Senior Liberal Democrats are facing significant resistance from their political opponents over the less than graceful U-turn over student tuition fees.
Senior Liberal Democrats are facing significant resistance from their political opponents and no doubt their own activists, over the less than graceful U-turn over student tuition fees.
It is expected that Lord Browne will recommend a dramatic increase in student tuition fees, raising the cap to as much as £7,000 or scrapping it all together, in addition to raising the interest on student loan repayments – despite the Lib Dems pledging at the general election to remove fees altogether.
Some embarrassing photographs of Lib Dem cabinet members (never mind every single Lib Dem MP and 500 PPCs) signing the NUS pledge opposing tuition fees are likely to make appearances in the press over the coming days. The Lib Dem MPs pledged:
“…to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative.”
Among those MPs is Bristol West Lib Dem Stephen Williams; upon signing the NUS pledge as shadow minister for universities and skills, he said that the Lib Dem parliamentary party would vote against any increase in tuition fees and “fight any attempt to raise the cap”.
During May’s election campaign, Lib PPCs pledged that the party would abolish tuition completely. They even boasted that their manifesto policy had been fully costed, and that Lib Dems would start scrapping fees immediately, starting with final-year fees, working down until “all university education is free”.
The same election leaflets goaded Labour’s unpopularity over top-up fees and the Conservative’s plans to “double tuition fees”.
If it was fully costed then, why merely months later is it completely unaffordable? After losing the conference vote on free schools, and with some backbenchers already promising to abstain from the vote on the issue – what will the grass-roots of the party think of this latest betrayal?
77 Responses to “Every Lib Dem MP signed NUS pledge – will they all now cave in to Cameron?”
Gareth Douce
RT @TodJSullivan: Every Lib Dem MP signed NUS pledge – will they all now cave in to Cameron? http://bit.ly/aTR5ay
Chris
In defence of taking away people’s public services, Nick Clegg keeps wheeling out some variation of “Look, we have to do this, we have to get rid of this budget deficit to avoid passing debt on to our children, which is immoral”. The best way of doing this, apparently, is massively raising debt on children.
We already knew Clegg’s word was worthless (he’s a politician) that’s why we made him sign the pledge, and made the text of the pledge so clear. Here is the full res photo – http://www.libdemvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Huppert-and-Clegg.jpg – standing in the world’s best university that he and the Lib Dem MP there attended for free.
“How about Cambridge?”
“Well, despite going to a crap comprehensive, I’m surely clever enough to get in, but I can’t afford it. What’s the best place to study Maths within my price range?”
“Hi UCAS adviser, I got ABB and I love Geography but I want to go somewhere with a good music scene, which uni choices should I put?”
“Well, first things first – how rich are your parents?”
This is the Britain you have created, Nick Clegg, you lying piece of shit.
Richard
And how can Vince Cable possibly abstain from voting on his own policy and have any credibilty left? He’ll be an even bigger laughing staock.
Chris
http://i56.tinypic.com/ff2xag.jpg
Owen Hughes
RT @leftfootfwd: Every Lib Dem MP signed NUS pledge – will they all now cave in to Cameron? http://bit.ly/aTR5ay