Election: Should Students Vote in London or Back Home?

The June 8 General Election will be the first in 16 years to fall in the university holidays, making it the first time that this generation of students have to decide whether their votes will have more impact at their family homes or term-time addresses.

A strong 68% of students surveyed by pollster YouGov said they plan to vote in their home constituencies. That has the potential to help in some marginal seats outside London but reduces the impact of students in parts of the capital with large student populations.

Students are generally left-leaning and may be particularly motivated to vote this time around because of Labour’s manifesto pledge to scrap tuition fees and the Conservative Party’s apparent willingness to push through a hard Brexit, an approach that has provoked widespread opposition on university campuses.

This application takes seconds to help judge where a student’s vote will be more effective: http://ge2017.com/students

The deadline to register to vote is May 22.

Town or Country?

Logic suggests that Labour-voting students should return to their home suburbs if their term-time address is in one of the poorer areas of London that are popular among students because of their cheaper living costs and are already safe Labour seats.

There is some variation between the number of voters in each electorate but electoral boundaries are revised from time to time to try to even out the difference between small and dense electorates in London and geographically larger constituencies in the countryside. The Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2010 confirms that “constituencies will need to be within 5% of an electoral quota of 76,641.”

Where are the biggest student populations?

The University of London Housing Service says the most popular area among students is Camden NW1 with 10% of surveyed students living there, probably due to the close proximity of University College London in Bloomsbury, which is a solid Labour seat under Keir Starmer.

Imperial College students can’t afford rents near the South Kensington campus and so favour the west in Hammersmith, Shepherd’s Bush and Fulham. Labour MP Andy Slaughter has a reasonably safe margin in the constituency of Hammersmith, having beaten the Tories in 2015 by 50% to 36.4% but a significant slice of the Labour vote will almost certainly go to the Lib Dens, whose vote collapsed in the seat at the last election. Labour’s poor standing under Jeremy Corbyn means Slaughter’s margin should shrink but he is still likely to hang on and is campaigning hard on the Brexit issue.

“I think Brexit and in particular May’s hard Brexit – out of the single market, out of the customs union, cosying up to dictatorships in a desperate effort to replace lost European trade – is a disaster for our country on social, economic, cultural and security terms,” he says. “However, if we let Brexit be the only issue, we let this government off the hook.”

Homesandproperty.co.uk ranks Woolwich, which is in another safe Labour seat, as another top are with student because of its good transport links and low rents.

Ride or Fight The Conservative tide

In London the battle is firmly pitched between Labour and the Conservatives in marginal seats such as Ealing Central & Acton, Brentford & Isleworth, Ilford North, Hampstead & Kilburn, Enfield North, Harrow West, Westminster North, Tooting and Hammersmith while the Conservatives are against Lib Dem Tom Brake in Carshalton & Wallington who backs popular policies against Southern Rail and a #ReformRenting campaign that will appeal to students.

YouGov conducted a poll of voting intentions across the country between April 24 and May 5, when the party manifestos had yet to be released, and compared its findings with the 2015 election results (left). The results show strong and increasing Conservative support although London is shown to be in favour of Labour. Corbyn’s team is “down on their 2015 vote haul in every region of the UK except the south-west and south-east where they were already performing poorly.”

UKIP support is down since last year’s Brexit referendum while the Lib Dems have only gained by small margins.

Returning students could be valuable in the north especially in waning Labour strongholds such as the Tees Valley, where the recent mayoral election yielded an unexpected victory for the Tories. According to YouGov the Conservatives have closed a 22 point deficit at the 2015 election to just 2 points now, with Labour leading 42% to 40%.

“The North West is the region where Labour holds the most seats and is in serious trouble if they start losing seats in significant numbers here. The Conservatives damaged Labour by wresting the Copeland constituency from them for the first time ever at a by-election earlier in the year, although Labour held on to Manchester and Liverpool comfortably at the recent mayoral elections,” says YouGov.

While individual constituencies and candidates will vary and the best option for students is to check with the app, Labour-leaning students from the North are likely to be better off helping to protect the seats Labour won there in 2015.

Whoever they vote for, have until May 22 to register to vote and make the most of this special opportunity to choose where they can have the greatest effect.

by Stewart Vickers @VickHellfire

 

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