Thinking of coming to the UK to study?
Don't.
The universities are fine, but the visa system is a nightmare and getting worse. Successive governments have targeted students to score anti-immigrant political points.
This may be incredibly disruptive to your studies. If they cancel your visa in the middle or give you one with a shorter duration than your degree and then decide not to renew it, you will not be refunded for the time or money spent for your studies up to that point.
The Tories did this because their core voters are people who own small businesses and suburban houses but who have not been to university - the nation of shop keepers.
Middle class people who have been to university, by contrast, tend* to favour things like human rights and justice. Tories saw universities as places that turned people into Labour voters. But universities are major employers. There are a lot of places in the UK where the local university is really important for the local economy or cultural scene. Most voters would not like a policy of fucking over unis because they do understand that our service economy absolutely depends on them.
So instead Tories fucked up uni funding in several ways. They already depended on foreign students, but Tories made that much more important and them immediately set about demonising students as migrants.
To understand Tory policy, imagine that you don't care if the entire country is giant slag heap as long as you have biggest house on the heap.
And for Starmer, his entire vision is to be much more efficient at slag heap delivery.
* These are wide generalisations and not universally applicable. White middle class people are often insulated from needing an analysis of things happening and so many never learn how. Ideally, this kind of analysis is part of the curriculum at most unis. Tories think it's absent in STEM (which is often fair) and that's part of why STEM programs continue to receive funding.
@celesteh ok I never looked at it that way, makes more sense when looking at why uni has become so expensive in the UK.
I'm part of the last generation of EU students that managed to get the £9000/year fee from SLC.
Anyways, seeing the revolving door of UK PMs, which more closely resembles a Balkan hybrid democracy than a Western liberal democracy, I'm reminded of Alexei Yurchak's Hypernormalisation, where a system is failing, but no one can imagine an alternative to the status quo.
Adam Curtis has invoked that same idea.
Most people I know are aware that everything is about to fall apart, but nobody knows what to do about it.
Charles ☭ 
is a Green
Bogdan Buduroiu