It’s often struck me that camping life of this kind is perhaps the Platonic form of a certain type of postwar English sociality. Amenities are frugal, but pleasantly so. You have neighbors, but not too close. (It’s an unwritten rule of camping that you don’t pitch your tent right next to someone else’s unless you absolutely have to.) People say hello, but socializing is optional. Everyone’s kids play together, only vaguely supervised. The dogs are generally well-behaved. And, importantly, it’s high-trust by definition: after all, you can’t really lock a tent. 

In the absence of any phone signal for doomscrolling, I took for holiday reading a forthcoming book on English pastoral. In Fields of Green traces this literary trope of ideal rural landscapes as a response to the development of modern England. Its author, André Gushurst-Moore, argues that England has always needed “pastoral” as a literary mode where we can take refuge from upheaval, technology, and social fracture in the temporary Arcadia of England’s rolling green hinterlands. 

That’s certainly how it felt to take a holiday in a grassy field, without handheld access to the relentless rage and demoralization fodder online. The feeling of implicit trust in the campsite was also as restful as the lack of phone reception. But this year, I found my peace troubled by a nagging fear that environments of this kind might be, in some fundamental way, under threat.

From my tent you couldn’t drive far without passing signs for the nearby town of Great Yarmouth, Rupert Lowe’s constituency and heart of the Restore Britain movement: the epicenter of an angry, anxious sense to the effect that Britain used to be a high-trust country but isn’t any more. That is: Britain in general used to be more like my East Anglian campsite, but is growing increasingly hostile, fractious, and genuinely dangerous. 

Restore output typically blames this phenomenon on immigration. And it’s true that there is evidence linking illegal migration in particular both with other kinds of criminal activity, as well as the sort of friction that arises when incompatible social norms come suddenly into collision. But is the sense of decaying cohesion really just the fault of foreigners? Were we really always a “high-trust” society, until those immigrants came along and ruined it? I’m not sure we were. Rather, that sense of comparative national unity marked both the culmination, and end, of “Great Britain” in her imperial pomp. 

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If, in Gushurst-Moore’s telling, pastoral has always served as idealized respite from a more turbulent real-world England, that grittier England is also to be found in literary history. In prewar literature in particular, this England comes across as a vigorous, exciting, but not particularly “high-trust” place. Defoe’s 1722 Moll Flanders recounts the first-person narrative of a career criminal. Dickens’s 1839 Oliver Twist is set almost entirely in London’s criminal underworld. Plenty of other literary works detail the rampant fraud, theft, violence, and criminality of early modern and Georgian Britain. It was, in fact, predominantly the Victorians who set the nation on a path toward the centralization, order, and robust public mores that would eventually produce the “high-trust” Britain, that now feels as though it persists only in rural hinterlands and middle-class enclaves. 

As certain of their own correctness in every respect as they were dedicated to large-scale infrastructure, technological innovation, improving the morals of the poor, and expanding British dominion to every corner of the earth, the Victorians established the road patrols that ended the highway robbery of the Moll Flanders era. They also founded the police force that tackled the pervasive criminality of Oliver Twist’s London. And they built the factories and schools that, for better or worse, drilled generations of working-class Britons into regimented assembly-line work punctuated by shift-end bells. 

The English pastoral dream grew more intense, and was more desperately clung to, as real-life Great Britain industrialized, stripping coal-fields, belching smoke into the sky, and unrolling canals, railways, and roads across the landscape. Evocations of deep England such as The Wind in the Willows (1908) were, in this sense, a product of their own antithesis in the cities and suburbs — where, by the time Kenneth Grahame wrote it, most British people lived. 

The historian AJP Taylor observed, in his Oxford History of England, that “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman”. But that fateful August, just six years after The Wind in the Willows was published, the world of order, industry, and moral purpose the Victorians built came to its climax, and also the beginning of its end. 

When war broke out in 1914 every facet of Victorian innovation — the factories, the administration, the large-scale coordination of workforces, the patriotism — came together in a whole-of-society war effort. The English novelist Mary Augusta Ward described this phenomenon in 1916: an enormous, coordinated mobilization that reached into every corner of English society and geography, and re-oriented every part of it to supporting the same cause. 

After 1918, that regulatory Leviathan never really went away again. With the Second World War it expanded still further, adding blackout rules, rations, the mass evacuation of children from city centers, and a host of other emergency measures. By and large, everyone pulled together, under the organizing moral focus of existential threat. Those wartime habits, and the cultures they produced, persisted well into the long 20th-century peace that followed, legitimating the establishment of a nationwide welfare state, National Health Service, and much else we now take for granted. 

This is why we’re still obsessed with the wars: they really did create modern Britain. Wartime Britain also represented the pinnacle of that “high-trust” culture whose disappearance is now routinely blamed on immigration. But the Victorians, who turned a relatively lawless Moll Flanders Britain into that orderly, industrial empire of our recent past, understood something we’ve chosen to forget in the decades since: that order always implies a measure of violence. 

Periodically, when Elon Musk decides, in his wisdom, to intervene in British politics, he likes to imagine all of Britain and her inhabitants as basically hobbits: bucolic, small-minded denizens of rural Arcadia, desperately vulnerable to predators. But this is both wrong and unhelpful. Yes, Tolkien’s Shire is one of the most famous evocations of that pastoral idyll. But historically, Britons were the despoilers of the Shire as well as its hobbit inhabitants. The Romantic spirit of Wordsworth, and the Arts and Crafts movement led by John Ruskin, harked back to a mythic, rural deep England; meanwhile, technologists  and visionaries in the real-world 19th-century Britain had little compunction about driving roads and railroads through those fields of green in pursuit of “improvement”. 

This people produced Cecil Rhodes as well as John Ruskin. They invented steam engines, sterilization, and vaccination, not to mention a host of lethal weapons. They imposed law and order on Britain, routinely resorting to corporal punishment, hanging, or deportation. They did the same to a great many other geographies besides — some of which retain the bones of our common law to this day, even while agitating for reparations. Even education was delivered with unembarrassed, righteous ferocity: the tyrannical, pedantic Mr Gradgrind, in Dickens’s novel Hard Times, vividly illustrates the methods used to impose knowledge and manners on the children of Victorian Britain.

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By contrast, since the two wars Britain has seemed determined to hold fast to our legacy of wartime solidarity, order, and peace, built on those brusque Victorian foundations — only now, without ever needing to be tough. It’s as though we want Elon to be right; as if, were everyone only to play by the rules, all of England might be forever Arcadia. But instead, it’s allowed that culture of order and common purpose to soften, by degrees, where its goods are rapidly evaporating. We congratulate ourselves on having abandoned “Gradgrindian” teaching, while teachers collapse under the stress of bad behavior in the classrooms and kids learn nothing. Local policing is nonexistent. Rules are only for suckers. Our border enforcers hand out visa-sponsorship licenses to vape shops, or Islamic centres allegedly linked to the Iranian state. 

But the decay in our capacity to enforce even the rules we have is as much, or more, a cause of immigration as its effect. And, pace Restore Britain, plenty of the rule-flouting is home-grown. Just recently, for example, the BBC reported on a huge rise in hare coursing, a deeply medieval-sounding illegal bloodsport, in which participants coordinate online to mass-trespass onto farmland and gamble on sight-hounds chasing hares across open fields. Such events are reportedly often linked to wider criminal gang activity; but there’s nothing to suggest the gangs themselves are anything but British. They just aren’t doing the postwar “high-trust” thing. 

Fifty dead hares dumped outside your country shop hardly evokes Arcadia. Nor, as the secessionist villagers of Piddington in Oxfordshire recently realized, does the prospect of having your community of 400 imminently outnumbered three-to-one by 1,250 male asylum seekers at a nearby military base. 

It’s understandable that, after the two wars, no one wanted ever to live through anything so horrible again. The result was a desire both to preserve Britain’s war-forged social cohesion, and also to reject every trace of the toughness, and willingness to follow through with violence, that many blamed for the catastrophe of war. There followed some halcyon decades of peace with very little violence — but those decades are now, palpably, at an end.  

And yet the mistake wasn’t to dream of Arcadia as such. It was imagining (as Elon Musk still apparently does) that all of England could be preserved in a state of bucolic green. That’s never what these islands have been. The best we ever managed was preserving some pastoral space amid the upheaval. 

In the aftermath of our decades-long holiday from enforcing the rules, it’s going to take more than just being nice to strangers while camping to sustain this — or the postwar utopia of rules. We also need the piratical adventurousness of the Moll Flanders era, and the ambition, toughness, and self-belief of the Victorian one. Perhaps even, if we haven’t the space to jail criminals, we should do as they did. (It would be popular.) 

The price of some pastoral idyll is accepting that every such peaceful community has an edge. In the 21st century, you can’t hide from the internet forever — even, as those poor hares found out, in the countryside. And especially in the internet age, no space of “high trust” will stay that way for long, unless we stand ready to defend it. 

Our higher education system is facing an unprecedented level of fraud, after decades of policy blunders and lax oversight. Organized crime networks are exploiting funding loopholes, using sham students to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds. Thousands of these “students”, many with no intention of ever studying or repaying, have enrolled in degree courses purely to cash in on easily accessible loans, turning a scheme meant to expand educational opportunities into a sordid free-for-all. The emerging picture is one of brazen criminality, with the Student Loans Company (SLC) uncovering at least six questionable college partnerships that facilitate these loans. Over the last academic year alone, the SLC flagged over 3,500 suspicious applications that exhibit clear signs of fraud. That’s equivalent to around $60 million — yet after decades of limited oversight is clearly the tip of the iceberg.

The mechanics of the fraud are shockingly simple. Applicants enroll online in university courses, often never setting foot in a classroom, but still triggering tuition and maintenance loan payments. Because finance applications and course registrations are largely taken on trust, with virtually no in-person verification, fraudsters can game the system remotely. Much of the scam centers around so-called franchised colleges: private institutions that offer degrees on behalf of accredited universities. These smaller colleges have become a weak link in the chain. Showing a willingness to admit candidates with minimal vetting and lower entry requirements, they make it easy for opportunists to pose as students.

During enrollment, proper registration can be bypassed via forged credentials and identities. Organized crime groups submit bulk applications using fake documents or duplicated addresses to meet eligibility checks. Many franchised colleges are also willing to admit individuals who speak little to no English, accepting dubious evidence of English proficiency, including screenshots of Duolingo tests. At one Manchester college, students barely had enough English to understand the onboarding process. Once registered, a large number of the fraudulent students then immediately quit their courses after receiving the first installment of the maintenance loan, around $4,000, before re-enrolling in a new course the following year.

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In fact, these schemes have proven so lucrative that they have led to certain international communities embracing the opportunities en masse, repatriating ill-gotten gains back to their home countries. Roughly 15% of all Romanian nationals in Britain received a student loan in 2023. The number of applicants from the country surged by over 1,500% over the eight years prior. Romanian students now make up over half of all applicants at several franchised college providers. This has been driven, in large part, by a wave of Romanian-language TikTok and Facebook videos that propagandize student loans as free money to be sent back home. These posts could easily be mistaken for those of traditional influencers, with videos showcasing tropical destinations, designer clothes, and a youthful recruiter keen to help you get rich quick.

Even worse, many of these influencers are acting as recruitment agents for franchised colleges, profiting directly from each student they refer. These agents actively coach applicants on how to game the system, often using social media to advertise, recruiting students with poor English skills and explaining that they can get paid just to enroll. These agents also engage in commission sharing, with some offering existing students cash lump sums for each friend they introduce to the course: all with no limit on referrals. This web of kickbacks and profit-sharing creates an incentive pyramid, where all parties make money by pushing more students through the door, leaving the British taxpayer footing the bill for all those unpaid loans.

At the heart of this scandal is a structural weakness caused by the rise of franchise partnerships in higher education, with universities increasingly farming out courses to affiliated colleges. This system was designed to widen access and save costs by using off-site providers. Instead, it’s led to widespread abuse with near-zero oversight. Roughly two thirds of franchised providers aren’t registered with the official regulator of the higher education sector, resulting in hundreds of colleges teaching degree courses with no scrutiny from the Department of Education. As a result, quality controls have been scant. Forget the language issue: there is little accountability around whether students even attend classes, leading to some franchised campuses having course completion rates of just 60%.

All the while, there is a vested interest in keeping this system in place, as the number of students enrolled at franchised providers has almost tripled over the last four years. By 2022, these educational arrangements accounted for just 5% of all student loan borrowers, yet franchised courses made up over half of all detected student loan fraud by value. One franchised college received $234 million in revenue in 2024, with profits increasing 1,200% in just three years. This is despite universities and partner colleges splitting the tuition fees of newly enrolled students, with the lead former typically taking 30% for essentially brokering the deal. For cash-strapped bursars, this provides an uncapped source of secondary income without the need for further infrastructure, teaching staff, or course provisions. For those universities willing to turn a blind eye, and delegate all responsibilities to a college partner, this arrangement can be highly lucrative.

It all speaks to a system utterly unable to keep pace with changing realities. The UK’s student finance model has long relied on an assumption of trust, while funding shifted costs from the state to students and fees continued to rise. Education providers suddenly stood to receive much more per student — yet if loan books swelled, controls have stayed lax. As far back as 2018, a report warned that some private colleges had found a loophole within the funding system. It was hoped that the newly formed Office for Students (OFS) would address the problem. In the years since, however, the regulator has been more focused on political battles in academia than on financial policing, meaning little was done to systematically fortify the loan system against this new type of fraud.

At the same time, government policies inadvertently widened the problem. After Brexit, EU nationals already living in Britain by 2020 retained the right to UK student finance as home students. Despite this being intended as a fair provision for those settled in the country, it also meant that tens of thousands of people from across Europe suddenly qualified for British loans with minimal restrictions. After the Government announced that tuition fees would be frozen at $9,250, meanwhile, universities’ per-student income stagnated, even as operating costs continued to soar. To combat this, institutions sought creative ways to boost enrollment and revenues, driving mass adoption of the very franchise system that’s now proving so vulnerable to abuse.

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To be fair, the situation isn’t totally hopeless, with policymakers are now scrambling to bolster the system. In practice, that means new legislation and tougher enforcement measures on organized fraud. In addition to a dedicated counter-fraud team from the Public Sector Fraud Authority, the Government has announced that any college teaching 300 or more students on franchised courses must register with the regulator or lose access to student finance. There are also proposals to give regulators the power to impose instant sanctions on dubious providers; improve verification of student eligibility; and recover funds from universities that ignore fraud. The Department for Education may also link loan disbursements more closely to attendance and academic progress, while strengthening data sharing between agencies to identify fraudulent students.

Yet beyond these short-term fixes, the scandal has done near-irreparable damage to public trust in British higher education. That’s especially problematic given education is one of Britain’s biggest invisible exports. Almost $22 billion comes from fees and spending by legitimate international students a year. These are students who are willing to pay premium fees far in excess of domestic students: essentially due to an academic reputation built over hundreds of years.

It is, therefore, sadly ironic that widespread criminality risks diminishing the appeal of our great academic institutions. This could justifiably fuel a perception that British credentials aren’t what they used to be, as the perceived value of a university education diminishes with every sham course and low-quality provider. If British degrees can be abused on this scale, meanwhile, it raises uncomfortable questions about how much the education sector has been operating on an honor system too easily dishonored. With over half of franchised providers still unregistered, and therefore free from regulatory oversight, this could easily fuel narratives around a system in chaos.

Either way, the whole scandal once again strikes at the heart of short-sighted policymaking that aims to produce flattering headlines and optimistic metrics — without a willingness to address difficult structural challenges. Widening access to higher education is important, and cutting costs can be helpful. But without the necessary, and far less glamorous, development of a robust regulatory environment for these initiatives to sit in, malignant forces will soon exploit political generosity. This crisis demands a change in mindset from policymakers, and restoring credibility will require more than just one-off raids and attention-grabbing investigations.

Nor, of course, are the lessons here just for vice-chancellors. Time and again we’ve seen well-meaning schemes — from Motability to Covid relief — wrecked by organized fraud. Especially as our high-trust society fades away, it’ll become more important than ever for the Government to build out the actual institutions that prevent graft from occurring. Fail, and the state will continue to crumble far beyond the university gates.