Labour's Tuition Fees Betrayal

Remember Jeremy Corbyn pledging to abolish university tuition fees and scrap student debt just a few days before we went to the polls?

Not only that but Labour's Welsh Manifesto contained the following statement: "Welsh Labour has always been clear that education should be free and if funding allowed, there should be no tuition fees". During the election First Minister Carwyn Jones said “it would be difficult to conceive a scenario where Welsh Labour did not match the UK Labour Party’s pledge to abolish fees".

Only Labour isn't scrapping tuition fees at all, it isn't even maintaining them at current levels. The Welsh Labour government announced last night that fees would rise to £9,295 from autumn 2018 because “our universities must be able to compete domestically and internationally”.

A message to student voters that when actually in power, Labour puts up tuition fees. Students will remember this betrayal at the next election. That's two parties of the left that have betrayed students.

Labour would only be able to deliver on their promise in the event that they actually won the election. The labour party in Wales has no power to collect the revenue to fund such an enterprise. Only two types of taxation were devolved by Westminster to Wales - and they are both relevant to property.

I agree to an extent but actually your argument is irrelevant. Education is a devolved service to Wales, Scotland and N. Ireland and the Scottish government provides free tuition to all Scots. The Welsh government - which has been Labour controlled since devolution in 1998 - could also provide free tuition if it chose to.

Welsh voters would have heard (and/or read) Corbyn's student pledge, they would also have head (and/or read) the Welsh Labour leader Carwyn Jones' pre-election statement "“it would be difficult to conceive a scenario where Welsh Labour did not match the UK Labour Party’s pledge to abolish fees" and may well have voted accordingly.

After all, politicians and especially those promising "a kinder, gentle politics" don't lie to the electorate, do they?

The University Monopoly Cartel needs to be regulated as they All put up fees to the £9250 cap no competition at all regardless of there and the course status

The origional funding formula £3000 max had no interest and the Torys couldnt marketise it to there mates in the financial instriments sector when students had £9000 max debt at the end of their course.

Labours Policy is to tax Companies back to Below the Corporation tax levels in 2010 to fund it

You're having a laff. Your own education spokesperson agreed that this pledge will cost the tax payer one hundred billion Pounds, many times more than any increase in Corporation Tax will provide. And that's before you've raised one hundred billion Pounds to pay for the new infrastructure you've promised, the one hundred and fifty billion Pounds for a National Investment Bank, re-nationalisation of the railways and all fuels, nationalising the buses .... your spending list goes on and on.

But where's the money coming from?

"Magic Money Trees" is about the most truthful answer. I presume your leader is tending to them in his allotment in Islington even as we speak.

Let's hallucinate for a moment and imagine that Corbyn wakes-up on a Friday morning to discover that Labour has won the the most seats in the General Election. At that precise moment, he is NOT the Prime Minister, that person is the very same person who was Prime Minister when Corbyn went to bed on Polling Day. Two things have to take place before Corbyn becomes Prime Minister:

1. The incumbent, presently Theresa May, has to visit Buckingham Palace (or wherever the Queen happens to be on the day - it could be Sandringham, Windsor or Holyrood) for an appointment with the Queen at which she notifies the Queen that she is unable to form a government as she no longer has an overall majority in the House of Commons. At this point she is still the Prime Minister and her party is still the party of government.
2. After a decent interval the Queen will summon Corbyn and ask him if he can form a government. If Labour has an absolute majority then he will answer in the affirmative whereupon the Queen will invite him to be her Prime Minister and form his government. But if Labour has the most seats but NOT an overall majority, Corbyn will be asked to attempt to form a government of coalition (or other looser alliances) and return to the Palace if successful. In this latter case, May remains Prime Minister and leads a caretaker government.

There is, therefore, a limited window of opportunity for those with wealth to clickey-clickey their mouse buttons and transfer their capital to safe havens such as the Caymans, BVI, or maybe offshore it in the Channel Islands, Gibraltar or Malta. Foreign investors will join the capital flight and remove themselves and their money abroad: this is equivalent to what took place in France a few years ago when the ardent socialist Hollande wanted to tax France's millionaires excessively - they took their money and came to live in London; there are currently more French millionaires living in London that in the whole of France.

So the wealthy are no longer there for you to rob, where else can you get some badly-needed cash? You mentioned Expats elsewhere a day or two ago. Just how much do you think you'll get from a few thousand elderly folk living in timeshares on the Costa Lota? About €10 in small change and a few orphaned buttons is all! Or maybe you'll do what Gordon Brown did - a pensions grab. Oh wait ... no that won't work any more.

What about raiding Sir Richard Branson's bank account - no, you'd be out of luck there; he banks in the BVI. Or maybe Sir Philip Green, that rather odious shopkeeper? You'd be out of luck there: all his money is safely in his wife's hands; she's a Non-Dom and permanent resident of Monte Carlo. In addition, he could simply take their money out of Taveta Investments which would mean the closure of Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Outfit, Tammy, TopMan, TopShop, Wallis and Warehouse, thereby putting some 45,000 on the dole.

You want the top 1% to pay for your profligacy forgetting that that the very people you loath provide investment and jobs and contribute far more to UK plc than their income tax statements suggest.

Jeremy better franchise the growing of his Magic Money Trees because he's going to need many more than he can possibly fit into his allotment.

I dont know what happened to your ongoing leaving thread but this was my last reply to your repeated lies

I also have the screen shots

I Note your row back that you knew the Lady in question before me She never taught Bob Ward or anyone else Cebuano untill 3 months after we were living in Guadalupe I organised a small goups of expats who met at our house including my best man in my subsequent marriage 4 years later. Bobs involvement was well after the end of my relationship and was through the Forum you were both Moderators of

Your word may have less value than you suppose Mark given you continue to try to peddle the second hand lies that you have no posability (or possible interest)to know the truth of.

The only reason you attempted to blackmail me ,with your threats of "revelations" is because you are the woirst kind of cowardly bully but I will always call such out

Now remember your new found resolve to stay off politics and your promise to Dom

I heard last night that on average a graduate from an English university will leave with debt of over £50,000.

Many will die without having repaid the debt....what a millstone to have on one's shoulders.

A policy introduced by politicians who benefitted from subsidised higher education - but are now happy to pull-up the drawbridge behind them.

Shameful.

From poorer families its now £57000 due to the maintanace grant withdrawel plus 6.3% interest wereas in the origional version £9000 max with no interest

If we use your example of £50000 @ 5% it looks like this after 10 years

If an amount of £50,000 is borrowed at an annual interest rate of 5%, compounded monthly, the value of the debt after 10 years can be calculated as follows...

P = 50000. r = 5/100 = 0.05 (decimal). n = 12. t = 10.

If we plug those figures into the formula, we get:

A = 50000 (1 + 0.05 / 12) ^ (12(10)) = 82,350.50

So, the debt balance after 10 years is £82,350.50

I agree shamefull for our children to be so burdened

No student is expected to repay any of his student loan until his earnings top £20,000 a year and all individual debt is written-off after thirty years. The ones who will benefit the most from the abolition of tuition fees - the middle and upper classes - would otherwise have to repay the most as they're statistically more likely to be earning the floor figure at a much earlier age.

Who introduced tuition fees in the first place? Tony Blair's Labour government in 1998! They were the politicians who benefited from free tuition and maintenance grants for 18 years under the previous Conservative administration!

I agree!

Burdened by your party's education policy!

My son borrowed about 40 grand.. That loan was a life time investment in himself.
4 years of employment and loan fully paid.
No drama.
Good planning and an attitude for saving that we taught him from the age of two..

Good luck to him.

Quite remarkable that he's managed to repay on average £10,000 a year. I can only surmise he landed a highly paid job from the get go (which most graduates don't); he's lived like a hermit or he's had some assistance.

Most definitely atypical.

His secondary school wouldn't even let him take A level maths after he got an A grade in GCSE..
That really pissed me off to be honest and knocked his confidence a bit.. We also had to practically beg the A level Chemistry teacher to let him take A level Chemistry because of the math situation..Thankfully we were successful and he got 5 straight A`s.
He still had to take an additional year in Uni for a maths foundation because of the secondary school cock up..
He got his Chemical engineering degree and was recruited immediately,on 26K starting salary.
Very proud of him...He`s going places that boy...and DEBT free!

Since 26K yields 1737 GBP after tax and NI, repayments would amount to 833 that gives 904 net per month. Do-able if sharing a house and living like a student.

26K was starting salary...Little bugger wont tell me what he earned since then!
I suppose that`s his business now..

You suppose right. And it's monumentally unimportant.
Sometimes it's even OK to take a pay-cut to get where you want to be.

A very positive and uplifting tale - I can well understand your pride and the support you gave him (in terms of advocating his case with the school etc) is commendable.

I confess a deal of incredulity however that someone on a starting salary of £26k (gross) could - over 4 years - repay £40k (Net). All other things being equal his living expenses must have been minimal and he must have exercised massive restraint and commitment. Most praiseworthy.

The wider point about ladling huge debt on our kids still remains. I just think our priorities as a nation are stacked against ordinary folk.

Personally it saddens me to see the tuition fees in the UK go the way of the United States. A college education in the US is ridiculously expensive. A cheap course is $23,000 a year. A more expensive course is $50,000 a year. And a bachelor degree is for four years and not three as in the UK. Given that living expenses, books and so on come on top of that, it's easy to see how expensive it becomes.

Fifty thousand pounds is a lot of debt to place a graduate in and if that figure continues to rise, it may well discourage people from less wealthy backgrounds from attending, widening the so called 'class divide'.

There are 15 universities in scotland for 5.92 million people and 10 in wales for 3.06 million. That equates to one university per 394,666 in Scotland and one university per 306,000 in wales. That's 25% less people/university in wales.

The Barnett formula which governs budgetary spending in Wales and Scotland takes % of UK population into account. Scotland receives a budget from the UK. So does Wales. However Wales receives considerably less, and, because it has fewer heads of population (and hence less funding) per university, has less money for each one. Scotland however receives income from North sea oil and gas. Wales does not. Wales is not able to set it's own taxation. The welsh government could not provide free tuition without making cuts elsewhere. Where would they get the money?

I agree with your general point, John, however:

If you're looking for inequality then you need to compare places not campuses. You also have to compare the relative numbers of foreign students at each who pay a much higher tuition fee which enables the universities to offer grants and bursaries to local students.

That was certainly true when Blair introduced tuition fees. However Scotland's oil and gas revenue has dropped dramatically, particularly over the last two and a bit years - remember that revenue was going to fund the country's independence!

I agree that in general tuition fees should not be charged to British citizens attending British universities, regardless of which constituent part of the UK the student comes from or the university is located. However in return, the student needs to complete the course and take the final exam. Those who drop-out mid-course or fail to take their final exams should have to repay their tuition fees: that is only fair on the tax payer.

I agree that students who fail to complete the course should have to repay the fees. That seems fair to me. And if we are in agreement on the rest, then by definition we have to conclude that what we have here is not a 'tuition fees betrayal' but rather a matter of economics.

Not that I'm personally a labour supporter, but I do like these things to be balanced.