Labour MP tears into his party’s ‘middle class’ tuition fees policy

Much excitement from Labour this morning over the new IFS report on tuition fees. With research finding that students from disadvantaged backgrounds will graduate with debts in excess of £57,000, Labour’s shadow education minister has said it’s time to ‘deliver a debt-free education system run for the many not the few’. Conveniently, the party has not bothered to comment on the other finding of the report – that Labour’s plan to scrap fees completely would benefit richer students the most.

Happily one Labour comrade is open to this view point. In an article for the Fabian Society, Phil Wilson – the MP for Sedgfield – describes Labour’s policy to abolish tuition fees as ‘a middle class offer to young people on the whole from middle-class backgrounds’

‘The direct offer to students to abolish tuition fees from September this year must have helped too; a middle class offer to young people on the whole from middle-class backgrounds.