Corbyn has forced PM to pivot to the Left
THE triple-whammy of ‘Labour-lite’ policies coming out of Manchester this weekend reflects the growing alarm in No 10 over Jeremy Corbyn’s resonance with young voters. By promising to scrap student debt, put a roof over their heads and boost public sector pay, Mr Corbyn won a thumping 62 per cent of the under-40s’ vote in the General Election – compared with just 23 per cent who voted Conservative.
In contrast, the Tories’ flagship offering was the confusing and sinister ‘dementia tax’, which conjured up visions of their ailing parents being turfed out on to the streets.
Tuition fees have been politically toxic since Tony Blair introduced them in 1998 – as former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg discovered in June, when he lost his Sheffield seat on a wave of student fury over his broken promise to abolish them.
Now Mr Corbyn has harnessed the same inter-generational anger to carry him to the brink of Downing Street.
In her desperation to keep Mr Corbyn at bay – and appease the plotters in her own party – Mrs May has been forced to abandon the strictures of austerity and pivot to the Left. The new policy on fees will feed speculation about the continuing influence of Mrs May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy – described by Tory Ministers as a ‘closet socialist’ and a ‘Red Tory’ before he left his job in the wake of the Election fiasco.
He has called tuition fees an ‘unsustainable Ponzi scheme’, in which fake returns are generated only by using
money from fresh ‘investors’, the students. Mr Corbyn is benefiting from the knock-on effects of Mr Blair’s drive to ramp up the number of university places for schoolleavers, which has led to a proliferation of courses with poor employment records.
A man who takes a creative arts degree will, for example, typically end up on the same salary as one who skipped university altogether – but is saddled with £50,000 in debt in the process.
This has bred a generation which fears it will never pay off its debts and never earn enough money to buy their own homes.
It is this generation which is now turning en masse to Mr Corbyn.
It was Mrs May’s mistake to underestimate the potency of this sense of alienation.
She has to hope that her U-turn has not come too late for her and her party.