CORPORATION tax could be hiked above its current 20 per cent rate under Labour plans to help abolish tuition fees, Jeremy Corbyn said yesterday.
The Labour leader promised to reverse the planned cuts to the levy, which are due to fall to 17 per cent by 2020, and indicated that it could actually rise even further.
He said he wanted the tax to be in the “20 per cent area” or “not much higher.”
Mr Corbyn, who was re-elected as Labour leader on Saturday, defended his plans for a £500 billion programme of investment funded by increased borrowing.
And he also questioned the need for extra spies for MI6 and whether “huge land-based defence forces” were necessary.
Mr Corbyn said the tuition fees issue needed to be addressed because working-class students were being put off going to university.
He said the corporation tax rate was among the lowest in the OECD group of developed countries and proposed that it should be raised to 20 per cent as it was previously.
Asked if he could rise it even further, he told BBC One’s Andrew Marr Show: “Not much higher, but I do think we have to recognise that we are well behind the curve of most European countries in the way that we treat our students in higher and further education.
“The fact that we leave students in massive debt and the fact for the first time this year for many, many years the number of working-class youngsters going to university is beginning to reduce.
“We are turning our universities in the direction of the elite, rather than the direction of everybody.
“That, to me, is not just sad, it is wrong, unnecessary and wasteful.”
