Power of the student vote

by Samantha Tse

The National Union of Students (NUS) has identified 20 key areas where they believe student votes could prove critical in swaying the upcoming election. Newcastle was ranked top, followed by Manchester and Liverpool.

NUS president, Wes Streeting, believes the student vote could be as strong as the ‘grey vote’ of the older generation.

“You won’t see pensioners being ignored at this election because it doesn’t matter how old or frail they are, they will find a way to get to the polling station on voting day,” Streeting said in a recent interview. 

At the NUS annual conference last week, Streeting said that students will be “screwed over for generations” unless they flex their influence over the ballot box. “Many seats with high concentrations of students were widely recognized to have been swayed by the student vote,” Streeting said.  

Aaron Porter, NUS president-elect, echoed the sentiment by saying that parliamentary candidates who oppose abolishing tuition fees should not be expecting student support.

A recent poll of 14,000 students show that a third are leaning towards the Conservatives, a fifth are backing the Liberal Democrats and the remaining fifth are supporting Labour.

Stephen Williams, the Lib Dem higher education spokesman and MP for Bristol said: “You have to look at the combination of the student and academic vote. There’s a high turnout among academics, and a lot of students vote in their home constituencies.”

It’s the student-academic vote that could make a difference and the Lib Dems are targeting that vote. Lib Dems are the only party promising to phase out tuition fees.

Nicola Dandridge, chief executive of Universities UK, said: “There are more than 370, 000 people employed in higher education and almost 2.5 million students. No one is suggesting that they will all vote on a single issue, but investment in a strong, flexible and high-quality higher education system may feature in their thinking.”