>#Sir Keir Starmer poised to ditch pledge on free university tuition
>Henry Zeffman, Associate Political Editor | Nicola Woolcock, Education Editor
>Tuesday May 02 2023, 12.01am BST, The Times
>Keir Starmer is preparing to ditch Labour’s commitment to free university tuition, setting him on another collision course with the left of his party.
>Labour’s two past general election manifestos promised to abolish tuition fees and Starmer’s successful leadership campaign in 2020 pledged to retain that policy. But the Labour leader is preparing a speech for later this month in which he will reverse his position.
>A senior party source told The Times: “At a time when we’re being so careful about spending commitments, it’s a glaring anomaly that we still haven’t moved on tuition fees. It’s one of the remaining commitments from 2019 that we will be clear we have moved on from.”
>Labour strategists hope that electoral benefits from showing Starmer’s fiscal discipline will outweigh the costs of criticism from the party’s left that he is abandoning another previous commitment.
>Earlier this year Starmer insisted that the ten pledges which formed the basis of his leadership bid “haven’t all been abandoned by any stretch of the imagination”. But he no longer wants to increase income tax for the top 5 per cent of earners, “defend free movement” with the EU or abolish the universal credit benefit system. Plans to nationalise energy companies have also been ditched.
>Starmer first indicated that he was considering changing his stance on tuition fees in January. Asked by The Times whether he stood by the pledge, he said: “University tuition fees are not working well. They burden young people going forward. Obviously we have got a number of propositions in relation to those fees that we will put forward as we go into the election.
>“But I have to be honest about it, the damage that has been done to our economy means that we are going to have to cost everything as we go into that election and we will do that with discipline”.
>It is not clear what funding system Starmer prefers. In 2015, under Ed Miliband’s leadership, Labour pledged to cut annual fees from £9,000 to £6,000. The maximum fee for an undergraduate is now £9,250, though universities argue that this has been devalued to the extent that it is worth only around £6,500 compared with when it was introduced.
>Though the coalition government’s decision to triple fees to £9,000 in 2010 sparked mass protests, polling suggests that many students now accept the system. A survey of more than 1,000 by the Higher Education Policy Institute found that only 28 per cent of students living in England want Labour to pledge to abolishing tuition fees while 23 per cent want Labour to reduce fees to £6,000 and 20 per cent back the status quo. Another 15 per cent want fees to be cut to £3,000, 4 per cent would prefer a graduate tax and 3 per cent want current fees to rise with inflation.
>Students must fund their day-to-day expenses through maintenance loans, which are capped according to the income of their parents. Many say it is insufficient and barely covers accommodation.
>The polling found that 52 per cent of students think living costs should be covered by targeted grants and top-up loans while 25 per cent want a mix of grants, loans and parental contributions. Some 46 per cent of students think maintenance support should be between £10,000 and £12,500 each year, while 19 per cent think it should amount to under £10,000 and another 18 per cent think it should be between £12,501 and £15,000.
>Of those polled, 46 per cent supported Labour, 11 per cent would vote Green and 7 per cent backed the Conservatives.
How many pledges can Keir Starmer drop before the GE? I’m guessing a 99%, which will be roughly around the amount of voters he is going to drop aswell. Really feel like a national debate on how the country should be governed in the 21st century is needed rather than perpetuating this farce that goes nowhere but down the drain and into the pockets of the rich making them richer and the poor even poorer
Getting hard to see Labour as anything other than Tory-Lite. Neither party appears willing to make life better for people.
It is high time we ditched FPTP voting when voting for MP’s and swap to PR. While we have FPTP it will always remain either Red Tory or Blue Tory.
The Starmer Pledge has plunged past the Freddo and has reached parity with the Lone Jelly Baby (headless) in value
Unpopular opinion: fine. And I say that as someone with student debt. Subsiding it (further – it already partly is) would be a bung mostly to the children of the middle-class and wealthy, both of whom are already well-served by various offerings and exceptions. Give some extra funding to university students from low-income families, then do something about the miserable state of our further education system. We have no shortage of graduates but we are desperately short of plumbers, carpenters, electricians etc. FE has been horribly underfunded, neglected and ignored.
The closer we get to the election the closer labour will need to look at their pledges vs the money available to pay for them. It’s called reality and it’s unavoidable
OK- flame suit on – we acknowledge that Keith is a pandering non-entity, but what if we move past fees as a totemic issue? I do a bit of work in tertiary, and we’re dealing with a far more complex market failure than “fees or no fees”. The tertiary sector is being run (like so much in the UK) to meet short-term political needs – and we’ve ended up with a system that just churns kids through in many cases. Three years of padding a slum landlord’s pension; the f/t staff I know are all really dedicated- but bit by bit all their give-a-damns get tapped out. The whole thing needs wholesale rethinking – and our current political class are entirely devoid of the necessary intellectual heft.
The article is paywalled so can someone tell me when he actually made this pledge and how it was costed at the time? I would absolutely love to see this and I expect it to be affordable but I had never seen anyone actually commit to it before.
Bold of him to assume he can abandon the 18—24 demographic entirely.
How do you guys think we would fund free education? It would be more taxes. The man needs to get into office first before he can do anything and to do this he needs to garner votes from old people who hate more tax. Theres no point in having a Labour government that won’t be electable. The fact is young people just don’t vote.
Once again, Keir Starmer confirms he is nothing more than a Tory in a red tie. Not to mention fundamentally dishonest, considering he has backtracked on almost all of the pledges he made during his leadership bid.
It’s so fucking bleak being a person in their twenties in this country. You can either vote for a party who have actively sought to destroy your life for the last thirteen years, or a party who will do exactly the same but with ‘a grown up at the helm’.
Why is it so hard for a mainstream politician to act like things can be better for a change? Is Starmer so afraid of having mean things written about him in the Times that he is literally just incorporating David Cameron’s politics into his own?
Another day whilst labour has a guaranteed win, another policy ditched by the ‘honestly not Tory lite’ leader.
Interesting that this is in the Times, who are not historically very Labour friendly, and it comes right before the local elections.
This is yet another thing that makes me not want to vote Labour any more – what’s the point if they promise to act like Tories? But then perhaps that’s the aim of the article?
They can afford it for students in Scotland…but English students are saddled with debt. Fuck the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems, England deserves better.
Honestly I didn’t know he had even made this pledge to be ditching it. When was that? Massive error of him to do so.
Free education should absolutely be a goal but with the current state of things it’s not going to be practical within a single term of government.
Assuming it was feasible to introduce it overnight too would create a huge amount of problems- who is going to want to go to university one year if they know by waiting a year they save a tonne?
Starmer clearly has decided that being a pretend Tory is going to win him the election. As U turns seem to be a Tory thing, he is following in their food steps.
It’s sad to see what’s happened to the Labour party. I used to be angry, now I’m just sad
This is one of the most moronic political decisions ever. We have digital technology, developing AI and automation, and if politicians want the interests of private capital to go unhindered and also to have a socio-economic system based on jobs and work then people are going to need an ongoing access to education and training.
What this basically does is reduce people’s access to education to a one shot, one opportunity type deal. If you grew up in relative affluence, went through school, and could afford to further your education you get the opportunity to set yourself up in life. But if not, tough shit. If you don’t have a vocation, a trade or qualifications for whatever reason then you’re fucked, because in terms of employment you go to the back of the queue and become less employable.
This essentially stifles social mobility – if there’s such a thing which still exists – and kills it stone dead.
This is not a cost of living crisis we’re going through but rather we’re on the brink of socio-economic collapse. Our system is as much socially bankrupt as it lacks socio-economic sustainability. This comes out of the fuck up known as Brexit.
Labour really need to get past Starmer and the House of Constipated Reasoning if they’re going to offer up any serious alternative to the Tories.
People are raging, calling him a Tory in a red tie but have you seen the economy the real Tories are going to leave him with?!?
It’ll likely take his entire first premiership just to fix the NHS.
Expecting him to do everything at this point is crazy. Hes not the best I agree, but hes a damn sight better than the guys in the blue ties.
This comments section has convinced me that we’re getting another 15 years of a conservative government and we deserve every second of it.
OK. The TIMES says Labour MIGHT do something that might make younger voters mad, two days before the local elections.
Is this rumour true? I don’t know. BUT neither does the Times. I will judge Labour, but I will not be led by the nose by the Tory Party and its cheerleaders.
Theres no such thing as “free”.
Free here only means taxpayer funded.
Do you want to pay *even more* tax?
Apparently Max Headroom really hates the left wing.
I had to pay tuition fees and fully support them, otherwise people would just do degrees in useless things like Philosophy and Art History. However, they should at the very least offer grants/subsidies to those willing to do subjects in which we have a skills shortage such as engineering or medicine. So you’d pay something like £9,000 per year for Drama, but £1,000 per year (or even free) for Nursing.
It’s not free now, but it’s not a barrier to entry either, since you’re not paying anything until you’re on a high salary and the debt doesn’t affect your credit rating.
For improving university accessibility, the focus should be on the living costs/maintenance loan/grant, since those are things that can actually make a difference t how financially easy it is to attend university.
I really think Labour are in for a nasty shock at the next GE, as much as we need the Tories out.
We are being subjected to one governing ideology of Capital, with party alternation acting as its stewards. It’s a savagely shit and unjust system.
The solution for the younger generations is just to leave this shithole 🙂
I was very tenuously supporting Starmer, but he’s made me fed up now. Fuck him
Good. It’s not fair for people who didn’t go to university to be in part funding people to do so through their taxes. It’s an inherently classist idea.
I don’t think uni should be free, but it should be cheaper and accommodation prices need to be slashed by half.
33 comments
>#Sir Keir Starmer poised to ditch pledge on free university tuition
>Henry Zeffman, Associate Political Editor | Nicola Woolcock, Education Editor
>Tuesday May 02 2023, 12.01am BST, The Times
>Keir Starmer is preparing to ditch Labour’s commitment to free university tuition, setting him on another collision course with the left of his party.
>Labour’s two past general election manifestos promised to abolish tuition fees and Starmer’s successful leadership campaign in 2020 pledged to retain that policy. But the Labour leader is preparing a speech for later this month in which he will reverse his position.
>A senior party source told The Times: “At a time when we’re being so careful about spending commitments, it’s a glaring anomaly that we still haven’t moved on tuition fees. It’s one of the remaining commitments from 2019 that we will be clear we have moved on from.”
>Labour strategists hope that electoral benefits from showing Starmer’s fiscal discipline will outweigh the costs of criticism from the party’s left that he is abandoning another previous commitment.
>Earlier this year Starmer insisted that the ten pledges which formed the basis of his leadership bid “haven’t all been abandoned by any stretch of the imagination”. But he no longer wants to increase income tax for the top 5 per cent of earners, “defend free movement” with the EU or abolish the universal credit benefit system. Plans to nationalise energy companies have also been ditched.
>Starmer first indicated that he was considering changing his stance on tuition fees in January. Asked by The Times whether he stood by the pledge, he said: “University tuition fees are not working well. They burden young people going forward. Obviously we have got a number of propositions in relation to those fees that we will put forward as we go into the election.
>“But I have to be honest about it, the damage that has been done to our economy means that we are going to have to cost everything as we go into that election and we will do that with discipline”.
>It is not clear what funding system Starmer prefers. In 2015, under Ed Miliband’s leadership, Labour pledged to cut annual fees from £9,000 to £6,000. The maximum fee for an undergraduate is now £9,250, though universities argue that this has been devalued to the extent that it is worth only around £6,500 compared with when it was introduced.
>Though the coalition government’s decision to triple fees to £9,000 in 2010 sparked mass protests, polling suggests that many students now accept the system. A survey of more than 1,000 by the Higher Education Policy Institute found that only 28 per cent of students living in England want Labour to pledge to abolishing tuition fees while 23 per cent want Labour to reduce fees to £6,000 and 20 per cent back the status quo. Another 15 per cent want fees to be cut to £3,000, 4 per cent would prefer a graduate tax and 3 per cent want current fees to rise with inflation.
>Students must fund their day-to-day expenses through maintenance loans, which are capped according to the income of their parents. Many say it is insufficient and barely covers accommodation.
>The polling found that 52 per cent of students think living costs should be covered by targeted grants and top-up loans while 25 per cent want a mix of grants, loans and parental contributions. Some 46 per cent of students think maintenance support should be between £10,000 and £12,500 each year, while 19 per cent think it should amount to under £10,000 and another 18 per cent think it should be between £12,501 and £15,000.
>Of those polled, 46 per cent supported Labour, 11 per cent would vote Green and 7 per cent backed the Conservatives.
How many pledges can Keir Starmer drop before the GE? I’m guessing a 99%, which will be roughly around the amount of voters he is going to drop aswell. Really feel like a national debate on how the country should be governed in the 21st century is needed rather than perpetuating this farce that goes nowhere but down the drain and into the pockets of the rich making them richer and the poor even poorer
Getting hard to see Labour as anything other than Tory-Lite. Neither party appears willing to make life better for people.
It is high time we ditched FPTP voting when voting for MP’s and swap to PR. While we have FPTP it will always remain either Red Tory or Blue Tory.
The Starmer Pledge has plunged past the Freddo and has reached parity with the Lone Jelly Baby (headless) in value
Unpopular opinion: fine. And I say that as someone with student debt. Subsiding it (further – it already partly is) would be a bung mostly to the children of the middle-class and wealthy, both of whom are already well-served by various offerings and exceptions. Give some extra funding to university students from low-income families, then do something about the miserable state of our further education system. We have no shortage of graduates but we are desperately short of plumbers, carpenters, electricians etc. FE has been horribly underfunded, neglected and ignored.
The closer we get to the election the closer labour will need to look at their pledges vs the money available to pay for them. It’s called reality and it’s unavoidable
OK- flame suit on – we acknowledge that Keith is a pandering non-entity, but what if we move past fees as a totemic issue? I do a bit of work in tertiary, and we’re dealing with a far more complex market failure than “fees or no fees”. The tertiary sector is being run (like so much in the UK) to meet short-term political needs – and we’ve ended up with a system that just churns kids through in many cases. Three years of padding a slum landlord’s pension; the f/t staff I know are all really dedicated- but bit by bit all their give-a-damns get tapped out. The whole thing needs wholesale rethinking – and our current political class are entirely devoid of the necessary intellectual heft.
The article is paywalled so can someone tell me when he actually made this pledge and how it was costed at the time? I would absolutely love to see this and I expect it to be affordable but I had never seen anyone actually commit to it before.
Bold of him to assume he can abandon the 18—24 demographic entirely.
How do you guys think we would fund free education? It would be more taxes. The man needs to get into office first before he can do anything and to do this he needs to garner votes from old people who hate more tax. Theres no point in having a Labour government that won’t be electable. The fact is young people just don’t vote.
Once again, Keir Starmer confirms he is nothing more than a Tory in a red tie. Not to mention fundamentally dishonest, considering he has backtracked on almost all of the pledges he made during his leadership bid.
It’s so fucking bleak being a person in their twenties in this country. You can either vote for a party who have actively sought to destroy your life for the last thirteen years, or a party who will do exactly the same but with ‘a grown up at the helm’.
Why is it so hard for a mainstream politician to act like things can be better for a change? Is Starmer so afraid of having mean things written about him in the Times that he is literally just incorporating David Cameron’s politics into his own?
Another day whilst labour has a guaranteed win, another policy ditched by the ‘honestly not Tory lite’ leader.
Interesting that this is in the Times, who are not historically very Labour friendly, and it comes right before the local elections.
This is yet another thing that makes me not want to vote Labour any more – what’s the point if they promise to act like Tories? But then perhaps that’s the aim of the article?
They can afford it for students in Scotland…but English students are saddled with debt. Fuck the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems, England deserves better.
Honestly I didn’t know he had even made this pledge to be ditching it. When was that? Massive error of him to do so.
Free education should absolutely be a goal but with the current state of things it’s not going to be practical within a single term of government.
Assuming it was feasible to introduce it overnight too would create a huge amount of problems- who is going to want to go to university one year if they know by waiting a year they save a tonne?
Starmer clearly has decided that being a pretend Tory is going to win him the election. As U turns seem to be a Tory thing, he is following in their food steps.
It’s sad to see what’s happened to the Labour party. I used to be angry, now I’m just sad
This is one of the most moronic political decisions ever. We have digital technology, developing AI and automation, and if politicians want the interests of private capital to go unhindered and also to have a socio-economic system based on jobs and work then people are going to need an ongoing access to education and training.
What this basically does is reduce people’s access to education to a one shot, one opportunity type deal. If you grew up in relative affluence, went through school, and could afford to further your education you get the opportunity to set yourself up in life. But if not, tough shit. If you don’t have a vocation, a trade or qualifications for whatever reason then you’re fucked, because in terms of employment you go to the back of the queue and become less employable.
This essentially stifles social mobility – if there’s such a thing which still exists – and kills it stone dead.
This is not a cost of living crisis we’re going through but rather we’re on the brink of socio-economic collapse. Our system is as much socially bankrupt as it lacks socio-economic sustainability. This comes out of the fuck up known as Brexit.
Labour really need to get past Starmer and the House of Constipated Reasoning if they’re going to offer up any serious alternative to the Tories.
I Will vote Labour because i see no other choice, i do not trust them though.
I liked the last general election pledges though. https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2019-50501411
People are raging, calling him a Tory in a red tie but have you seen the economy the real Tories are going to leave him with?!?
It’ll likely take his entire first premiership just to fix the NHS.
Expecting him to do everything at this point is crazy. Hes not the best I agree, but hes a damn sight better than the guys in the blue ties.
This comments section has convinced me that we’re getting another 15 years of a conservative government and we deserve every second of it.
OK. The TIMES says Labour MIGHT do something that might make younger voters mad, two days before the local elections.
Is this rumour true? I don’t know. BUT neither does the Times. I will judge Labour, but I will not be led by the nose by the Tory Party and its cheerleaders.
Theres no such thing as “free”.
Free here only means taxpayer funded.
Do you want to pay *even more* tax?
Apparently Max Headroom really hates the left wing.
I had to pay tuition fees and fully support them, otherwise people would just do degrees in useless things like Philosophy and Art History. However, they should at the very least offer grants/subsidies to those willing to do subjects in which we have a skills shortage such as engineering or medicine. So you’d pay something like £9,000 per year for Drama, but £1,000 per year (or even free) for Nursing.
It’s not free now, but it’s not a barrier to entry either, since you’re not paying anything until you’re on a high salary and the debt doesn’t affect your credit rating.
For improving university accessibility, the focus should be on the living costs/maintenance loan/grant, since those are things that can actually make a difference t how financially easy it is to attend university.
I really think Labour are in for a nasty shock at the next GE, as much as we need the Tories out.
We are being subjected to one governing ideology of Capital, with party alternation acting as its stewards. It’s a savagely shit and unjust system.
The solution for the younger generations is just to leave this shithole 🙂
I was very tenuously supporting Starmer, but he’s made me fed up now. Fuck him
Good. It’s not fair for people who didn’t go to university to be in part funding people to do so through their taxes. It’s an inherently classist idea.
I don’t think uni should be free, but it should be cheaper and accommodation prices need to be slashed by half.