Today saw a weird piece of media face with an impostor conning several news outlets into reporting that Edinburgh West MP Mike Crockart was going to resign as a PPS and vote against the tuition fees increase. The impostor even got as far as being interviewed by the BBC on the World at One before the hoax was rumbled. His office said that, “Mike is still waiting to see what the final offer will be before he votes and that has always been our line”.
(Ironically just before this took place, I was in Millbank to appear on the BBC’s …
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is interviewed today in the Independent on Sunday, with the report inevitably featuring tuition fees:
He says he is still determined to tackle social disadvantage and educational underperformance, and says that a £150m national scholarship scheme will give a year’s free tuition to 18,000 students on free school meals. Universities wanting to breach the £6,000 cap on fees, to charge up to £9,000, will have to give another free year to the poorest students.
In the coming weeks, months and years he will need to “grit my teeth, display a bit of resilience, and explain calmly and
Sometimes political life is just one controversy after another. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes, a special issue takes centre stage and becomes totemic – a key decision which sets the course for a whole period of government. So it was for Blair’s Iraq. So it is now for Clegg’s tuition fees.
William Cullerne Bown has described our dilemma well. The options are to trash the Coalition or to trash the Liberal Democrat brand. There is no third way. It is far too late to rethink whether we should have signed the NUS pledge, …
LDV has had sight of this letter, written by a group on facebook, and sent to Lib Dem MPs.
Dear Liberal Democrat MPs,
We, the undersigned students, recognise the benefits of tuition fee reform and urge you to vote for it.
We see that our annual loan repayments will fall due to the substantial rise in the loan repayment threshold, and that the grants system will become more generous. We see that part-time students will no longer be forced to pay up-front fees and that poorer graduates will benefit from a rise in the repayment threshold.
I’m sure many of you, like myself, watched Vince Cable’s interview on the Politics Show last week where he denied breaking any promises to oppose a rise in tuition fees, with a certain feeling of discomfort. But now I think the time has come to discuss a change in narrative.
Lib Dem MPs and Ministers (including up until now Vince Cable,) have a reputation for giving straight-forward honest answers to journalists questions without coming across as evasive or revisionist. However, with the tuition fee pledge to deny a promise was ever made and as such never broken is not a …
Nick Clegg, has written to Aaron Porter, President of the National Union of Students, in response to the NUS’ ‘Right to Recall’ campaign.
His letter in full:
Dear Aaron,
Thank you for writing to me about your ‘Right to Recall’ campaign.
The idea of a right to recall was something I proposed when I first became leader of the Liberal Democrats and I am proud that it is now part of the Coalition Agreement. However my proposal was for it to apply to MPs who were found guilty of serious wrongdoing by the parliamentary authorities. My intention has always been that it should be
How to avoid a three-way car crash with most ministers voting for the Browne Report, some ministers and many backbench MPs abstaining and yet a further group of Lib Dem MPs voting against is now the main debate within the Parliamentary Party over tuition fees.
Some changes to the original Browne report proposals have already been promised, but the debate has now moved on from the question of whether or not there could or should be more modifications to how people will vote on that modified package, which is unlikely to change any further at this point.
By Iain Roberts
| Mon 22nd November 2010 - 2:21 pm
I recently spent the day at the office of a Lib Dem MP, who’s been targetted for a protest about the proposed increase in tuition fees. As a veteran of quite a few protests myself, especially back in my student days, it’s interesting and quite fun to be on the receiving end.
My personal view on the Lib Dem tuition fees position is one I’ve previously written about. With hindsight, the pledge was clearly a mistake and our MPs shouldn’t have made it. However, we are where we are and MPs have to consider not just the pledge but actually …
The BBC is reporting that Vince Cable has argued that there’s been no betrayal of students by the Lib Dems, and that he’s working to get the best deal for students.
We didn’t break a promise. We made a commitment in our manifesto, we didn’t win the election. We then entered into a coalition agreement, and it’s the coalition agreement that is binding upon us and which I’m trying to honour
Vince speaks in an interview to be broadcast on the Politics Show later today.
By Shas Sheehan
| Sat 20th November 2010 - 10:27 am
What a mess we seem to have got ourselves into over tuition fees. How on earth did we get here?
I can only speak for myself. I joined the party because of its policies on green issues, clarity of thought on civil liberties, regard for international law, opposition to nuclear energy and renewal of Trident, and tuition fees.
This latter policy was very important to me.
I don’t come from a privileged background. At school I was one of the kids on free school meals and to go to university I had a full grant.
I hated free school meals because everyone knew who …
We all know that the review is merely a suggestion for how the government should approach this situation. Yet the fact that Nick and Vince seem to be jumping on the Browne bandwagon leads me to expect the worst. It would seem that they need reminding of the slogan we fought with during this year’s General Election
By Iain Roberts
| Tue 16th November 2010 - 5:29 pm
Have the Liberal Democrats betrayed students? The NUS certainly say so, and plenty of people agree.
They’re wrong.
The Liberal Democrats have made a u-turn on tuition fees – they haven’t denied it. As I argued a few days ago, the Lib Dems have no claim to be morally superior to any other party. We didn’t want to go back on commitments and promises but, like Labour and the Conservatives, we have done.
But is that u-turn a betrayal of students?
Or, to put it another way, is the result of that u-turn that students get a worse deal than they’d …
There’s an interesting short video from the BBC’s Politics Show South East, featuring the new Liberal Democrat MP for Eastbourne, Stephen Lloyd.
“Every single decision I take goes through the prism of Eastbourne,” says Stephen, as he shares his thoughts on coalition government and tuition fees.
You can also read about a typical Westminster work day for Stephen:
His Wednesday starts at 9 am with a two-hour long Work and Pensions select committee.
He goes straight from there to Prime Minister’s Questions and the big topic of debate is the government’s decision to allow universities to charge tuition fees of up to £9,000.
There is a rather American saying which runs along the lines of “We have four boxes with which to defend our freedom: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury
box, and the ammo box. In that order”.
It becomes a good way of putting Wednesday’s violence in context, particularly for those that are trying to argue some similarity between the suffragette movement and student fees. That movement had no choice but to resort to violent occupation because the very thing its members were campaigning for was access to the ballot box.
But rather than the entire NUS executive distancing themselves …
The story is clearly designed to make the reader believe that, even as Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems spoke out against tuition fees, it was secretly their plan to renege on the party’s manifesto pledge. Yet, if you read more carefully it becomes clear that the party was simply anticipating the likely hung parliament scenario — that faced with two parties, Labour and the Tories, committed to tuition fees …
Over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free, Tim Farron MP reiterates his pledge to vote against tuition fees, calling them “the poll tax of our generation” – a reference to the angry scenes at Wednesday’s demonstration.
In his article, Tim makes the distinction between the NUS pledge against tuition fees, signed by Parliamentary candidates before the General Election (which he intends to abide by), the Liberal Democrat manifesto (which became a negotiating document) and the Coalition Agreement (which contains 65% of the Liberal Democrat manifesto).
I was at the tuition fees protest as one of the Lib Dems who had agreed via Facebook to march together at the demonstration. Amongst the (inevitably violence dominated) coverage of the protests, I decided that I would like to give my impression of what occurred for the benefit of those who did not attend.
For me the protest began at 9.30am by boarding a Student Union organised coach to London from the University of Surrey. There were about 100 of us in total from Surrey and the general feeling on the coaches was upbeat as we gave our names and …
Rarely, both the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader had reason to be absent from Prime Minister’s Questions today. So it was dear Harriet versus the Cleggster.
As an added twist, it turned into a “Higher Education Special”, in part spurred by the student demonstrations outside parliament as the session was unfolding. There were no less than ten questions on higher education. My, the Labour whips had been busy. Sadly this meant less time for the constituency issues often raised by MPs.
I witnessed the session live via Twitter, where Nick Clegg received a rather jaundiced reception – to put it mildly. When I look back on the video, it seems to me that Nick Clegg did a remarkably good job of what was probably the most difficult parliamentary session of his career. Indeed, he looked terrified beforehand, as Northern Irish questions overan.
Harman started by asking how Clegg’s April pledge to end university tuition fees was going.
Nick Clegg replied that:
..we have stuck to our wider ambition to make sure that going to university is done in a progressive way, so that people who are currently discouraged from going to university—bright people from poor backgrounds, who are discouraged by the system that we inherited from the right hon. and learned Lady’s Government—are able to do so. That is why our policy is more progressive than hers.
Harman said he hoped he’d tell that to the protestors outside and quoted him saying that fees of £7000 would be a “disaster” – so how would he describe fees of £9,000?
Nick Clegg said that there was a consensus that graduates should pay some contribution and added:
The proposals that we have put forward will mean that those who earn the least will pay much less than they do at the moment—while those who earn the most will pay over the odds to provide a subsidy to allow people from poor backgrounds to go to university—and will, for the first time, end the discrimination against the 40% of people in our universities who are part-time students, who were so shamefully treated by her Government.
Harman, rightly, said that none of the Labour party agree with fees of £9000 a year. I think Harman was spot on when she said that this is not about the deficit. It will be cleared by the time the new tuition fees scheme starts. It’s about the proportion of graduate (what she described wrongly as “student”) funding versus public funding. Clegg was rather disingenuous when he referred to a consensus that graduates should pay “some” contribution. The government plans implies 100% graduate funding in some cases and 80-90% graduate funding in many cases. That’s all but getting rid of public funding.
Harman threw an attempted joke in: “We all know what it is like, Mr Speaker. You are at Freshers’ week. You meet up with a dodgy bloke and you do things that you regret. Is not the truth of it that the Deputy Prime Minister has been led astray by the Tories?”
We all know what that is like do we, Hattie? Ummmm let me think. I didn’t actually meet any dodgy blokes in Freshers’ Week, personally. I spent most of my entire year at University trying to find a dodgy woman but, sadly, failed.
Clegg then had an excellent riposte to Harman’s general thrust:
I know that the right hon. and learned Lady now thinks that she can reposition the Labour party as the champion of students, but let us remember the Labour party’s record: against tuition fees in 1997, but introduced them a few months later; against top-up fees in the manifesto in 2001, then introduced top-up fees. Then Labour set up the Browne review, which it is now trashing, and now the Labour party has a policy to tax graduates that half the Front-Bench team does not even believe in. Maybe she will go out to the students who are protesting outside now and explain what on earth her policy is.
All in all, I thought Clegg did an excellent job of outlining the fairness of the coalition’s plan while obviously being on the back foot, due to going back on the promise.
But an emailer to BBC Live called Robert Taylor put it very well: “Nick Clegg is not breaking his promise to the electorate regarding tuition fees; the LibDems did NOT win the election – had they done so they would not have increased the fees thereby keeping their promise.”
Quite frankly, whatever Nick Clegg does or says on this topic, people will always associate him and the Liberal Democrats with “breaking their promise on tuition fees”.
We can argue until we’re blue in the face that it was a daft promise to make in the first place, that Labour introduced tuition fees and increased them, that politics is the art of the possible, that the government plan is progressive and (as John Hemming has ingeniously put it) “a graduate tax in all but name”.
But, whatever we do or say, still the Tuition Fees Albatross will remain around our necks and that of Nick Clegg in particular for at least a generation. So we need to get used to that.
And for Monty Python fans: no, it doesn’t come with any wafers.
“If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.” Barack Obama
“Our party has long prided itself on its commitment to education as the great leveller; the best way to create social mobility and equality of opportunity in society” – words written by Jo Swinson MP in her article yesterday.
I agree with her, and that’s why I disagree that a near tripling of fees meets that commitment. That’s why I will be lobbying MPs to vote down the measure in the House of Commons in December.
Over at The Guardian’s Comment is Free website, Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley John Hemming has penned a robust defence of the Coalition’s plans for higher education funding in England, taking as his starting point the IFS’s findings that more than half of students will pay 9% of income over £21,000 a year for 30 years: “In other words this new system is a graduate tax in all but name.” Here’s an excerpt:
It is, however, not an open-ended graduate tax as it has a cap. The cap works in such a way that graduates with higher earnings get to
He called for a united response to “a financial crisis that has changed the world” and proposed “four levers for durable, lasting prosperity”:
Openness in trade; more flexible labour markets; greater investment in infrastructure; and a workforce equipped to thrive in the green, digital economy of the future.
Towards the end, he touched on UK university tuition fees and outlined the proposed reforms:
The UK is already blessed with a world-class university sector. But we need to secure it for the future…
Vince Cable, Lib Dem secretary of state for business, innovation and skills, has sent the following email to Lib Dem members following today’s announcement of the Coalition’s proposals for higher education funding in England:
The Liberal Democrats have always championed our universities. We have long fought for a fair deal for students.
Now in Government we are in a position to turn that campaigning into real action.
The higher education package I am announcing today will promote high-quality university teaching and research. It will guarantee fair access for all, regardless of background. It will deliver a progressive, sustainable funding structure.
By Stephen Tall
| Wed 3rd November 2010 - 12:25 pm
It’s three weeks since Vince Cable announced in the House of Commons that he, on behalf of the Coalition Government, supported the broad thrust of The Browne Report’s recommendations — in particular, that tuition fees in England should be increased.
This Lib Dem policy U-turn sparked the biggest outcry among party members of the Coalition to date, with many members regarding opposition to tuition fees as fundamental to a belief in free education and to the party’s broader identity. (See the comments threads here, here and here, for example.)
No. I don’t like Vince Cable’s announcement today on higher education either.
Nevertheless, Party Policy is clear: we want fees to go. This means that we don’t need to spend a six figure sum on a special conference just to repeat ourselves. Or to say we’re cross with Vince. Nor is there any need of a grand public statement in the Guardian letters page. Or a row at Federal Policy Committee.
FPC is still asking itself what it is for. On the one hand, it must get on with developing new Party policy – but with sharply limited resources. On the …
This weekend I had the pleasure of chairing a debate for the East of England Conference. Before the day began I had trepidation about the emergency motions.
Normally emergency motions are unusual, if not rare. However this year we faced a choice of Community Hospitals versus Tuition Fees, both controversial, both worthy of debate.
In my heart of hearts I really wanted Tuition Fees to be debated and I knew I had to remain neutral as chair of the session. Although my stance on tuition fees has never been hidden, I have as a parliamentary candidate signed the pledge, I …
The Vice Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University writes…
I am opposed to what are commonly called ‘top up’ fees in higher education and would resist any move to impose upfront fees for higher education. But, this is not what the Browne recommendations propose.
The weekend before Browne reported I was in despair and angry. It was becoming increasingly apparent that the Coalition government was going to impose a 75-80% cut on the teaching budget for higher education and expect the shortfall to be recovered through an increase in fees.
I am the Vice-Chancellor of a large metropolitan university, with just under 35,000 students. …
Both of the candidates to be the next Liberal Democrat President have expressed their support for the party retaining a long-term aim of abolishing tuition fees.
Tomorrow Liberal Democrat Voice will publish in full the answers from Susan Kramer and Tim Farron to a set of questions Lib Dem Voice has posed them. Their answers paint two different views on what the role should be of the Party President and how they would approach it. But on several issues they both agree, including on tuition fees:
Do you believe the party should have a long-term commitment to the abolition of tuition fees?
Going into a coalition government with another party was always going to be hard, particularly with the Tories! It feels to me like a trip to the dentist. Something I know is the right thing to do for the long term, but very painful in the short term.
I supported the coalition. Given that I spent the last eight years as a relatively high profile Liberal Democrat in Liverpool, a city that judges it’s people and particularly it’s politicians by how much you hate the Tories, it was a brave thing to do!
David Willetts said he disagreed with one of the main proposals of Lord Browne’s radical blueprint for universities, published last week.
Browne, former chief executive of BP, recommended ministers allow universities to set tuition fees – currently £3,290 a year for students in England – as high as they thought they could command.
Browne said institutions charging more than £6,000 should have to pay a rising percentage of each additional £1,000 as a levy to government. This would mean a university that charges £7,000 would receive 94% of the fee, while one charging £10,000 would receive 81%.
At conference I spoke about the importance of retaining our character in coalition and the importance of having distinctive policies to ensure that, come the next election, people remain clear about the Liberal Democrats and what we stand for.
The Browne review on university funding and tuition fees gives us the perfect opportunity to differentiate ourselves from the other parties.
We have campaigned against tuition fees for years, while Labour introduced them and raised them and the Conservatives seek to create a free market model for our universities.
Part of the coalition agreement included allowing the Liberal Democrat MPs to abstain from …
Jeff How relevant is this to Trump’s MAGA movement, to Farage and Reform?
Of little to none I would have thought. The political ideologies that came to d...
Nonconformistradical I second Henry's comments about Barrow - this south-eastener has at least, albeit not recently, set foot in the Barrow constituency (visiting friends who lived ...
John Peters I would not have classed Barrow-in-Furness as post industrial. For decades it has had the same major employer - the dockyards. It manafactures the UK's nuclear ...
David Raw @ Daniel Walker, "we should have the cheapest possible democracy".
I didn't say that, Daniel, though what I imply is that the party needs to prove to and mak...
Henry I do get very annoyed by the comments on these by-election posts. The over-exaggeration of our comeback because we won last week and then complain when we finis...
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