NORTH of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll was overwhelmingly backed by students as he hit out at Sir Keir Starmer’s betrayal of the working class at a Cambridge Union address.

Students voted for the left-wing politician’s motion on Thursday night, which was backed by working-class scholars who took turns to blast the Labour leader’s austerity politics.

Mr Driscoll predicted the party will comfortably win next year’s general election, but that Sir Keir will be ousted by his party members and councils as “continuity Thatcherism” runs out of road.

He said Britain’s social contract has been broken and with both the Tories and the Labour leadership are “hypnotised by austerity,” Sir Keir “has broken every one of the 10 pledges he was elected on.”

Defining working class as “whether your income comes from the work you do or the property you own,” he said trade union leaders now serve as the real opposition to the ruling elite.

“Continuity Thatcherism will fail: there’s nothing left to sell, no more capacity to pile on debt, no bubble to ride,” he said.

“Working people will rebel, Labour councils rebel, Keir Starmer will be ousted.

“And this is where the Labour Party is totally different from the Conservative Party: Labour MPs, Labour members balk at the two-child benefit cap, banning MPs from picket lines, taking donations from American private healthcare firms and then proposing more NHS privatisation, with any luck we’ll see someone like Andy Burnham in charge.”

He added: “Until then, I say fight in another ways: through community groups, through renters’ groups fighting illegal evictions, climate action groups defending our parks and our beaches, trade unions fighting for quality pay.

“[RMT general secretary] Mick Lynch and [Unite general secretary] Sharon Graham are the real leaders of the opposition today or you can vote for independence like me to hold power in our towns, cities and our regions.”

The debate began with a passionate speech by a first-year human, social & political sciences undergraduate, who said he was from a family of six living off less than £25,000 a year.

On Labour’s five-point plan, he said championing a pledge to get 13,000 more police on our streets was “primitive populism” that revealed “how far detached Labour has become.”

He said Sir Keir’s ditching his pledge to scrap tuition fees was a “massive betrayal” to the “debt-averse” working class, adding: “What the working class want is a better standard of living, where we don’t struggle to afford the bare necessities, a solution to that is better welfare provisions which is not in Labour’s agenda.

“This refusal to attempt to redistribute wealth goes against the very principles of the Labour Party.

“All I see is a sorry excuse to promote trickle-down economics.

“For someone who raves on and on about how we need to instil workers with a sense of dignity, Starmer has no plan to give them a much-needed pay rise.”

He also chalked up the party’s treatment of Mr Driscoll — who was barred from standing as a Labour candidate for the inaugural mayoralty of the North East of England —– as “a clear and shameless attempt by Starmer to wipe away the leftist identity of Labour.”

Another student told the debate that polling in her native Grimsby showed “lots of people said ‘if I could vote the Brexit Party I would, I’m not sure I would vote Labour.’

“This is a working-class town and they do not feel that Labour supports them, that Labour works for them, and I feel that speaks for itself, ta.”

Deputy Green party leader Zack Polanski also backed the motion, blasting Labour’s failure to commit to abolish first-past-the-post electoral voting. 

Arguing against, Labour’s Lord (Leslie) Griffiths of Burry Port failed to convince students by saying: “Do you know that 83 per cent of Keir Starmer’s cabinet were educated in comprehensive state schools — 60 per cent of Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet educated in fee-paying schools: that says it all for me, I want a world where everybody has an equal opportunity.

“I went to Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. I can tell you that whatever battles you have to face here, there are battles on the global scale that you cannot even imagine by sitting here.”