Keir Starmer says ‘vast majority’ of Labour leadership pledges still stand as he backs away from abolishing tuition fees – UK politics live

The Green party has attacked Keir Starmer for abandoning his promise to get rid of tuition fees and confirmed that it still favours their abolition.

Adrian Ramsay, the party’s co-leader, said:

This is the latest U-turn from Keir Starmer’s Labour and this time it’s students who are paying a heavy price. The Green party believes tuition fees should be scrapped and grants restored.

Higher education is a public good and should therefore be properly funded by government. Students in England pay some of the highest fees in the world, while in Scotland, Germany and Sweden university education is free. This shows that the whopping £9,000 charge for students, introduced by the coalition government and now backed by Labour, is a political choice.

Publicly funded higher education is not only possible but essential to a society committed to equality and social mobility.

Momentum, the Labour group set up to promote Jeremy Corbyn’s agenda when he was party leader, claims that Keir Starmer could end up like Nick Clegg if he abandons his promise to abolish tuition fees.

Responding to what Starmer said on this this morning (see 9.01am), Momentum spokesperson said:

This move wouldn’t just fly in the face of party democracy and the wishes of Labour Students. It would be a betrayal of millions of young people in desperate need of hope. The Labour leadership should learn from Nick Clegg’s failure, not repeat it.
Keir was elected on a promise to abolish tuition fees. With higher education in crisis and young people facing a future of high rents & even higher debts, this pledge is more urgent than ever. Trust matters. Young people matter.

The Liberal Democrats under Clegg saw their support among younger voters collapse after they performed a U-turn on tuition fees after going into coalition with the Tories in 2010. It was one of the main reasons why they went from having 57 MPs after the 2010 election to just eight after the one in 2015.

But Starmer’s U-turn is different, for at least two differences. Clegg went back on a manifesto promise, whereas Starmer has gone back on a promise made in a leadership contest, to party members not to the electorate as a whole.

And the Liberal Democrats did not just commit to abolishing tuition fees in their manifesto; most of their MPs signed a pledge saying they would “vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament” – only for Clegg, and many others, to do the precise opposite when they were in the coalition government, voting in favour of a huge increase in fees.

Student opinion may also have moved on a bit on this issue since 2010. See 11.29am.

Only 28% of students in England want Labour to abolish tuition fees, poll suggests

Richard Adams

A new poll shows that just one in four students support Labour’s Corbyn-era policy to abolish university tuition fees in England, as Keir Starmer is widely expected to ditch Labour’s previous commitment.

The survey for the Higher Education Policy Institute found that just 28% of students in England want Labour to abolish tuition fees, while 20% want Labour to keep the current system of fees capped at £9,250 a year. Of the rest, 23% want Labour to cut undergraduate tuition fees to £6,000, and 15% want fees cut to £3,000, with 4% backing a graduate tax instead.

The poll of 1,000 undergraduates conducted by Savanta found that 46% of students said they would vote Labour while just 7% said they backed the Conservatives. Some 10% supported the Greens and 5% the Lib Dems.

Nick Hillman, director of HEPI, said:

The results won’t make happy reading for the Conservative party, who now have minimal support among undergraduates. While they will make happier reading for Labour, it is clear there is no single student funding model that would be overwhelmingly popular with students. This will make the opposition’s job harder as they firm up their policies in the run-up to the next [general] election.

There was stronger support among students for a maintenance grant aimed at poorer students, and more generous maintenance loans for all students.

Most students also said they supported the staff strikes over pay and pensions that have hit British universities this year, with 67% in support and only 16% opposed to industrial action.

In his Today interview Keir Starmer also implied that he was no longer committed to the pledge he made during the Labour leadership to increase income tax for the top 5% of earners (which is what the party proposed in the 2019 election campaign). When the presenter, Justin Webb, put it him that this would be a good option for a government needing more money, Starmer replied:

Justin, we are in a different situation now because obviously – I think we’ve got the highest tax burden since world war two.

When Webb pressed him on this, Starmer said “those with the broadest shoulders should, of course, pay more”. He said some Labour policies reflected this, and repeated the point he made in another interview about the need for a tougher windfall tax on energy firms. (See 9.44am.)

Webb then asked individuals, and asked again why Labour was not in favour of the wealthy paying more in income tax or capital gains tax. Starmer replied:

Justin, we’ve got the highest tax burden since the second world war. What we’ve had from the government is tax rise upon tax rise on tax rise. If they’ve proved one thing, it’s that their high-tax, low-growth economy doesn’t work.

What we’ve seen over the last 13 years is an economy that hasn’t worked. It hasn’t grown at any reasonable rate. That the net cause of the cost of living crisis, the reason why people’s wages haven’t gone up cost, why their living standards haven’t gone up. People will be asking themselves after 13 years, am I any better off? And the answer to that is no.

Now the question you then put to me: ‘Well, wouldn’t it be therefore sensible to raise taxes even higher’, I think the high-tax, low-growth model doesn’t work.

At that point Webb pointed out that they wealthy had been doing “pretty well” recently. So why not ask them to pay more in tax. Starmer replied:

Justin, that’s because my answer on what we do about the economy is we’ve got to grow the economy. And so I accept, Justin, I’m giving you a different answer to perhaps previous Labour leaders, which would always go straight to tax and spend.

I’m saying my central focus is on growing our economy.

If we had grown our economy at the same rate as we did under the last Labour government, we would have had tens of billions of pounds to spend on public services without raising tax. That’s why I’ve said … the number one mission will be growing the economy.

Webb then asked Starmer if he was arguing that putting taxes up for the rich would suppress growth. Starmer replied:

I actually think that the way to grow our economy is to have a different model for our economy.

Webb pressed him again. Would putting up taxes for the rich suppress the economy? Starmer replied:

I think it depends … I do agree with the principle that those with the broadest shoulders should pay more, pay their fair share.

But you are not going to enforce that, Webb suggested. Starmer replied:

That has been a principle and is of course an important principle.

But I am deliberately trying to shift the discussion because I do genuinely believe that the way to get our economy functioning again is to have a proper plan for growth. We haven’t had that for 13 years.

I’ve quoted the exchange at some length because, although Starmer backed away from the proposal to put up tax for the top 5% some time ago, and although he is now branding Labour as the party of “lower taxes for working people”, the exchange was significant because it showed quite how keen he is to distance himself from the more conventional “tax and spend” Labour tradition.

Starmer argued that the “high-tax, low-growth” model did not work. But there are plenty of people on the left who believe that there is a “high-tax, high-growth” model that might work. Starmer does not seem inclined to try.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, is calling for an investigation by the Competitions and Markets Authority into claims supermarkets are profiteering during the cost of living crisis, Jess Clark reports. Government figures show food and drink prices rose by almost 20% in the year to March, the fastest annual rate since 1977. Davey said:

We need to bring soaring food prices back under control and offer relief to families. That means cracking down on profiteering by food multinationals and the big supermarkets so customers get a fair deal.

In his Today interview Keir Starmer said he was no longer committed to the promise to abolish tuition fees that he made when standing for the Labour leadership because “we are in a different economic situation”.

But he claimed the “vast majority” of the promises he made in that contest, most famously set out in a list of 10 pledges, still applied. He told Today’s Justin Webb:

We are in a different economic situation. You and others would be quizzing me hard if I just simply said: ‘Well, I’m going to ignore the current economic situation and press on with something notwithstanding the cost when we get to an election in 2024’.

But there are very important pledges I made, the vast majority of which stand.

But some of them – one of them was, for example, defend free movement as we leave the EU. Well, we’ve left the EU, so we’re in a different situation. So that’s clear.

‘Vast majority’ is probably a generous way of counting. I’ll come back to this shortly with a proper analysis.

BP has beaten City forecasts to post one of the largest first-quarter profits in its history despite an easing in energy prices, Alex Lawson reports. It made £4bn in the first quarter of 2023.

In an interview with BBC Breakfast, Keir Starmer said these figures confirmed Labour’s argument that the windfall tax on energy companies did not go far enough.

He said that, while Labour “of course” wanted BP and other energy companies to be able to make profits “so they can invest”, the BP profits were “over and above” what was reasonable. He went on:

What we say in the Labour party is use that money, have a proper windfall tax that’s effective and use that money directly to freeze council tax.

The government has loopholes in the windfall tax they’ve put in place, so they aren’t using their money effectively.

Labour says one problem with the government’s windfall tax is that it allows an exemption for capital investment. Labour says it would remove this.

It also says that it would increase the rate of the windfall tax to 78%, which it says is the rate in Norway, and backdate it to January 2022. The government’s rate is 35%.

Together these changes would raise £10.4bn covering 2022-23 and 2023-24, Labour says.

This morning the Times has a story saying Keir Starmer is poised to abandon the pledge he made when he was running for the Labour leadership in 2020 to “support the abolition of tuition fees”. It was a continuation of a promise in Labour’s 2019 manifesto.

Starmer has been signalling that he will ditch this promise at least since last summer, when he refused to confirm it in a New Statesman interview. In January this year he indicated that economic changes since 2019 meant the promise would have to be revised. According to the Times, Starmer is now planning to give more details of his thinking in a speech later this month.

Asked about the story in his Today interview, Starmer said Labour would probably “move on” from the pledge. He said:

We are looking at options for how we fund these fees. The current system is unfair, it doesn’t really work for students, doesn’t work for universities.

Starmer said the party would, in the coming weeks, “set out a fairer solution”. He went on:

We are likely to move on from that commitment, because we do find ourselves in a different financial situation.

But Starmer said this did not mean Labour was “accepting for a moment that the current system is fair or that it is working”.

Good morning. We’re back waiting for the Sue Gray report. Today’s version will take the form of a written statement for a Cabinet Office minister described on the Commons order paper as an “update into the circumstances leading to the resignation of a senior civil servant”. This is the investigation ordered by the government into whether Gray, who had been a very senior civil servant as well as the author of the Partygate report, broke civil service rules by negotiating a move to become Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. In the past other senior officials have left the civil service to work for an opposition party, but Gray’s move was particularly controversial because news of her departure leaked before she had even resigned, and before she had told the civil service what she was doing.

At the weekend the Mail on Sunday reported that the inquiry into her departure was expected to say she broke civil service rules. It said:

Insiders told The Mail on Sunday they expect the Cabinet Office to conclude she breached the code on the grounds of ‘impartiality’, because she was involved in secret discussions with Labour when she was conducting sensitive meetings with ministers; of ‘honesty’, because Ministers were in the dark over the talks; and of ‘integrity’, because her professionalism could be called into question.

Today the Daily Telegraph has splashed on a similar story.

In his Telegraph report, Nick Gutteridge says:

Sue Gray held secret talks with Sir Keir Starmer while working for the team advising the Commons Partygate investigation, a report is set to reveal …

A report by the Cabinet Office is on Tuesday expected to find that she entered negotiations with Labour while she was working with the department’s Propriety and Ethics Team (PET). At the time the team was advising MPs on the privileges committee investigating Boris Johnson, which Tory sources said on Monday presented a conflict of interest.

This morning, in an interview with BBC Breakfast, Keir Starmer said he was confident that Gray had not broken any rules and that the government was only publishing this report now because it wanted to damage Labour ahead of Thursday’s local elections.

He said:

Firstly, I had no discussions with [Sue Gray] while she was investigating Boris Johnson [over Partygate] whatsoever. I don’t think anybody is suggesting that that is the case.

I’m confident that she hasn’t broken any of the rules.

Whenever a senior civil servant leaves the civil service, there’s always a process they have to go through before they take up another job. That’s the process she’s going through, quite rightly too.

Actually, today there’s nothing much new about this. And I’m afraid, with 48 hours to the election, what’s going on is the government is trying to sort of resurrect a story about Sue Gray mainly because they don’t want to talk about the cost living crisis, which actually is the thing that most people are most concerned about.

When it was put to him that the story was potentially damaging to Labour (Tories claim it undermines Starmer’s reputation as someone who always abides by the rules and proper process, and that hiring Gray has damaged the civil service’s reputation for impartiality), Starmer dismissed the story as an irrelevance. He said:

What I’d say to the government is, if you’re listening to people across the country, they’re not talking about Sue Gray. They’re talking about not being able to pay the bills. For heaven’s sake, talk about the issue which is of central concern to, I would have thought, most people watching this.

Starmer has also been on Radio 5 Live and the Today programme. I will post more from his interviews shortly.

Here is the agenda for the day.

Morning: Rishi Sunak chairs cabinet.

11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.

Lunchtime: The NHS Staff Council meets to decide whether to accept the pay offer for nurses, ambulance staff and other non-doctor employees working in the NHS.

2.30pm: James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, takes questions in the Commons.

3pm: Helen Whately, the social care minister, gives evidence to the Commons health committee.

The Sue Gray written statement could come any time during the day.

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