STUDENTS and education unions slammed Labour’s “betrayal of millions of young people in desperate need of hope” today after the party’s increasingly right-wing leadership dropped a pledge to abolish cripplingly high university tuition fees.
Sir Keir Starmer’s latest U-turn on yet another left-wing pledge which got him elected leader in 2020 will help to condemn “millions of future students to a life of debt” and leaves Britain even further away from the publicly funded higher education system it needs, they stressed.
The move is likely to draw criticism from the party’s left, which has repeatedly warned that attempts to please the right-wing press while failing to offer a genuinely progressive alternative will only benefit Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
With Tory MPs branding Jeremy Corbyn’s successor “Sir Flip-Flop,” Mr Sunak attempted to capitalise on the situation in a fiery Prime Ministers Questions today saying Sir Keir has made a “series of broken promises.”
These include now abandoned pledges to renationalise public services, increase income tax for the highest earners and defend freedom of movement post-Brexit.
Left wing faction Momentum compared Starmer’s shifting position to that of Nick Clegg, who famously went into the 2010 general election pledging to abolish tuition fees only to triple them when in government. A spokesperson for Momentum said: “This move wouldn’t just fly in the face of party democracy and the wishes of Labour Students. It would be a betrayal of millions of young people in desperate need of hope. The Labour leadership should learn from Nick Clegg’s failure, not repeat it.”
The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made similar comments. He tweeted: “Young people should not be saddled with a lifetime of debt just because they want to get an education. Abolish tuition fees, restore maintenance grants and deliver free education for all.”
Cullen commented that, although the outcome of today’s meeting appeared to be set, nurses will remain in dispute with the government over pay and staffing.
“Tuesday’s meeting with Steve Barclay appears a foregone conclusion,” said Cullen. “Different unions and different professions came to different, but respectable, conclusions on this pay offer.
“The deal being accepted by others does not alter the clear fact that nursing staff, as the largest part of the NHS workforce, remain in dispute with the government over unfair pay and unsafe staffing.”
And Cardwell exposed his link to the account when he tweeted one message pretending to be Gorst, thenimmediately deleted it and was stupid enough to put the same message out on the ‘Spam’ account moments later
Right-wing Labour MP Jess Phillips has deleted a tweet in which she said she bought her first home at the age of twenty and described how it changed her and her children’s ‘fortune’
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Phillips has previously told the Financial Times, presumably in an oddly-placed effort to boost her working-class credentials, that at age 22 she was living in a ‘squat’
Clarification published over false Newsnight claim following ban on former leader running as Labour candidate
The BBC has published a correction after a news item last month falsely claimed that former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had not apologised over antisemitism in the party.
The clarification referred to an episode of the flagship current affairs programme Newsnight on 28 March, following the decision by Labour’s executive committee to ban Corbyn from standing as a candidate in the next election.
The programme referenced Corbyn’s alleged “refusal to offer up any kind of apology” over accusations of antisemitism in the party under his watch.
It also questioned whether the former leader would refuse to apologise “as he has all the way up to now”, if the issue of antisemitism arose in an election campaign.
“To be clear, Mr Corbyn apologised for antisemitism in Labour on a number of occasions as Party Leader, including ahead of a meeting with Jewish community leaders in April 2018,” the BBC said on Thursday, in an entry on its “Corrections and Clarifications” page.
Not for the first time, Starmer and Labour claim local elections will affect national policies
Keir Starmer has suffered the indignity of corrective action by Twitter after he posted a claim that votes in the local elections next month will affect the NHS.
Starmer claimed that voting for Labour would lead to ‘an NHS that treats patients on time again’ – but of course, local government does not decide NHS policy, capacity or funding:
Starmer has defended Labour’s recent appalling campaign messages. Now a social media platform has had to attach information to his campaign claim to reduce the extent to which it misleads voters. The scandal comes on the same day news emerged that Starmer accepted corporate hospitality from a firm that had to pay out almost £11 million after installing Grenfell-like flammable cladding to an apartment block.
Party at centre of storm yesterday after false claims in local election campaign on social media platform
The Labour party’s ‘blue tick’ marking it as an authentic account has disappeared from its Twitter account. The party was at the centre of a storm yesterday when the social media platform had to attach warnings and ‘context’ to misleading claims in Labour’s local election campaign on the platform.
It’s possible the disappearance of the tick is an effect of Labour’s infamously poor ability to organise, which led to mass data breaches and the loss of sensitive member information to criminals and the loss of control of its systems for months, causing it to fail to pay Twitter’s charge for blue-tick verification – but it’s also possible that the party has been at least temporarily penalised for its and its leader’s rogue behaviour, dishonest claims and reported racism:
