The National Union of Student is planning to use the proposed legislation giving voters the right to recall your MP to target Liberal Democrat MPs who vote for higher university tuition fees.
Will NUS be targeting Labour MPs who who voted for tuition fees (and scrapping of maintentance grants) in 1997 after Tony Blair stated “Labour has no plans to introduce tuition fees for higher education” or those who voted for top-up fees in 2001 which went against their manifesto pledge not to do so? If not then this is just a highly partisan campaign targeted at the Lib Dems and we may as well call NUS the National Union of Labour Students.
This campaign has no basis in law – the right to recall is for corrupt MPs, not ones who don’t implement a manifesto pledge.
So rather than spend time on this silly campaign, perhaps NUS should actually be lobbying ALL our MPs to stop higher fees BEFORE they are introduced. Targeting just 57 MPs will do nothing to help students. We need queues of students outside ALL MPs surgeries and 1000s of letters (snail mail not email) in their post bags as well as lots of local demos outside their offices. Using Right To Recall is defeatist and partisan and if we are to defeat the introduction of higher tuition fees, NUS can and must do better than this.
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