Theresa May’s launch of a review into university funding shows she has her priorities all wrong, says the Sun. It is true that the funding system for higher education ‘is broken’. ‘But it is nowhere near a priority for Britain, Theresa May or the Tories,’ according to the paper. Yes, ‘some fees should be slashed’. And yes, ‘many courses are pointless’. But the Prime Minister is merely ‘tinkering’ in a bid to match Corbyn’s ‘economically insane’ promise of free tuition. She should stop doing so now, says the Sun, which calls her promised shake-up ‘a distraction from what really matters to millennials’: the ‘dire shortage’ of homes. ‘Suffocating planning rules, sluggish developers and NIMBYs’ should be the Tories’ target – not tuition fees, the paper concludes.
Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph adds to the pressure on Jeremy Corbyn over his alleged meetings with a former Czech agent. Despite the ‘shrug of indifference’ which has, for the most part, greeted this story, Corbyn – and John McDonnell – should not ‘escape the scrutiny’ that such alleged contact with foreign diplomats should mean. After all, Corbyn ‘aspires to be the Prime Minister’. This means that Britain ‘is entitled…to ask questions about (his) character’. ‘Imagine’ for instance, says the Telegraph, that a Tory leader had been accused of contact with an ‘apartheid-era South African spy’. The screams for an inquiry from Labour would be deafening. So, if Corbyn has nothing to hide from his meeting with Jan Sarkocy, a former Czech spy, then the Labour leader ‘would agree’ to the publications of ‘his Cold War files held in the archives of the various Iron Curtain security agencies’. ‘Mr Corbyn needs to explain himself,’ the Telegraph concludes.
John McDonnell’s hint that some investors in private finance initiative could lose out under a Labour government is an ‘own goal’, says the Times. There is no doubt that this policy is a ‘punitive’ one and has little to do with ‘economic management’, says the paper. We should remember, says the Times, that this plan is being proposed by a politician who ‘named Marx, Lenin and Trotsky as his ‘most significant influences’. In light of this, ‘even raising the possibility that the state might not compensate investors in PFI deals makes a perverse ideological sense’. Yet for all the ‘problems with PFIs’, such a plan would be a big mistake. While many would find it hard to feel sorry for investors in unpopular PFI deals losing out, it would ‘make any future public-private partnership more expensive for taxpayers’ in the long-term. ‘Labour’s policies are a threat to property and prosperity’, says the Times.
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