You can’t beat Corbyn with Miliband

Tuition fees have all but killed the Liberal Democrats. The breach of their manifesto pledge to abolish the charges, compounded by them voting for a fees increase, broke the party. Even the opportunities presented by Brexit have not revived them. In their defence, they can plead that tuition fees make fools of all parties. The Conservatives opposed them at first, then raised them to £9,000 a year. The Labour party introduced them, yet now campaigns to abolish them.

In 2018, we seem to be in for another bout of tuition-fees silliness. No. 10 is clear that Jo Johnson was moved from the universities brief in the reshuffle because he was obstructing a review of the current policy. Downing Street and the Department for Education have been at loggerheads over the issue since the party conference, when both Johnson and Justine Greening, who was pushed out in the shuffle, made clear that they didn’t think much of either the freeze in tuition fees or the plans for a review.

The official line from No. 10 is that it is committed to a review of higher education and more details will be announced soon. The expectation is that with a new ministerial team in place Downing Street will get its review. But a lengthy examination of student finance would be a mistake in political and policy terms.

Politically, you can’t get better than free. Fiddling around with the fee level or the repayment threshold isn’t going to be able to compete with Jeremy Corbyn’s commitment to junk fees altogether. A review would only help Labour by raising the salience of the issue. What No. 10 hasn’t grasped is that you can’t beat Corbyn with Miliband. Any version of the ex-Labour leader’s 2015 pledge to reduce fees won’t appeal to those seduced by Corbyn’s pledge to scrap them.