‘We can’t afford to scrap tuition fees’
JEREMY Corbyn’s plans to blow a £10billion hole in public finances by scrapping university tuition fees has been condemned by a former Labour education secretary.
Alan Johnson, a highly respected moderate who has just retired from Parliament, damned the policy as “unaffordable” and suggested it would penalise working class families to subsidise wealthy middle-class students.
Mr Johnson said his party should remember the fate of the Lib Dems and former leader Nick Clegg who went into coalition with the Tories after being elected on a pledge to scrap tuition fees.
The Lib Dems then discovered it was unaffordable and in fact agreed to triple the level of fees to £9,000 instead. The result was that in 2015 the party lost all but eight of its 57 seats as voters turned against it for the broken promise.
Speaking on BBC Look North, Mr Johnson said: “It [scrapping tuition fees] is not affordable and in my view it won’t happen and we should learn off of Nick Clegg.
“There is nothing progressive about working people, many of whom will get nowhere near a university, cross-subsidising mainly middle-class students to have a free higher education.”
The proposal is a key bribe being used by the current Labour leadership to younger voters in the hope they will come out in unusually high numbers to tip the balance in the election. Turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds in 2015 was just 43 per cent.