Kicking the dark horse of tuition fees
At the meeting over Labour’s manifesto on 11 May, shadow education secretary Angela Rayner expressed dismay at John McDonnell’s announcement that Labour would prize abolishing the tuition fee over early years support. Her justification for this ire came down to two central factors: that she, as a single mother under the first New Labour government, benefitted massively from their development of the Sure Start scheme and others like it.While Rayner’s backstory is certainly an engaging & endearing one (which certainly merits a read), for now I’d like to focus on the other half of her reasoning, one centred in politics rather than admittedly subjective, if not persuasive, personal experience. Rayner claimed that the abolition of the tuition fee would be likely to benefit the middle class, because those are the kinds of people that go to university, whereas every child needs support, especially the children of working class parents – that was the whole point of Sure Start to begin wit