Scrapping student fees and renationalising the utilities is waste of money, says Chuka Umunna

Axeing tuition fees and renationalising the utilities are a waste of money, Chuka Umunna has said, in a first policy intervention since launching the Independent Group of MPs.

The former Labour politician also called for a big tax hike on shareholders receiving dividends, a “hypothecated” NHS tax and state funding of political parties to stop them being “the plaything” of the rich.

The “circus” of Prime Minister’s Questions should be scrapped and MPs moved to a new “horseshoe”-shaped chamber, instead of the big parties squaring off against each other, he added.

The ideas come in a 50-page pamphlet issued by Mr Umunna in “a personal capacity”, rather than reflecting “a manifesto” of the Independent Group, the 11-strong wouldbe party he helped set up last month.

Nevertheless, they will be seen as Mr Umunna’s attempt to stamp his influence on the grouping, after his appointment as its spokesman but not its leader.

The Independent Group had suggested it would not issue detailed policies for the near future, to avoid presenting a target for the “status quo parties” – something Mr Umunna himself called “incredibly unwise”.

Now the MP for Streatham, in south London, has published a wideranging personal manifesto, which advocates:

* Replacing privatised utilities with “public benefit companies” – while avoiding the “huge price tag of a 1940s-style nationalisation”

* Means testing tuition fees and reintroducing maintenance grants to help poorer students – without “wasting money on the most prosperous students” by axeing fees altogether

* Ending the “manifest unfairness” of dividend income being taxed at as low as 7.5 per cent – far lower than the 20 per cent basic rate of income tax

* Exploring a hypothecated tax to tackle the NHS “crisis” – whereby the revenue from a specific tax would be ringfenced for the health service

* Overhauling “parliament’s culture and ways of working” – with a circular chamber and a “better way of holding the prime minister to account” than the current question time

Mr Umunna said his ideas were based on six key values and principles – “unity, reciprocity, work, family and community, democracy and patriotic internationalism”.

“Our departure from the status quo parties was in part framed by reference to what we were against and what we disliked both about the policies and the cultures of what we had left,” he said.

“This pamphlet sets out what I think those who subscribe to progressive politics are actually for.”

Mr Umunna said the other members “agree with much of what I have written”, but stressed: “This pamphlet is written in a personal capacity and deliberately so.”

The other MPs who defected to were Labour’s Luciana Berger, Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker, Mike Gapes, Ann Coffey, Joan Ryan and Angela Smith and Tories Sarah Wollaston, Heidi Allen and Anna Soubry.