CORBYN’S £100BN FANTASY

That’s how much plan to write off tuition fees debt would cost

JEREMY Corbyn’s pledge to wipe out student debt would cost more than £100billion, his education spokesman admitted yesterday.

Angela Rayner said the policy was only an ‘ambition’ because the Labour Party did not yet know how it could be funded.

Mr Corbyn campaigned on a platform of scrapping tuition fees for new students. And days before the last election the Labour leader said he wanted a way to tackle the ‘historical misfortune’ of those already burdened with huge student debts – promising he would ‘deal with it’.

His party’s success at the ballot box has prompted ministers to reassess how to ease burdens that can hit almost £60,000 on graduation.

But Miss Rayner said Labour would not make an announcement on wiping out the current student debt until the sums added up.

On the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show she said: ‘ Jeremy said that that’s an ambition, it’s something that he’d like to do. It’s something that we will not announce that we’re doing unless we can afford to do that.

‘It’s a big abacus that I’m working on with that – it is a huge amount, it’s £100billion, which they estimate currently, which will increase. It’s a huge amount of money but of course we also know that a third of that is never repaid.’

‘We’ve got to start dealing with this debt crisis that we’re foisting on our young people.

‘It’s not acceptable. They are leaving university with £57,000 worth of debt, it’s completely unsustainable and we’ve got to start tackling that.’

Miss Rayner called on ministers to reduce the student debt burden by reversing the abolition of maintenance grants, reducing interest rates and raising the threshold at which repayments must be made.

In an interview with NME magazine less than a week before the election, Mr Corbyn said he was looking at ways to reduce the burden. He said there was no simple answer to the legacy of student debts.

But he added: ‘I don’t see why those that had the historical misfortune to be at university during the £9,000 period should be burdened excessively compared to those that went before or those that come after. I will deal with it.’

Labour has also vowed to abol- ish tuition fees – a policy it says will cost £9.5billion.

Last week universities minister Jo Johnson hinted that student loan interest could be cut amid rocketing debt levels. He admitted the student finance system was under review.

A day later, Commons leader Andrea Leadsom insisted Tory concerns over student loan debts had been heard, telling MPs the Department for Educa- tion was considering the issue. A report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies last week warned that three quarters of graduates were never likely to pay off their loans in full because their debts were the highest in the developed world.

The average stands at £50,000, rising to £57,000 for the poorest. High earners could also end up paying £40,000 over their lifetime in interest payments alone, the report found. Lord Adonis, a former Labour education minister who originally promoted tuition fees, has said the charges should be scrapped after becoming a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’.

He warned that the Treasury ‘will soon realise it is sitting on a Ponzi scheme’ that leaves graduates with massive debts and a black hole in publicsector finances.

A Ponzi is a fraudulent investment operation in which the operator generates returns for older investors through revenue paid by new investors.

‘A third of it is never repaid’

AFURTHER chill ran down the not exactly firm spines of the Parliamentary Conservative Party last week, when the pollsters YouGov reported that Labour had taken an eight-point lead.

for the first time since Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, his party’s standing in the polls was such that, if reproduced in a General election, it would win an overall majority.

I realise that polls do not inspire the highest trust, after their failure to anticipate the full surge in support for Labour in June’s election. But the breakdown of figures in this latest poll reveal a further development of two trends which that election had already demonstrated — and one of them is astounding.

this latest YouGov poll shows a mere 12 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds backing the Conservatives, with a thumping 60 per cent supporting Labour.

But here’s the remarkable thing: when the figures are broken down on class lines, it transpires that the Conservatives have more support among the lower socioeconomic groups (C2De) than they do among the upper social groups (ABC1). Labour — ostensibly the workers’ party — polls significantly better among higher socio-economic groups than it does among those on lower incomes.

Calculated

to put this at its clearest: Jeremy Corbyn is a magnet for the young — but most especially those from well-to- do backgrounds. that was made visibly — and audibly — obvious at the Glastonbury festival, where the Labour leader was acclaimed by thousands of those who could afford the £238 entrance fee with the chant ‘oh, Jeremy Corbyn’.

having thus bonded with the most Leftwing politician ever to have led the Labour Party, they then left all their mounds of rubbish to be cleaned up by eastern europeans on zero-hours contracts.

It’s not hard to see why Corbyn was able to win their hearts and their votes. It wasn’t because of his decades- long commitment to socialism. No, it was his pledge to abolish student fees — and, in particular, his suggestion that Labour would also find a way of writing off the accumulated debts of all those who had gone through tertiary education since fees were introduced.

this was confirmed on yesterday’s Andrew Marr show by the Shadow education Secretary Angela rayner. She admitted that this sum was in the region of £100 billion — equivalent to twice the nation’s annual budget deficit — but tried to reassure tax-paying viewers with the risible claim that she had ‘a big abacus’.

Corbyn told a rally last week that this was all for the benefit of the workers: because of tuition fees, ‘fewer workingclass young people are applying to university’.

this was a calculated lie. Since tuition fees were introduced, not only have the numbers of young people going to university soared, but the proportion coming from poorer backgrounds has risen dramatically. fewer than 10 per cent of those eligible for free school meals went to university ten years ago; now, almost a quarter of those at university are in that category. (this would not have been true of the middle-class Corbyn, who flunked out of his course in trade union Studies at North London Polytechnic, now London Metropolitan university, after a year).

But it will be the best-off among former students who will be the principal beneficiaries of Corbyn’s most successful votewinning offer (should he ever get elected to implement it). this is because student loans are repaid — in slow instalments via pay-packet deductions as part of PAYe — only when graduates are earning at least £21,000 a year. And after 30 years, any remaining balance is written off.

from this it is clear why middle-class students are the most enamoured of Corbyn’s bribe, sorry, offer. they will reap the biggest benefit, since they are the most likely to have to pay off the entire loan. It is also most attractive to well-off parents: those who were bracing themselves to pay £9,500 a year so young Johnny wouldn’t have to borrow, could rest assured these sums could instead be spent on a deposit on the youngster’s first property.

Crux

for rising house prices, too, have somehow been translated into support for Corbyn from young middle- class people. the most naked expression of this came in a letter to the impeccably well-bred Spectator magazine last week. It followed a piece by James Bartholomew, who, dismayed by his nephew’s support for Corbyn, wrote a public letter in the magazine to the young man, detailing the various hard-Left causes the Labour leader had espoused over decades.

But then Alex Scholes replied, explaining exactly why he, and Mr Bartholomew’s nephew, had endorsed Corbyn: ‘People of my generation are tired of hearing that we cannot have the same benefits that baby boomers such as Bartholomew enjoyed. to name a few: an economy generating meaningful and secure work, the ability to purchase a house, the guarantee of a state pension, free university tuition, and so on. that’s the crux of why we voted for Corbyn: we want what you had.’

far from the austere socialist that the young Corbyn had been, this is the anguished cry of the frustrated bourgeoisie. In the days when we baby boomers were students, the great causes of youthful opposition to the older generation — and the ones which might have led them to support Labour — would have been nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War and apartheid.

Now, it’s why can’t we have the same sort of house that you bought for thousands in the Seventies and which now is worth a hundred times that? And why do we have to pay for our university degree when you didn’t?

Don’t try explaining to such young people that it’s planning regulations, loved most of all by Labour, that have stymied affordable house-building, or that it was because university education in our day was all state-funded that there was so much restriction on numbers. they will just tell you that you are being selfish.

Conspiracy

Nor do such young enthusiasts for Corbyn seem willing to understand why those of our generation regard him as dangerous. to them, his support for Sinn fein/IrA, or for the Jew-haters of hamas and hezbollah, or for the late Cuban dictator fidel Castro — well, this is just ‘Jeremy’s’ general friendliness, part of the ‘kindler, gentler’ politics he promised.

So superficial is their understanding of what Corbyn is and stands for that they imagined he was going to fight the tories’ plans to cancel the country’s membership of the european single market — otherwise known as Brexit. they seemed not to know that Corbyn has always regarded the eu as a capitalist conspiracy — since 1987 he has voted in Parliament against every one of its treaties.

they might not even realise that Corbyn’s plans to nationalise large swathes of British industry would be illegal under eu law, and that therefore there is no chance that he will change his mind. this will come as a shattering blow to the remain- supporting denizens of Kensington, whose votes last month enabled a Labour candidate to seize that poshest of Conservative constituencies.

By no means every Labour MP is pleased about the way Corbyn has upended politics — gaining Kensington and the university city of Canterbury, but losing Middlesbrough South and Mansfield.

Last week one of them, Phil Wilson, wrote: ‘the route to a sustainable Labour victory will not be found by travelling only the middle- class streets of Kensington and the campuses of our university towns. to win over the middle classes, but lose the support of the working classes would be the Labour Party’s biggest folly. I don’t want to see the Labour Party become a middle-class pastime.’

the Conservatives are in too panicky a mood to take much succour from this Labour man’s complaint. But they should: because if Corbyn’s youthful support is so reliant on such middle- class themes — keeping more of your pay-packet and being able to get an affordable mortgage — then it can more easily be won back by the true party of the bourgeoisie.