Reform UK held a press conference at a decorating company headquarters in Enfield to announce education proposals that amount to closing most universities and expanding apprenticeships. Nigel Farage was absent — still avoiding questions about the party's funding models after his byelection loss in Clacton. Zia Yusuf, increasingly persona non grata within Reform after feuding with party figures, was also missing. The task fell to Richard Tice and Suella Braverman. Tice opened by refusing to congratulate students receiving A-level and GCSE results, claiming roughly 80% had either underperformed or wasted time on "Mickey Mouse" subjects. He dismissed modern languages and history as unnecessary, framing critical thinking itself as overrated. His alternative: apprenticeships. Tice cited his own experience starting on construction sites with a JCB before becoming CEO of a property company — omitting that the business was a family firm founded by his grandfather. Braverman then spent her opening five minutes attacking the government for failing students over the past 15 years — a period during which she served as a Conservative MP and senior cabinet minister. The contradiction went unacknowledged. Her substantive proposals: help businesses take on apprentices (duplicating Labour's existing scheme), cancel non-vocational degrees, and close down most universities on the grounds they merely generate student debt. She singled out "gender studies" by name and proposed effectively converting institutions like Oxford into technical colleges. The Q&A exposed the policy's hollowness. When the BBC pointed out that student loans count as government borrowing on the balance sheet — meaning cancelling degrees wouldn't straightforwardly save money — Tice appeared surprised. His response: "Cash is cash." No further elaboration followed. The party's education spokesperson couldn't explain the fiscal mechanics of the party's education policy. The press conference also surfaced Reform's ongoing internal dysfunction. Tice insisted the party's public infighting represented normal "day-to-day disagreements" and that things had never been better. He described Farage's Clacton byelection — where he faced a candidate wearing a bin on his head — as a triumph, while acknowledging the possibility of a recall petition following a parliamentary standards investigation. The structural problem is straightforward: Reform is proposing to destroy a higher education sector worth billions of pounds to the UK economy without any credible replacement architecture. The apprenticeship expansion duplicates existing government policy. The university closures would eliminate research capacity, international student revenue, and the knowledge economy pipeline — all to score points in a culture war over "gender studies." The party cannot explain the accounting, cannot staff its own press conferences with its leader, and is openly feuding over its governance structure while proposing to restructure national education.
