Starmer ditches pledge to scrap tuition fees: YET AGAIN he doesn’t deserve your trust
The genius at the top of the Labour Party has shot himself in the foot – again.
Keir Starmer has ditched yet another of the pledges on which he managed to get elected as leader of the Labour Party – and has already been lambasted for it in the pages of The Spectator:
“@Keir_Starmer breaks one of his ten pledges.
Again.
It begs the question, as one BBC journalist put it to Starmer, ‘Why should we believe your five pledges when you binned your ten leadership pledges once you were elected?’”
Deeply untrustworthy man.https://t.co/kCLqv7grNd
— James Foster (@JamesEFoster) May 2, 2023
The article states – rightly, it pains This Writer to admit:
In the latest wheeze to … prove that Labour is now a Serious Party of Government, the spin doctors at Labour HQ have opted to ditch the party’s long-standing pledge to abolish tuition fees.
As recently as 2021 he was lambasting it as ‘a huge debt for young people that they carry around for a long time’ which is ‘why we rightly committed at the last election to get rid of tuition fees.’
Starmer told Radio 4’s Today programme that: ‘We are likely to move on from that commitment because we do find ourselves in a different financial situation. But I don’t want that to be read as us accepting for a moment that the current system is fair or that it’s working.’ So, er, the system is broken but we’re not going to fix it? So much for an end to sticking plaster politics…
The abolition of tuition fees was of course one of Starmer’s ‘ten pledges’ that secured him victory in the 2020 leadership race, back when he was live action role-playing as a Corbynite. Among those include ‘common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water’, ‘defend free movement as we leave the EU’, ‘increase income tax for the top five per cent of earners’, ‘abolish Universal Credit’ and ‘end outsourcing [in the] NHS, local government and justice system.’ All this at a time when he’s asking the country to vote him in on the basis of his so-called ‘five missions’.
It begs the question, as one BBC journalist put it to Starmer, ‘Why should we believe your five pledges when you binned your ten leadership pledges once you were elected?”
The relevant trade unions – and remember, Labour relies on the unions for support – hate the new posture:
Real shame for young people & 2 things come to mind, first is when the differences between the parties become so slight it’s easy for Tories to steal policies & upstage Labour by going further, plus the election increasingly becomes precariously about the character of the leaders https://t.co/8hkUfOXaEC
— John McDonnell MP (@johnmcdonnellMP) May 2, 2023
Others are picking out video clips of Labour figures talking up the former policy to flag up the hypocrisy of the new position; representatives who proudly proclaimed that they would end tuition fees now have to proudly proclaim the exact opposite:
"And we will scrap tuition fees and bring back maintenance grants. Free education for all throughout your life. That is the prospect that [the Tories] would have us believe is so terrifying"
Not just the Tories, eh Angela? pic.twitter.com/tSTQ9MbKYe
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) May 2, 2023
And others are bringing it home by tying it to the local elections on Thursday (May 4):
Abolishing tuition fees wasn't a "commitment". It was a lie.
Starmer doesn't do "commitments". He tells lies to win elections, then does everything the corrupt establishment wants.
A vote for Labour on Thursday is a vote to endorse an establishment-approved fraud. https://t.co/P07p3CTpvZ
— Frank Owen's Legendary Paintbrush🥀🇵🇸🇾🇪 (@OwenPaintbrush) May 2, 2023
It’s nauseating. We’ve gone from “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn!” to “Ugh! Keir Starmer!”
The current Labour leader has abandoned everything that distinguished Labour from the Conservatives.
Voting for his party – now – means voting for no change at all.
And that is as true with the local elections as it is with a general election: he has made sure all party representatives are terrified of dissent so electing them is putting in place somebody who will do their best for Starmer… and not for you.
If you were thinking Labour looked like a smart choice, you’d better think again.
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I agree with tuition fees and loans. As a former university lecturer I can say one thing certain Universities are middle class organisations. I keep in touch with the university and nothing has changed. Working class students are a minority less even than overseas students. Sate funded grants mean working class people pay for the education of others that they can never achieve. Loans are a fairer way of funding higher education.
His argument would look a lot more believable if Scotland hadn’t done away with tuition fees some years back on an ever decreasing budget. Will he be elected as being ‘not as bad as the Tories’? I think that in the local elections the Greens are going to do well with voters who can’t stomach him but won’t vote either Tory or their allies from the coalition LibDem either..