Sir Keir Starmer should not have abandoned a pledge to abolish university tuition fees, a Labour mayor says.
The Labour leader announced last week that his party is set to “move on” from the commitment, which was among the promises he made during his leadership campaign in 2020, blaming a “different financial situation” as the reason for the U-turn. The move has drawn criticism from political opponents and union leaders, while North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll has now also spoken out.
He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that Sir Keir “should have stuck” with his promise to get rid of the £9,250-a-year fees and that he did not “buy into the Tory narrative that there is no money”.
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Speaking at last week’s local elections count in Newcastle, Mr Driscoll said: “I am a firm believer that we should have free education. When you look at this as a system, not just the individual cost at the time, we have ended up with whole swathes of 20 and 30-year-olds with huge amounts of debt, with massive marginal tax rates when they start to earn enough to pay it back.
“And it is sometimes putting people off from getting further qualifications, putting people off starting a business, certainly putting off any chance for people to buy a house. If you look at most other advanced economies, they don't do it in this way – their fees are not as high.
"I do think it was a good policy when he [Starmer] announced it and I think he should have stuck with it.”
Mr Driscoll is bidding to become Labour’s candidate to stand for the larger North East mayor role due to be created next year under a £4bn devolution deal, a role which he will compete with Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Kim McGuinness for. The mayor, a supporter of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, added: “I don’t think anyone could have predicted [financial impact of] the pandemic.
"I know from the work that I have done that we have delivered the [North of Tyne] manifesto, but we have had to be very creative about powering through when you have a massive global shock like that. We know there are going to be issues and we don’t know what they are going to be – that is the challenge of politics, isn’t it? You might say that the definition of a promise is that it’s what we will do even when things are bad.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme last week, Sir Keir said Labour would “set out a fairer solution” for the future of tuition fees in the coming weeks. He said: “We are looking at options for how we fund these fees. The current system is unfair, it doesn’t really work for students, doesn’t work for universities.”
The U-turn was criticised by the University and College Union, whose general secretary Jo Grady called the tuition fee system “broken”. She said: “Keir Starmer repeatedly pledged to abolish the toxic system of tuition fees and in doing so was elected leader of the Labour Party.
“It is deeply disappointing for him to now be reneging on that promise, a move which would condemn millions of future students to a life of debt.”
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