself from the widely mocked poster amid job losses in arts.
UEZs, FTZs, EPZs, FEZs, SEZs, and Freeports are now officially Labour policy, Starmer stated Labour had ‘inherited’ the Tories SEZs/Freeports experiment in corporate goverance, but this is a lie, Labour MPs, Mayors, councillors, Lords, and Baronesses were active board members of Sunak and Truss’s free zones consortia. Starmer before he was PM previously said ‘free zones were not a silver bullet for the UK economy’, but at Labour’s recent Investment Summit Labour now say they will ‘improve on the Tories free zones policy objectives’ and create more investment zones. You cannot trust these neoliberals with anything least of all the public sector.
