So, just what exactly does Keir Starmer stand for? In the latest wheeze to distract from the Sue Gray drama and prove that Labour is now a Serious Party of Government, the spin doctors at Labour HQ have opted to ditch the party’s long-standing pledge to abolish tuition fees. As recently as 2021 he was lambasting it as ‘a huge debt for young people that they carry around for a long time’ which is ‘why we rightly committed at the last election to get rid of tuition fees.’
Yet all that has now changed apparently, as the party seeks to embrace a new-found spirit of fiscal probity – an approach that doesn’t extend to Labour’s eye-watering Net Zero commitments. Starmer told Radio 4’s Today programme that: ‘We are likely to move on from that commitment because we do find ourselves in a different financial situation. But I don’t want that to be read as us accepting for a moment that the current system is fair or that it’s working.’ So, er, the system is broken but we’re not going to fix it? So much for an end to sticking plaster politics…
The abolition of tuition fees was of course one of Starmer’s ‘ten pledges’ that secured him victory in the 2020 leadership race, back when he was live action role-playing as a Corbynite. Among those include ‘common ownership of rail, mail, energy and water’, ‘defend free movement as we leave the EU’, ‘increase income tax for the top five per cent of earners’, ‘abolish Universal Credit’ and ‘end outsourcing [in the] NHS, local government and justice system.’ All this at a time when he’s asking the country to vote him in on the basis of his so-called ‘five missions’.
It begs the question, as one BBC journalist put it to Starmer, ‘Why should we believe your five pledges when you binned your ten leadership pledges once you were elected?”
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