Labour promise to scrap tuition fees if they win power in June

The Shadow Chancellor announced today that the party will get rid of university tuition fees “once and for all” if they were enter government this coming June.

Despite recent criticism of Labour’s ambition to raise corporation tax as a means of providing their various priority policies, the Labour minister insisted that £20 billion will be raised every year from increased taxation.

The policy would include an injection of funding into struggling schools across the country, and reintroducing university maintenance grants, whilst also abolishing the price tag on adult learner courses and further education opportunities.

Although it has not been explicitly mentioned that the policy will appear in their upcoming election manifesto, the news comes from a speech made in Mansfield by John McDonnell, who said Labour want to introduce a new national education service, just ”as the Atlee government with Nye Bevan introduced the National Health Service.”

This news comes in the wake of a recent rise in the polls for the Labour Party, who enjoy 55% of support from students, and comes amidst a visible drive to get more people under the age of 45 to register and vote, the Party’s key electoral target strategy.

McDonnell called for a ”radically fairer, radically more equal” Britain, arguing that the scrapping of tuition fees would provide for such a ”socialist” vision. Critics of the tripled tuition fees brought about under the Conservative-Lib-Dem coalition claim that students will in the future be paying far more, which will leave even more students struggling to pay back their loans following graduation.

It is clear that the Party is following in the direction of Jeremy Corbyn’s 2015 leadership pledge to scrap tuition through the raising of national insurance for top-paid workers or corporation tax, however the policy is yet to be certified in Labour’s official manifesto.