If Labour were to win the election, Harry Robson, Tom Jelly, and Oliver Kontkanen, all first-year students at Cambridge University, would stand to benefit to the tune of £9,000 each, because of the party’s promise to abolish tuition fees – but this cash incentive seems to leave them surprisingly cold.
Kontkanen, 18, (pictured above left) plans to vote Conservative, while Jelly (above right) and Robson, both 19, are hesitating between the Liberal Democrats and Labour. Not only has the tuition fees pledge not swayed them, they all feel sceptical about whether it can be implemented. Around the campus there is cynicism from students, who feel they have heard these tuition fee promises before.
“Obviously it is attractive at face value ... if it can be costed. Universities still need income,” Robson, a first-year politics student says, sitting with his friends at a table outside the politics faculty canteen, his books open, attempting to revise in the sunshine. Jelly, who is preparing for history exams, says that to suggest that a £9,000 incentive would decide his vote would be to assume “that you vote out of self-interest”.
“It looks like a good thing, but where is that money coming from? It’s a consideration, but I don’t think it will swing this vote,” he says.
Whether Cambridge students are typical of their counterparts in the rest of the country is open to debate. In any case, if it’s not tuition fees, something else is making Labour feel more confident that they could possibly hold on to this seat, which they took from the Liberal Democrats in 2015 with just 599 votes. It has been interesting to see how candidates’ confidence has ebbed and surged over the past few weeks, based on nothing very tangible, except an unscientific sense of how their messages are being received on the doorsteps. At the start of the campaign, this seat was widely seen as a shoo-in for the Lib Dems. That party’s promise of a second EU referendum on the Brexit deal looked enough to win back Cambridge, which voted 74% remain, but as the election draws closer, some voters are reconsidering whether Europe is going to be the deciding issue for them.
A strong Labour student campaign team, who helped win the seat for the incumbent MP, Daniel Zeichner, is out in force again, combining studying for finals with sticking Labour flyers in the pigeonholes of thousands of students, and across the city, there seem to be more Labour posters – for what it’s worth; candidates feel differently about the actual value of political billboards.
Beyond the university, a focus group made up of undecided non-student voters, organised for the Guardian by BritainThinks – which is conducting research with the Guardian throughout the election as part of the Voices and Votes series –suggests that the Lib Dem message has not made as much impact as expected in Cambridge, the party’s number one target seat, where just a 0.58% swing is needed for Julian Huppert, who was the MP here 2010–2015, to pull the seat back from Labour. The panel describes the Lib Dem leader, Tim Farron, as “strange”, “anonymous”, “unimportant”, and one woman keeps forgetting his name. “I look at his picture, and I know who he is, but I can’t bring his name out,” says Sade, who works for a retail company.
“I’ve only seen one thing from him since the election began, which is when he wouldn’t be pressed on whether he thought homosexuality is a sin, which if you are a liberal is quite important,” Kate, a rowing coach, says.
With the student body very engaged in politics, and an estimated 4,000–5,000 undergraduates registered to vote, the undecided student voters are very valuable. Zeichner often comes to the spot where Robson, Jelly and Kontkanen are revising, between the English faculty and the history faculty, to canvass students at noon as lectures end and people have a moment before lunch. Snatching their time now that exams are beginning is getting harder, however. Today, Huppert is hovering, talking to people in and around the canteen, and sits for a moment to try to win Jelly and Robson over.
He makes doubtful noises about the Labour manifesto promise on tuition fees before reminding them that – despite the Lib Dem tuition fees U-turn, which lost him this seat in 2015 – he, individually, has been campaigning against tuition fees all his life. If Labour’s proposal “was properly costed I would support getting rid of fees. I’d be so delighted. But it has to be costed,” he says.
He doesn’t instantly manage to convince either of them, and their uncertainty echoes a difficulty the Liberals Democrats appear to be facing nationally. “I was completely set on voting Lib Dem before the manifestos were published. But I’ve had a change of heart about whether Europe is the number one issue for me any more, or whether post-Europe is what I’m thinking about now,” Robson says. “Will the Lib Dems get a majority? I don’t think so. Is my vote better used to empower more Labour MPs, who can tackle the Conservatives, and make sure we have a good deal leaving Europe?”
Jelly agrees. “The Lib Dems saying we will stay in Europe is just naive. I just don’t think we will stay in Europe,” he says.
Joe Beighton, 21, an undecided third-year music student, says he feels “a bit torn about tuition fees: making rich people pay for their tuition fees and not making others pay them back until they can afford them, in a way seems a leftwing policy.” Conservative voter Olivia Gaunt, 21, who is doing her finals in human, social and political sciences, and is about to leave university with £40,000 of debt, says: “Because of what happened with the Lib Dems when they proposed getting rid of tuition fees, I think people take that sort of proposal with a pinch of salt these days. People don’t believe it.”
Aliya Padhani and Pemi Arowojolu, both 19 and first-year politics students, knocked on the doors of about 200 students at their college to get them to sign up to register to vote; only a couple of people were not already registered. They share scepticism on the fees, but say they will both be voting Labour anyway. “In theory it’s a great idea, but I’m not sure about whether he is going to be able to deliver, or if it’s going to be another fiasco like the Lib Dems in 2010,” Padhani says. Europe isn’t a big factor in deciding how to vote because she thinks Brexit is now inevitable, but she says she will be voting Labour to protest against the “slow privatisation of the NHS” and to register a vote against Theresa May who “represents the epitome of the 1%”.
Zeichner says he has seen more enthusiasm for the tuition fees policy at Anglia Ruskin University, where more people come from lower-income households. He says the tuition fees pledge needs to be seen in the context of a wider package of education support pledges: scrapping of fees in the further education sector, the restoration of the education maintenance allowance for 16-18-year-olds and a commitment to protect students from above-inflation interest rate rises on their debts.
Many of the people he meets remain undecided, but he feels more upbeat than he did at the beginning of the campaign. “You have, as a candidate, not to get overexcited, but we are being received with enthusiasm and warmth across the city,” he says. The Conservative candidate, John Hayward, is determinedly upbeat and believes this is, contrary to what betting sites and voting research sites suggest, a three-horse race. But most people the Guardian spoke to said they had not seen much Conservative literature and there was still no sign of blue posters in the city. (Hayward says he is not playing the poster game.)
In the focus group, there is general gloom about the election, with almost all participants vigorously opposed to the Conservatives and all convinced that they will win. Both Zeichner and Huppert are well known and, broadly, popular; no one seemed to suggest they would be heartbroken if either won, and the other candidates in the area are seen as irrelevant. Among Labour-leaning voters, there is respect for Corbyn in the abstract but much uncertainty, with most agreeing that “he’s heading in the right direction, but no one’s following him”.
