FlyTheNest

Fairness for taxpayers
Put simply: our young people are being ripped off. They’re being saddled with tens of thousands of pounds of debt from bad degrees that just leave them poorer, and dissuaded from pursuing more vocational options because they are led to believe that university is the only route to success. It’s not fair on them – and it’s not fair on you as taxpayers, forced to pick up a big chunk of the bill despite getting nothing back for our economy.

RogerOThornhill wrote: ↑Mon 17 Jul, 2023 10:02 am How much of this focus on 'poor quality' university courses is to do with the amount that Goverment has to write off the student loan book as jobs aren't paying enough for loans to be repaid?

refitman wrote: ↑Mon 17 Jul, 2023 6:49 pm Oh no, they're losing the centrists

AnatolyKasparov wrote: ↑Mon 17 Jul, 2023 7:36 pm They are hardly going to rock the boat in public days ahead of vital byelections, are they - who says they aren't making their views known behind the scenes?

Two things that may be worth noting (whilst not excusing what Starmer said yesterday)

1) the 2017 Labour manifesto did not pledge to reverse this, that doesn't mean it wasn't an excellent offering overall;

2) the SNP/Green administration in Scotland has the power to scrap this restriction, however it has not done so.

Scottish child payment is £25 a week per eligible child, payable every four weeks. There is no limit on how many children within a family can get Scottish child payment, so it will still be paid for a child affected by the two child limit in universal credit or child tax credit.

AnatolyKasparov wrote: ↑Mon 17 Jul, 2023 10:47 pm
Labour's candidate is much better (no really, she is) and if there is any justice she will defeat him comfortably.

if Labour wins, what will it actually feel like? Whatever is in its manifesto, and irrespective of the narratives that Starmer does or doesn’t campaign with, a victory will self-evidently be a huge moment, replete with at least a momentary sense of relief and euphoria. But on the current evidence, what Labour will actually do with power is less interesting than what the simple change in regime will trigger, whether Starmer and his allies like it or not.

The last 13 years have been so full of underinvestment, cuts and serial cruelties that from the moment they take power, calls for change will be overwhelming. Along with the party’s regional mayors, the Labour people who run councils, faced with a £3bn funding gap over the next two years, will rightly demand greater financial autonomy, and a level of funding from Whitehall that at last begins to make up for the cuts that they are still being forced to inflict on their communities. Whatever Starmer’s antipathy towards the green movement, its activists and organisations – such as Green New Deal Rising, whose supporters disrupted his recent speech on education – will sense the door being at least slightly more open, and push on it all the harder.

As a weak economy continues to make the case for renewed ties with the EU, there may well be a revival of the movement that pushed for a second referendum on Brexit, this time focused on membership of the single market. More urgently, I can easily foresee the kind of community activists who have parried the worst aspects of the Conservatives’ record on poverty and inequality – the people who run food banks, homeless shelters and all the rest – sooner or later making a great deal of noise about the intolerability of living with both a centre-left government and the continuation of such awful social problems.

As things stand, I am not sure Starmer, Reeves and Streeting will have the policies, authority or political talent to tell all these forces to keep quiet, something that particularly applies to a re-energised trade union movement, whose grievances have hardly been silenced by recent moves on public sector pay.