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Ahead of the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats, under then-leader Nick Clegg, made a bold and memorable promise: a Lib Dem government would scrap university tuition fees.

But just seven months after Clegg’s party entered government as part of a coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives, a motion to increase tuition fees in England to £9,000 was narrowly passed in the Commons.

The move split the parliamentary party, with more than half of Clegg’s MPs voting against the policy or choosing to abstain. Clegg, then the deputy prime minister, was moved to film an apology video in 2012, telling the camera through a downcast expression: “We made a pledge, we didn’t stick to it, and for that I am sorry.”

The U-turn was later seen as a key, if not the main, reason for the party’s subsequent collapse. At the 2015 general election, the Liberal Democrats won 8 per cent of the national vote share, down from the 23 per cent it won five years before.

The pain didn’t end there, though. The broken promise haunted the party long after it left office. Tim Farron, the Lib Dem MP for Westmorland and Lonsdale since 2005, admitted to PoliticsHome that he was “nervous” about the issue when he became party leader in 2015.

Fast forward to 2026, and the Lib Dems have seemingly taken a major step forward in exorcising the ghost of the tuition fees U-turn by announcing their boldest universities policy since falling out of office.

The party has announced that it would reverse the decision by the Labour government to freeze the threshold at which graduates repay their student loans, as well as write off student debt for public service workers, and reverse the National Insurance increase and international student levy to help improve university finances.

PoliticsHome reported at the time of the announcement that there was some nervousness among party figures about making the topic a major policy focus, even 15 years on from the U-turn.

The Lib Dem MP for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire, Ian Sollom, who is leading on the policy for leader Ed Davey, acknowledged that student finance is an area “where we are still building trust”.

“We know that there will be a trust issue for many graduates around this particular issue,” he told PoliticsHome.

However, Sollom said that part of the way to build that trust is to “not go out and oversell what we have got”. He described the plans announced earlier this year as “pragmatic” and wants the policy to speak for itself.

He added that “a lot of graduates have been prepared to put their misgivings about the Liberal Democrats behind them and actually have forgiven us or moved past those issues”.

“On this particular issue, it is important that we are mindful that we let this cohort down before and we…absolutely don’t want to do that again to the very same people,” he told PoliticsHome.

Why exactly does Sollom think the memory of the Lib Dems’ coalition U-turn lingered for so long?

“If I knew the answer, we might be able to make more progress,” he said. 

“Like it or not, as a party, it was the defining thing that people associated the Lib Dems with in the period of coalition.”

Farron, who voted against the move in 2010, believes that the issue is no longer a problem for the Lib Dems.

“Even though I voted against the tuition fee rise, it was a thing that I was nervous of when I was leader, but that’s nearly 10 years ago,” he told PoliticsHome. “It’s right that we moved on. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter, but it doesn’t constrain us now.”

Farron added: “That nervousness is a thing that those of us who spend a lot of time talking about politics might care about, but not 99 per cent, and so there’s a real liberation.”

Lib Dem MP Bobby Dean, who was at university himself when the rise in tuition fees was announced, told PoliticsHome that now is “absolutely the right time” for the party to take up the mantle on this issue, adding “a lot of time has passed since [the] coalition government”.

“If we’re going to be a serious national party with a serious national offer, then we can’t stand here and worry about the impression of a policy area from 15 years ago.”

Chris Annous, senior associate at More in Common, told PoliticsHome that people in Westminster can overplay the extent to which the rest of the country cares about decisions made by the coalition government.

“I don’t think many students now attribute their tuition fees to Liberal Democrats, because it’s been 15 years since that decision was made. They [fees] have increased further. The party’s not been in government for a long time.”

He added: “The impact of the coalition is not as extreme or perverse as many people in politics or Westminster like to assume.”

More in Common polling conducted in April last year found that the tuition fee increase was neither the most well-known nor most disliked coalition policy among respondents who were considering voting Lib Dem. Asked what coalition government decisions Lib Dems should be most proud of, respondents saw the bedroom tax and privatisation of Royal Mail in a more negative light than the tuition fees rise.

Amira Campbell, President of the National Union of Students, said it is not “impossible” for Davey’s party to rebuild trust with students.

“But it is certainly not an easy task. Students need tangible proof that they have a plan for real change and will actually deliver for them if given another chance.”

Campbell said that politicians from other parties “simply dismissing” the Lib Dems on the subject of student finance because of decisions taken fifteen years ago is “not only frustrating, but disrespectful to students”.

“Every party that has been in government over the last 28 years, since tuition fees were introduced, is at fault for the mess we are in,” she told PoliticsHome.

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Let’s just deal with this quickly.

Because the truth is that we should all be quietly sending BBC Scotland bouquets in appreciation for doing the independence movement a favour for once.

Belief in an independent Scotland IS as strong as ever, which is to say it’s pretty much where it’s been since 2014 – two or three points either side of 50%. But while it’s true, that fact certainly WASN’T demonstrated by last Saturday’s pathetic march and cursory “rally”, which at the very, very highest estimate was attended by just a twentieth as many people as used to regularly show up at such events.

“We are the 45”, a performer sang at one point to a crowd which numbered only slightly more than that.

“With strength in numbers, Scotland shall prevail”, he continued, leading any rational observer to conclude that Scotland’s chances of prevailing must be roughly on a par with those of our capturing the World Cup in America this summer.

The march was the latest in a series of similar embarrassments, which would have attracted nothing but mockery and pity if broadcast on the evening news. What it demonstrated was that the roughly 50% of people who support independence are as actively committed to making it happen as the roughly 50% of people who want to bring back hanging and the roughly 50% who want to get rid of Trident, two things which are just as far away from the current political agenda.

This is an extraordinary misunderstanding of news values from someone who used to be the editor of a national newspaper. The march was announced seven months ago, has been relentlessly promoted since then, was officially supported by the SNP (which the 100,000+ AUOB marches never were), took place in the runup to an election and featured the First Minister as its headline speaker AND STILL ALMOST NOBODY BOTHERED TURNING UP.

That’s the only thing even remotely and tentatively approaching being a news story here: Widely Promoted Event About Supposedly Incredibly Vital And Urgent Subject Supported By Half The Population And Government Party Who Will Win Imminent General Election Attracts Comically Low Attendance.

We should be weeping with gratitude that the BBC didn’t run that story. Even the march organiser didn’t show up, and nor did most of the SNP, who were focused on keeping their members on the gravy bus come May.

Breaking: 3,000 people mooching down the High Street for an hour and half of them climbing Calton Hill to listen to a desultory handful of awful speeches for another 45 minutes is NOT, in fact, “more than enough” to end the British state’s 300-year control of Scotland. (If it was, obviously, we’d have been independent by Monday.)

Once again: if it had really had the potential to do that, why didn’t more people turn up? At least 1.6 million Scots support independence. Yet fewer than two out of every thousand of them could be arsed with getting a bus or train to the nation’s capital on a bright sunny day to register their interest and have a nice social day out.

Not even SNP supporters think independence is on the political agenda.

And nor do they much care. Independence is not even in SNP voters’ top three priorities, because even people so dumb they’re still voting SNP know that the SNP have neither a strategy nor any motivation for achieving independence. The SNP’s interests lie entirely in maintaining the status quo, as the party’s last former CEO accidentally pointed out in The Courier this week.

And even if the SNP did want independence, we know how it goes by now.

[SNP wins election]

SNP: “We demand another referendum!”

UK GOVERNMENT: “No.”

SNP: “Okay then! See you in another five years!”

More to the point, Richard Walker knows that too. In the article, he just comes right out and says “We should deploy this strategy even though we know it won’t work and when it doesn’t work everything will be over”.

For the sake of brevity we’ll draw a veil over some of the more farcically ludicrous passages in the article. But the line below merits a brief mention, because it’s either a breathtakingly audacious lie or self-delusion on level that in less enlightened times would have seen someone put in a jacket whose arms fastened round the back:

Because on the evidence of last Saturday, the biggest favour UK media can possibly do the independence movement right now is to not draw attention to what a pitiful, withered, irrelevant and impotent state it’s in.

In the early hours of 25 March 2026, Israeli occupation forces (IOF) and police entered homes in Silwan, in occupied East Jerusalem, escorting settlers as Palestinian families were forced out of their properties in the Batn al-Hawa neighbourhood.

East Jerusalem — evicted after 10 year legal battles with settler organisation

16 Palestinian families, approximately 100 people, who had lived in the area for decades, were forcibly evicted from their homes. Their apartments were then emptied of their possessions. In many of these cases, illegal settlers from the settler organisation Ateret Cohanim moved into the properties immediately after the families were removed.

These evictions come after Israeli occupation courts upheld ownership claims based on pre-1948 Jewish property rights, which had been fought by Palestinian residents since 2016. Since 7 October, 2023,  the Israeli occupation has forcibly displaced 28 Palestinian households from Batn al Hawa. Another 15 families are also expecting to be evicted from the neighbourhood imminently, by the same court order.

A law, known as the Legal and Administrative Matters Law of 1970, exclusively enables Jews to “reclaim” property in East Jerusalem. This is one of the many examples of the occupation’s discriminatory, apartheid policies. The many thousands of Palestinians who were forcibly displaced during the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba, in 1948, have not been allowed to return to their homes.

Since “Israel” occupied East Jerusalem, in 1967, it has expanded its presence and control over East Jerusalem, and attempted to alter the city’s religious identity, history, and demography- to Judaise Jerusalem. It has done this by exploiting its discriminatory laws and policies And through a combination of evictions, demolitions and restrictive planning policies, such as in Silwan, “Israel” is able to dispossess Palestinians of their land and property. .

Israeli occupation demolishing homes in al Bustan for biblical park tourist attraction

Several days after the Batn al Hawa evictions, on 30 March, the occupation’s police, military and bulldozers stormed the al-Bustan neighbourhood of Silwan, to demolish four Palestinian properties. No prior warning was given before the homes belonging to the Awad, Abu Shafaa, and Al-Ruwaidi families were destroyed. Retaining walls, gates and fences were also destroyed, roads bulldozed, and nearby infrastructure damaged,

The demolition of homes in the al Bustan neighbourhood, has been driven by the occupation’s plans to transform the area into public gardens, Torah-related projects, and settlers’ parking. He also highlighted that this neighborhood, located near the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is one of the most affected by Judaization and settlement initiatives.Demolitions accelerated in 2024 and 2025, and by February 2026, the occupation had demolished 35 homes and issued 17 additional demolition orders in al-Bustan. A total of 1500 Palestinians in the area have demolition orders on their homes, so further ethnic cleansing is expected any day.

The Israeli occupation’s interest in Silwan is due to its location, against the southern walls of the Old City and close to al Aqsa, which would allow the zionist regime to cement control over East Jerusalem. Archaeological tourism projects, settlement expansion, and court-backed property claims are all being used to forcibly displace Palestinians, and ethnically cleanse occupied Jerusalem of Palestinians.

Featured image via the author

Mariana Mazzucato, professor at UCL, has shown how Labour should be less willing to simply hand out public money to corporations. Instead, she says that subsidies and grants should come with a guarantee of public benefit.

‘Conditionalities’ — types of public benefit

There are various possibilities for making the most out of public money when it comes to partnering with the private sector.

Mazzucato outlines them in four categories. The first, ‘access’, means requiring that the resulting products or services that the government puts money towards are affordable to the population. The second, ‘directionality’, means mandating that the company follows desirable goals such as green power. The third, ‘profit sharing’ means that the company returns some of the profits to the government. This could go further, with the government taking a stake in company. The fourth, ‘reinvestment’, means that some of the company’s profits are reinvested into socially desirable activities.

Of course, a government could use the mandate and popular support of a manifesto to at least take basic essentials into public ownership, to deliver common good without relying on corporations. But if large corporations still dominate some sectors, equitable partnerships could be the way forward.

Mazzucato — No nonsense approach

The government can already use legislation to ensure companies act in a certain way. Failing that, public-private partnerships can be useful.

Direct subsidies are not the only way the government hands out money to corporations.

22% of The Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers receive universal credit (UC). That means the public purse is essentially subsidising the profits of companies like Tesco, which makes £6,150 of profit per employee.

This parliament, the government is providing £2.5bn to the steel industry. And that’s without taking a stake or profit-sharing with steel companies.

Although, the government has said that Tata Steel, which is receiving a £500m grant, will have to transition to Electric Arc Furnaces (EAFs) to address climate change or share its profits with the government. This is an example of a conditionality as Mazzucato outlines, but alone is quite the piecemeal approach to the neoliberal system.

Featured image via UCL