Tories’ latest #studentdebt attempt is frankly embarrassing. For them

It seems desperation breeds persistence, at least when it comes to clinging to the one faeces-stained straw the Tories think they have to grasp as an attack on Jeremy Corbyn’s credibility.

But following the complete debunking of their original claim that Corbyn had promised to ‘wipe’ student debt, which was based on an NME article that said nothing of the sort, the flailing Tories – they’re drowning, not waving – have sunk to new depths to try to shore it up.

This latest attempt is not even scraping barrel-bottoms – more like digging their fingers into the bottom of a cess-pit – which may explain the particular Tory glove-puppet they chose to put out a video of Shadow Justice minister Imran Hussein, who when speaking to a group of schoolchildren told them (among other things):

Just this morning Jeremy Corbyn has announced that the tuition fees will be abolished straight away from September if there’s a Labour government, and that we will bring back immediately EMA and also that every existing student will have all their debt wiped off. That’s fantastic news, isn’t it guys?

The mouthpiece is claiming that this means Labour did promise to wipe all student debts. There are several issues with this – 4 minor ones and one huge one:

1. Hussein is a Shadow Justice minister, meaning that student loans and debts are not his brief, leading to..
2. He got it wrong – the policy announcement that he refers to was about tuition fees, not debts
3. Hussein clearly had his wires crossed and was thinking of Corbyn’s pledge to end tuition fees for new students from 2018 and to backdate the cancellation so that students starting university in September this year. Corbyn had not announced on any morning during the campaign a pledge to ‘wipe off all existing student debts’, so this is incontrovertible
4. A statement by a junior justice minister is not a Labour manifesto promise, nor even a firm mention by the party’s leader. It’s a junior minister with his wires crossed – in a video nobody’s even seen until now, a good six weeks after the election
5. Here’s the biggie: even if 1-4 did not apply – they do – then ‘all existing students‘ is not ‘all people with a historic student debt‘.

I studied. I am no longer an ‘existing student’. I have several people in my family who went to university and now have student loans. They are no longer ‘existing students’. There are hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who went to university and have existing student loans.

None of them is an ‘existing student’.

Even if Imran wasn’t clearly labouring under a misapprehension, in the context of student debt, ‘existing student’ only means ‘people at uni now‘.

If issues 1-4 didn’t kill the Tories’ feeble attempt stone dead, number 5 skewers it, cremates it and puts it six feet under for good measure.

The Tories are clearly terrified of Corbyn – so terrified that they’ll try even the most laughable tactics to try to smear him.

So they’re still claiming Corbyn had promised to wipe off all student debt. He didn’t – and this latest attempt by the Tories and people whose backside they have their hand up is frankly just embarrassing.

For them.

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