Westminster’s newest recruits are now in a position to challenge older MPs who benefited from a free education
It has taken a surprisingly long time for the chickens to come home to roost. But watching Zarah Sultana, the 26-year-old new Labour MP for Coventry South, waving her student debt bill at ministers over the despatch box last week was a decisive moment in the henhouse all the same. How, she raged, was it fair that working-class kids such as her had ended up £50,000 in debt from going to college, while Boris Johnson sailed straight “from the playing fields of Eton to a free education at Oxford”?
To accuse her of class warfare, as several Tories promptly did, is fundamentally missing the point. Age is the yawning divide between newcomers such as Sultana or Nottingham East’s Nadia Whittome– who dropped out of university halfway through because of money worries – and many of the ministers they’re facing across the floor of the Commons. While there’s nothing new in the argument that millennials got a raw deal compared to previous generations, there’s something about the rawness of facing that concept made flesh that shifts the terms of debate.
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