Just as the Ukip threat lurks for Labour in the working men's clubs and council estates of the north, so the Greens are poaching its voters in student towns across the nation. So much so that the party has identified 12 target seats which it could lose because of a mass exodus to Natalie Bennett's band of plucky eco warriors, among them student hotspots like Leeds North West, Bristol West and Brighton Pavilion.
It is in this context that Labour strategists will have been watching Bennett and sole Green MP Caroline Lucas launch the party's manifesto at a theatre and arts space in Dalston, East London's hipster heartland, this morning. They will have seen plenty to worry them in a set of proposals pitched straight at campuses and student union bars. “[The Greens'] offering has been a very professional, well-thought through [set of policies targeting] what students are hard up against and how their lives can be improved,” says Oliver Sidorczuk, Director of youth voting organisation Bite the Ballot, who think there's plenty here to entice student voters.
Read about the party manifestos:
Conservative manifesto: the verdict
Labour manifesto: the verdict
A poll last year by YouthSight found the Greens in second place to Labour among students—the first time a smaller party has made their top three—with support for Ed Miliband's party slipping since the previous poll. It found that the most significant factor in the party's appeal to these younger voters was, predictably, its environmental policies. Accordingly, the Green manifesto has two whole chapters dedicated to the Earth and environment. Compare that with Labour, whose climate change policy—very much a sideline in its campaign so far—is buried halfway through the unsexily titled chapter on “we will stand up for Britain's interests in Europe and the world.”
Social policy also ranks highly for students as a reason to support the Greens, and polls show that 18-24 year olds place more importance on housing and (often) education than other voters do. The party's manifesto has plenty of this for the taking. Unencumbered by Labour's new “budget responsibility lock” or that party's paranoia over its image among businesses, Bennett and Lucas were today able to pledge 500,000 new social rented homes (the policy over which Natalie Bennet suffered her radio “brain fade” earlier this year), sweeping rent controls, an end to benefits sanctions, a boost to overall public spending and, of course, death to the tuition fees so disastrously u-turned upon by Nick Clegg. The regulation of government surveillance gets its own section, too.
Of course, it's not like Labour have nothing to offer students; their proposed crack down on zero hours contracts, for example, gets right to the heart of young people's concerns about jobs, while their cut in tuition fees, though less impressive than the Greens', makes them the only major party planning to slash tuition. At the end of the day, though, it seems students share a similar disillusionment to older voters. YouthSight found that students were likely to vote Green because “I do not trust any of the other political parties” and “I have become increasingly disillusioned with the other political parties.” This fresh manifesto, brightened up with its much more youth-oriented priorities and unsullied by the record of broken promises which hangs around the main parties, might be seen as worth a punt by a generation chronically wary of politicians.
