LABOUR Party leader Ed Miliband pledged yesterday to cut tuition fees from £9,000 to £6,000 a year if returned to government, as the party’s conference was starting in Liverpool.
At the same time, Miliband’s Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls said it was ‘quite conceivable’ there would be a coalition in the future with the Liberal Democrats.
Miliband said reduced tuition fees could be partly funded by a higher interest rate on student loans for those university graduates on more than £65,000 a year.
He denied his new policy was a ‘U-turn’.
He added: ‘If we can do more by the time of the election, we will. But this is an important first step.’ He refused to guarantee that a tuition fee cap would form part of the Labour Party’s next election manifesto.
Miliband is due to address the Labour Party Conference tomorrow.
The president of the National Union of Students, Liam Burns, warned Miliband he was ‘sorely wrong’ if he thought students would settle for a cut in fees to £6,000.
Meanwhile, Ed Balls told the Sunday Telegraph that he would be ‘very happy’ to serve in a future coalition with the LibDems.
Balls ruled himself out of any future Labour leadership contest, but said he would back his wife Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Home Secretary.
Len McCluskey, the leader of the biggest trade union Unite yesterday said he was for ‘civil disobedience’ to make the government ‘change tack’.
McCluskey said: ‘My understanding is he (Miliband) disagrees with strikes while negotiations are still continuing.
‘That’s an understandable and perfectly legitimate position – it’s not one I share, but it’s a perfectly legitimate position.’
McCluskey said he would prefer not to have strikes, and would ‘of course’ prefer to settle things with the Tory-led coalition by negotiations.
‘No worker ever likes taking strike action,’ McCluskey said, but he added: ‘There’s a deep sense of injustice and nobody’s listening. . . the government aren’t listening.’
McCluskey said the November 30 day of coordinated strike action over pensions would be the ‘biggest mobilisation’ by unions since the 1926 General Strike and said that ‘if negotiations break down’, then the unions would ‘absolutely’ like to see the support of the Labour Party leader for the pensions strikes, and it would be ‘interesting’ to see if Miliband then changed his position – after publicly attacking the pensions strikes by teachers and civil servants on June 30 this year.
McCluskey said: ‘I think what Ed has to do, and certainly what we have to do, is lay the blame for these strikes where they belong and that’s squarely at the feet of the government, who have been intransigent and are locked into an ideological attack on ordinary, decent men and women in the public sector.’
He added: ‘The attack on our welfare system, the National Health Service, universal education, all of this is ideologically driven.
‘We have to demonstrate the nature of that attack and also the fact that there is an alternative to it.
‘This slash and burn attack is simply an approach by the government, who have seen an opportunity.
They’re using the current crisis to attack the very basis of the social architecture that’s held us together for the past 65 years.
‘This is our heritage and we’ve got to be prepared to stand and fight for it so we can pass it on to future generations.’
But McCluskey stressed: ‘I would not like to bring the government down.
‘They’ve been elected by due process,’ he said.
