ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why politics is important to Higher Education (HE) wonks, and argues that it will become increasingly so over. It offers a potted history of the HE debates that have hit the big time in political public discourse and analyses the factors that have turned a policy discussion into a political one. The chapter looks at the future to outline some issues which are likely to attract public and media attention. Economic policy for United Kingdom governments has focused on the productivity of the supply side of the economy, which in HE has prioritised policies to tackle market failures that disrupt the development and availability of skills. Policy has always been shaped and guided by politics, driven by deeply held beliefs about social mobility and fairness, painful political debates of the past, the political narratives of the day, and, of course, the party-political machine.
