Tories keep up pressure on Corbyn over student debt 'promise'

The Tories are stepping up their campaign to discredit Jeremy Corbyn's pre-election pledge to "deal with" student debt.

The Conservatives have written to shadow chancellor John McDonnell, challenging him to reveal what spending plans Labour would axe to pay for it.

Since the election the Tories have accused the Labour leader of a U-turn and lying to students. But he insists he never made a commitment to write off student debt.

Spearheading the latest Tory attack, Chancellor Philip Hammond said: "As their £100bn broken promise on student debt shows, Labour aren't being straight with the British public.

"Labour would take out an enormous loan, but are pretending they wouldn't have to make cuts elsewhere to pay for it.

"Families, and working people everywhere know that's not how it works; when you take out a loan you have to pay interest on it, and that means making tough decisions on where to cut back elsewhere."

The Conservatives claim new analysis of Labour's spending plans shows that by the end of this Parliament, public sector net debt would be more than £250bn higher under Labour than under the Conservatives.

They claim that means Labour would spend £5.8bn more a year in debt interest payments, the equivalent to the pay of around 65,000 nurses, 56,000 teachers and 53,000 police officers, putting tens of thousands of jobs at risk.

"This position is clearly untenable," the Conservatives write in their letter to Mr McDonnell, which the party claims is signed by 147 Tory MPs.

"Either you will need to make reductions to public spending in areas which you are yet to identify, raise taxes in areas you have yet to identify or break the promises you made to the electorate.

"The public will rightly want to know in order to fund your extra borrowing: What areas of public spending you will reduce? What new taxes you plan to raise or introduce? What further election promises you will break?"

The target of the Tory attack is an interview given by Mr Corbyn to the New Musical Express six days before the election.

It was reported at the time that he had hinted he would wipe out debt for thousands of graduates.

But while Labour's pledge to abolish tuition fees was a major part of its election campaign, there was no promise to write off student debts - worth £100bn - in the party's manifesto.

In his NME interview, Mr Corbyn said: "Yes, there is a block of those that currently have a massive debt, and I'm looking at ways that we could reduce that, ameliorate that, lengthen the period of paying it off, or some other means of reducing that debt burden.

"I don't have the simple answer for it yet - I don't think anybody would expect me to, because this election was called unexpectedly; we had two weeks to prepare all this - but I'm very well aware of that problem.

"And I don't see why those that had the historical misfortune to be at university during the £9,000 period should be burdened excessively compared to those that went before or those that come after. I will deal with it."

Asked about the Tory attacks in a TV interview earlier this week, Mr Corbyn said: "I recognised it was a huge burden, I did not make a commitment we would write it off because I couldn't at that stage.

"I pointed out we had written the manifesto in a short space of time because it was a surprise election but that we would look at ways of reducing that debt burden, recognising quite a lot of it is never going to be collected anyway and try and reduce that."