Fall Out by Tim Shipman

Author:Tim Shipman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

The most expensive item in the manifesto, with a price tag of £9.5 billion, was the pledge to abolish university tuition fees, which cost students up to £9,000 a year. An interest rate rise from 4.6 per cent to 6.1 per cent – announced on 11 April, a week before May called the election – made the issue topical and toxic for the government. The decision pitched a determined John McDonnell against Andrew Fisher, who had been wary of Corbyn committing to the policy during his second leadership campaign. Fisher was allied with Angela Rayner, the shadow education secretary, who was pushing for more money to go into pre-school education and further education funding instead. The unions backed Rayner. A senior official in a major union said, ‘We had an argument because our members were going to be more affected if Sure Starts were reopened. That was a bigger priority for us.’

‘John Mac was the big advocate for tuition fees,’ a leadership source said. ‘He knew that Jeremy really wanted it, but Fisher wanted to spend more money on the NHS.’ At one stage there was talk of matching the promise of Vote Leave a year earlier to spend £350 million a week extra on the NHS (the size of Britain’s gross contributions to the EU budget). ‘There was a time when we just wanted to put it on the side of a bus and send it round the country,’ a party official said. ‘For the life of me I still don’t understand why it didn’t happen.’

Others say the question was not whether tuition fees would be scrapped, but how it would be paid for. In the end McDonnell opted for raising income tax on high earners, but Labour also considered a windfall tax. To many commentators the policy was actually a regressive one, since it was, in effect, asking all taxpayers to subsidise university students, who tend to be middle-class. But that was not how Corbyn’s team saw it. A source close to McDonnell said, ‘They think it’s a tax on working-class people who do well for themselves. They are ideologically opposed to it.’ The shadow chancellor also had one eye on boosting support for Corbyn among the students in Momentum who would help protect him in the event of another leadership challenge. A former LOTO employee said, ‘John understood in the first leadership campaign that we pulled a layer of young people around us and he didn’t want it to dissipate. He was worried about it.’

In another sign of Labour’s growing strategic acuity, Corbyn’s team returned to the pledge on Monday, 21 May, saying they would include students starting university in England that autumn and that students partway through their courses would not have to pay for the remaining years. The timing was crucial. It was the last day on which people could register to vote. It spurred another wave of student registrations. ‘That was an intelligent thing to do,’ a former Corbyn employee said. It also raised some estimates of the cost to £11 billion.

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