Morning LabourList: We don’t need no tuition fees

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If you don’t want to know any more about Labour in-fighting, look away now. It was a difficult weekend: a row kicked off at the National Policy Forum meeting after National Executive Committee officers declared (at short notice) that seven days notice is required for elections, meaning the chair election due to take place on Saturday morning was ruled out. The NEC will decide a date for the vote at a future meeting. A delegate in attendance, activist Jo Rust, has reported on the meeting for LabourList and focusses on the substance of the NPF conference, which is after all held to discuss policy.

In selection news, local councillor Sonya Ward won the Mansfield race by a landslide. She was backed by several members of the shadow cabinet as well as Momentum, which will be launching its ‘Unseat’ campaign in the key marginal with Owen Jones on Saturday. Keen canvassers should consider joining hundreds of Labour activists in efforts to oust the sitting Tory MP, none other than Ben “the country is drowning in a sea of unemployed wasters” Bradley.

Speaking of backward-looking Tory ideas, Theresa May will today admit that the tuition fees policy has failed. In a speech setting out plans for a drawn-out review on higher education funding in England, May will accept that the poorest students are ending up with the most debt. She will touch on a range of proposals including the idea floated by Damian Hinds of a “value for money” model for universities that would see science students be charged more. Labour, of course, has already pledged to abolish tuition fees and restore maintenance grants. It seems the Tories are going to offer expensive solutions to a problem they created, and those solutions will be less popular than the opposition’s clear answers. Keep an eye on LabourList for more on this subject later.

@siennamarla

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