Sir John Hayes MP who criticised ‘woke’ political bias in universities has ‘second job’ at a university

An MP who wrote about “universities twisting young minds with woke lies” and criticised social sciences degrees is paid almost £40,000 per year as a part-time politics lecturer.

Sir John Hayes, Conservative MP for South Holland and the Deepings, has three ‘second jobs,’ through which he earns £128,000 per year on top of his £84,144 MP salary.

What is Sir John Hayes’ second job at a university?

The backbench MP, who has written about university culture wars and political bias in higher education, is currently employed as a part-time professor of political studies at the University of Bolton.

According to the latest entry in the register of members’ financial interests, where MPs must log any outside earnings, Sir John renewed the role with increased pay last month, having started at the university during the height of the pandemic, in April 2020.

Sir John is also a regular contributor to the Daily Express, where he has written on universities and higher education without referencing his current role.

In June 2021, Sir John wrote an article titled, “Universities twisting young minds with woke lies to be punished by law - GOOD!”.

In it, he described a decision taken by a group of students to remove a picture of the Queen from a common room at Oxford University as “part of a wider trend to ‘cancel’ everything in our culture that doesn’t fit the tiny mould made by tiny ‘woke’ minds.”

He wrote: “Tellingly, the motion to remove the portrait was tabled by a student from the birthplace of puritanical ‘wokeness’ – America – a nation in which elements of the public, from the Salem witch trials through to the red scares of the twentieth century, have long been susceptible to periodic waves of spiteful hysteria.”

The student in question, Matthew Katzman, recently told the Observer how he had suffered threats and racist abuse which forced him to seek protection and eventually flee Oxford, following coverage of the incident, which he said was grossly misrepresented.

He told the Observer: “The journalists and politicians who trashed me were doing it for their own ends: to get a headline or to get paid. Well, congratulations! Because they all won. They didn’t care about what it did to me”.

Earlier this year, Sir John wrote an article for the Daily Express titled, “It’s time to learn that degrees are not for everyone,” in which he warned about “questionable degrees which lack intellectual and economic value.”

“Arts and social sciences are particularly vulnerable to dilution of standards and corruption of content,” he wrote.

He also claimed that students who complete these courses leave university “so poorly educated that, unsurprisingly, they cannot employ their degree to secure a meaningful job”.

NationalWorld contacted Sir John Hayes and the University of Bolton for comment but received no response.

How much does Sir John Hayes earn from second jobs?

The University of Bolton role pays £38,570 per year, but Sir John is also the president of a technical college in Saudi Arabia and a strategic adviser to an oil trading firm, BB Energy Trading, earning him £30,000 and £50,000 per year respectively.

Overall, Sir John’s outside employment involves an average monthly commitment of over 38 hours - approximately a full working week out of every month.

Sir John is one of many MPs who maintain one or more ‘second jobs’ on top of their parliamentary duties.

An investigation last year by NationalWorld found that from January 2020 to August 2021, MPs around £10 million from ‘second jobs’ and worked the equivalent of more than 7000 working days outside of parliament.