Two wrongs

Fears grow for student finance and cross-border research as temperatures rise

“I hate it when I’m right,” says Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2, as he spends another Christmas Eve crawling through a ventilation shaft in an oil-stained vest, pursued by bad guys. So it is with Playbook when it comes to universities and this government.

We have been suggesting for a while that the higher education budget within the Department for Education is likely to be squeezed to pay for other policy priorities. We’ve also been saying that there are two frontiers in the UK’s developing relationship with the European Union—the Northern Ireland protocol and associate membership of Horizon Europe—and that the two would clash sooner rather than later.