Evan Harris: “If you want to get rid of fees vote more Lib Dems into power”

Former Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris has made the extraordinary claim that to get rid of fees "the answer is to vote more liberal democrats into power".

Former Liberal Democrat MP Dr Evan Harris made the extraordinary claim on Radio Five last night that:

“If you want to get rid of tuition fees, the answer is to vote more liberal democrats into power, not less, because the only way… If you want to get rid of tuition fees realistically the only way to do it…

“If students want to get rid of tuition fees it’s more Liberal Democrats they need, not Tory and Labour.”

This, despite the fact that it was only because of Liberal Democrat MPs that last night’s votes on tuition fees – trebling the cap to £9,000 and raising the lower limit to £6,000 – passed, by a majority of 21. Harris was debating Left Foot Forward’s Will Straw and leading Conservative blogger Shane Greer on the Tony Livesey show.

Listen to it:

Here is the roll of shame of the 34 Lib Dem MPs who broke their pledge by failing to vote against the government:

Danny Alexander
Norman Baker
Sir Alan Beith
Gordon Birtwistle
Tom Brake
Jeremy Browne
Malcolm Bruce
Paul Burstow
Lorely Burt*
Vincent Cable
Alistair Carmichael
Nick Clegg
Edward Davey
Lynne Featherstone
Don Foster
Stephen Gilbert
Duncan Hames
Nick Harvey
David Heath
John Hemming
Simon Hughes*
Mark Hunter
Norman Lamb
David Laws
Michael Moore
Tessa Munt*
Sir Robert Smith*
Andrew Stunell
Jo Swinson
Sarah Teather
John Thurso*
David Ward
Steve Webb
Stephen Williams*

* abstained – still a broken pledge. Chris Huhne and Martin Horwood were both absent in Cancun; only 21 of the party’s 57 MPs voted against the fees rise.

73 Responses to “Evan Harris: “If you want to get rid of fees vote more Lib Dems into power””

  1. Ian

    RT @DrEvanHarris: And see my comment for good measure RT @wdjstraw Crazy claim from Evan on R5Live last night: http://bit.ly/hAlZmb > …

  2. Rob Kent

    RT @DrEvanHarris: And see my comment for good measure RT @wdjstraw Crazy claim from Evan on R5Live last night: http://bit.ly/hAlZmb > …

  3. Avatar photo

    Will Straw

    Evan,

    Thanks for the comment. As you know, I protested against the Labour government’s introduction of top up fees in 2004. I felt ashamed that the party I support made a u-turn on their manifesto commitment. Labour paid the price for that decision at the 2005 election when it lost a handful of the seats including Manchester Withington to the Lib Dems. The country has, however, somewhat moved on since that point.

    The discussion at the moment is quite appropriately about the Coalition’s decision to cut the teaching budget by 80% which will force universities to charge £7.500 in fees on average. The only way for them to gain additional revenues will be to charge up to the cap of £9,000. Despite the improved repayment scheme, these levels will deter the poorest students as you accepted in your article for the Guardian yesterday setting out why you would have voted against the policy.

    The problem for the Liberal Democrats is that they went beyond a simple manifesto promise and courted the student vote on campuses and through the publicity surrounding the NUS pledge. Given that the party was simultaneously preparing for Coalition negotiations and debating whether to scrap the tuition fees policy altogether, it was an act of gross political indecency which most people now believe will come back to haunt them.

    All the best,

    Will

  4. Evan Harris

    Will

    I agree that many people have the *perception* that we had said Tuition Fees abolition (phase out) would be a spending priority or policy priority in coalition negotiations.

    See this from Nick Thornsby’s blog in response to David Mitchell’s Observer column. (http://nickthornsby.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/in-which-i-take-on-david-mitchell/) where DM asserted

    “We all knew before the election that the country was in financial trouble, but you [Clegg] still declared that a Liberal Democrat government, because it valued education, would make the abolition of tuition fees a spending priority.”

    Nick Thornsby:

    “This puzzles me. I don’t remember Nick Clegg at any point saying that abolishing tuition fees was a spending priority for the Liberal Democrats. Sure, it was a policy that was in our manifesto, but the clue to what were regarded as spending priorities were the four policies highlighted on the front of the manifesto (see picture), and talked about by Nick Clegg until he was blue in the face.

    The Liberal Democrats, and Nick Clegg personally, went through the election campaign emphasising four key policy pledges: raising the income tax threshold, political reform, a move to a sustainable economy, and a big investment in education through a pupil premium.

    Nothing on tuition fees, note.”

    So it is hard to claim that Nick Clegg ever said that in coalition talks tuition fee phase out would be any kind of red line. In fact he studiously avoided it. I know because I was on the policy committee which debated what our top four things would be. Poor tax-payers and kids from low income households were put before tuition fee abolition.

    Like I say in my Guardian piece, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/10/tuition-fees-politics-pledge, more work is needed in the future to avoid the situation where voters having falsely raised expectations about what a party of only 57 MPs can deliver in coalition with one of the fee-loving parties, and in a Parliament where 450 MPs (allowing for 75-100 Labour rebels) positively support fees.

    Best

    Evan

  5. Tom King

    Adam Bienkov – it is still their policy because party policy and Coalition policy are, self-evidently, not the same thing, probably because Liberal Democrat party policy isn’t influenced at all by 307 Tory MPs.

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