By Nick Hollinghurst:
Advice from Shadow Chancellor to Labour Leader goes Unheeded.
Just found this gem from Alan Johnson written in the Independent of Sunday of 26th September, 2010. Alan Johnson in a “Gissa job!” piece (which worked!) wrote a “letter” to Ed Miliband the newly elected leader of the Labour Party in which he gave Ed six pieces of advice.
The final one went, “Oh, and for goodness’ sake, don’t pursue a graduate tax. We should be proud of our brave and correct decision to introduce tuition fees. Students don’t pay them, graduates do, when they’re earning more than £15,000 a year, at very low rates, stopped from their pay just like a graduate tax, but with the money going where it belongs: to universities rather than the Treasury.”
Ed Miliband shortly afterwards made Alan Johnson Shadow Chancellor. This shows, I think, that either Alan is forgiven for this bit of Lib Demmery, or Ed Miliband secretly agrees with him (and us) – or, and this is perhaps the more likely, both.
Under the Coalition proposals the repayment salary threshold rises from Labour’s £15,000 to £21,000 and the fees cap falls from the £7,000 proposed by Lord Browne to £6,000 under the Coalition. This could rise to £9,000 if a university can justify it to the government, but they then have to provide significant financial help to poorer students.
The Labour proposals, now heavily pushed by Labour member and party careerist Aaron Porter, NUS President and Susan Nash, NUS Vice-President (and featuring on Ed Miliband’s blog), call instead for the graduate tax imposition Labour originally rejected! Labour and the NUS want to shackle graduates with the 20-year sentence of a tax surcharge of up to 2.5%.
Do our students really want a tax surcharge that could mean them paying back tuition fees many times over during that 20 years? Having to adapt to the force of circumstance within a governing Coalition, as the Liberal democrats are having to do, is one thing, but Labour’s cynical U-turn for supposed party advantage is quite another – and quite shameful.