The students turn right
Ian Bradley
When Sir William Elliott, the newly reelected Conservative MP for Newcastle North was asked by a BBC reporter how he had managed to increase his majority in a highly marginal seat, he attributed his success largely to the votes of students. Not that a Tory like Sir William would use so vulgar a term as students. He actually called them undergraduates. But there was no doubt of his conviction that he had received substantial support from the campus of Newcastle University.
Five years ago it would have been inconceivable to hear a Conservative MP attributing his victory to such a constituency. There is general agreement among political pundits that the votes of Britain's one million students helped to put Labour in power in the two 1974 elections. But the evidence suggests that they were an important factor in the Conservative victory in May 1979. The student vote may well have accounted for the above average swings to the Conservatives in Birmingham SeIly Oak, Southampton West and Bristol North West and it probably counteracted the increased anti-conservative vote of British Leyland workers fearful of their future in Oxford.
The extent to which student opinion has shifted rightwards in the last five years is shown in the results of similar polls taken at sixteen colleges and polytechnics in London before the most recent election and in October 1974. The poll, conducted by Sennet, the London University student newspaper, showed that support for Labour had remained steady at 36.3 per cent. Those intending to vote Tory, however, had increased from 18.3 per cent in October 1974 to 30.5 per cent and support for the Liberals had dropped from 25.8 per cent to 14.7 per cent.
In universities outside London support for the Conservatives is even greater. An opinion poll carried out at Exeter University last November, when Labour still had a commanding lead in the national polls, showed that 56.5 per cent of those students who were intending to vote in a General Election were Conservatives, 31 per cent Labour, and only 2.5 per cent Liberal. The present levels of membership of major student political groups and the recent results of elections in students' unions confirm the shift of opinion that has taken place among those at universities and polytechnics in the last few years. In 1974 the student radicalism that began in the late Sixties was still not dead and parties of the far left dominated union elections. Now, however, by far the largest student political organisation is the Federation of Conservative Students with 14,000 members.
Four years ago, before they took a conscious decision to involve themselves in student politics, the Conservatives held only two full-time posts on student union executives. Now they hold more than seventy posts on campuses all over the country. The Federation achieved particularly rapid growth between 1975 and 1977 and, although its numbers have remained fairly static since then, it remains the best organised student political force.
The National Organisation of Labour Students has 5,500 members and claims to have grown at an annual rate of 15 per cent over the last three years. The Union Of Liberal Students has also been growing steadily and now has a membership of over 3,000 with a further 5,500 students affiliated to Liberal societies.
By contrast, the level of support among students for political parties on the far left has fallen dramatically in the last five years, and is now tiny. The Socialist Workers Party claims to have 700 student members, while the International Marxist Group has only 200 student members and says that they form a much smaller proportion of the group's total membership than they did in the early seventies. The Communist Party says that its membership in universities and polytechnics has dropped from 800 in 1974 to around 500 today. In the world of student union politics, in fact, victories for Labour and even for the communists, who are joined with Labour in a broad left alliance, betoken a move to the right. Recent elections to executive posts have favoured mainstream political parties at the expense of the far left. At Sheffield and Essex Universities, Labour presidents have been elected after years of domination by the Socialist Workers' Party. The North East London Polytechnic union, a Socialist Workers' Party stronghold until two years ago, is now controlled by Labour, and the presidency of the neighbouring Polytechnic of North London has been won from the SWP by the Communists. The Liberals have wrested control of the union at Manchester Polytechnic from the International Marxists.
In another traditional bastion of the left, the London School of Economics, the Conservatives now have their first union Officer for ten years. They have also recently won the presidential election in the Oxford University students union for the fourth successive year.
Eddie Longworth, president of the Federation of Conservative Students, believes that students have moved rightwards 'because they have become more realistic, more worried about jobs, and once you get into that state, you are more likely to vote Tory.' Certainly the shift in the political mood among students has been part of a more general return to conservatism and more conventional attitudes and behaviour in the last few years. No doubt the chillier economic climate and the overriding need to get a job has played a part. There has been a sharp drop in the number of those wanting to pursue sociology courses and a significant increase in applications for safe vocational subjects like law and accountancy. There has also been a steady increase over the last three years in the number of students going into industry and commerce and a drop in the number of those going on to further research or to social work.
Lecturers, who are now likely to have the longest hair and scruffiest clothes on the campus, are even being heard to lament the passing of those ancient days of student revolt, and to wish that their pupils were more inclined to protest. Perhaps under a Conservative government the tide will turn again, and they will be. But, at the moment, there are few signs of such a shift in attitude.
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