Labour’s row over tuition fees kicks off its year of internal battles

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Good morning. Another big speech, this time by Keir Starmer. Some thoughts below on the different things the two leaders are doing in their speeches and the big policy row that Starmer will face within the Labour party this year.

Inside Politics is edited by Georgina Quach. Follow Stephen on Twitter @stephenkb and please send gossip, thoughts and feedback to [email protected].

Although Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are vying for the same job, they are operating on different timetables. Because Sunak is prime minister already, he has to contend with the difficult truth that there isn’t really enough time between now and the next election for anything the government introduces today to have a material impact on the vote.

Sunak’s five pledges are designed so that, almost whatever happens, he can argue that they have been met, that the worst has passed, good times are round the corner and that the biggest risk to the recovery is a Labour government.

For good or ill, what political strategists call the “retail offer” is not going to change much between now and the election, because implementing policies takes time. In addition, there is very little that can be done without triggering a row in the Conservative party.

Starmer, of course, can’t implement anything anyway, and therefore his major policy promises don’t need to be ones that can be implemented between now and the autumn of 2024.

As a result, Starmer will announce his “retail offer” much closer to the election. David Cameron’s “Big Society” was unveiled in March 2010. Tony Blair’s own original five-policy pledge card came many months in advance of his election victory in May 1997.

For Labour, they will feel that the best time to unveil their own will be at the party’s annual conference in September. That would be a little over a year before the likely next election in late autumn 2024 and, they will hope, set them up well for their final pre-election test: the local elections of 2024.

So Starmer’s new year speech yesterday was largely about setting out his big vision, with more emphasis on devolution and green investment. The Labour leader was also trying to downplay his big strategic vulnerability — the fear that a Labour government means lots and lots of tax rises and that the old, old anxieties about Labour and spending will scupper his election hopes.

Another reason why Labour will want to use its conference to set out the retail offer is that the party will almost certainly want to have a big and unifying conference after a year of internal rows over policy.

Precisely because the next election will not be held until the autumn of 2024, and because underlying economic and social circumstances mean that the Labour party is likely to continue to enjoy a large poll lead, now is a good time for Starmer to settle any lingering rows he thinks he needs to have internally.

One of those rows, of course, is over tuition fees, and the future of the party’s Corbyn-era commitment to abolish them. My old colleague, the Times associate political editor Henry Zeffman, asked Starmer what his commitment to fiscal discipline meant for the tuition fee pledge, the most expensive policy in Labour’s 2017 and 2019 manifestos. Starmer declined to answer.

The challenge here is twofold. The first is that tuition fees, as I wrote in my column recently, have generally been a really effective way of increasing the level of tax graduates pay on the sly. As the number of graduates grows, they do what voters and organisations always do — lobby for tax relief. It will be hard for Labour to withdraw from the commitment without a big row internally.

And, as Bethan Staton has been reporting, the fees model is not getting enough cash through the door for most universities anyway. A combination of inflation and geopolitical risks, which may reduce the number of high-paying overseas students, is straining budgets and means many universities are overleveraged.

Regardless of who wins the next election, the government is going to have to get more money into higher education. We’re at the limits of what you can do via tuition fee rises on new students alone, because there is already a large chunk of the fee increase that is not paid off.

Whatever Labour ends up doing here is going to upset quite a lot of people. Expect to hear an awful lot more about Labour and tuition fees over the next year.

Now try this

I am really enjoying I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, a choice-based video game in which you play as a teenager in a remote space colony from the age of 10 to 20. The decisions you make shape your job, your relationships and the future of the colony.

However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend.

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