Highlights from ‘Our Political Voice’ Assembly at UCL
Photography by Daria Mosolova
Daria Mosolova attends the Students’ Union’s London Student Assembly, an event bringing together various political representatives and campaign group leaders.
On Friday 22nd November, the Students’ Union hosted parliamentary candidates, local politicians and leaders of youth organisations at the Institute of Education to represent their parties on a panel and discuss policies in front of a student audience.
Just three weeks ahead of the UK general election on 12th December, the assembly was organised with the purpose of boosting student political engagement by providing information on voting strategies and the parties, as well as encouraging conversation between politicians and young people. The first panel of the evening concerned student engagement, featuring members of MyLifeMySay, Shoutout UK, NUS and For Our Future’s Sake, while the Politics Panel in the second half allowed representatives of Liberal Democrats, Labour, Green and Conservative parties to hold a Q&A session with the audience.
According to the Electoral Commission, one in three teenagers were not registered to vote only one week before the 26th November deadline. The CEO of MyLifeMySay, Mete Coban, pointed out three possible causes of this phenomenon: a lack of political literacy provided by educational institutions; an inauthentic nature of politics that diverts young people from investing their interest; a narrow representation base. “When you look at politics, it is still not representative of society,” he explained. While Coban entered politics at the age of 21, the average age of a councillor is 66, for an MP it’s 55.
While Brexit remains at the heart of the upcoming election, the audience posed a variety of questions, indicating a sense of general weariness to the issue that has prevailed in political discussion since Article 50 was invoked in 2017. Instead, the panel involved concerns over youth living conditions, climate change, gentrification, UK arms trade as well as spending on public services.
“We want to embrace freedom of movement. It is really important that people have the opportunity to live and work and love across all of the countries of the EU,” declared Green Party councillor Caroline Russell.
“At this election we have got to chart a better course […] It is about how we work together with other countries to solve the problems that each of us have in our own countries,” stated Lib Dem MP Chuka Ummuna. Along with the Greens, the Liberal Democrats are the only parliamentary party that openly support staying in the EU.
Photography by Daria Mosolova
Voting
Richard Brooks, co-founder of For Our Future’s Sake, a student-led movement campaigning for a People’s Vote, identified tactical voting as a way of dealing with the flaw of the UK electoral system that leaves many constituencies facing competition between just two credible representative MPs. Brooks argued that depending on what issue you care about, “there are constituencies where you may usually vote Labour, for instance South West, but if you want to stop a hard-right Tory Brexiteer from getting in, you have to vote Lib Dem, because they are the only other candidate who has a chance of winning.”
Helen, a Young Green representative at LSE addressed the concern of ‘wasting’ a vote by supporting a party that is not likely to gain majority. “If you are in a safe seat, a vote for whichever party it could be is also seen as a ‘wasted vote’. If you vote green, the party that gets the seat is more likely to enact environmental policy.”
“If you live in a marginal seat, vote tactically. If you live anywhere else…vote for the party that best fits your values,” added Russell, specifying that polling outcome is not solely a matter of Brexit, but a determinant of the amount of media coverage and Short Money that smaller parties will receive.
Photography by Daria Mosolova
UK Arms Trade
Confronted with a question regarding the UK arms trade with Saudi Arabia and its impact on the crisis in Yemen, Conservative candidate Johnny Luk emphasised the need to increase transparency of revenue received from the export, as well as accountability for actions committed around the world with the use of British weaponry. Luk prefaced the statement by saying “We are very proud that we are a world leading military provider and we are an important stabilising force around the world and it is an important export for us as well.”
Lib Dem candidate Matthew Kirk apologised: “I’m not sure what our policy is. I should know and I’m sorry.” The Green Party and Labour agree on immediate suspension of the arms trade. The Greens also highlighted their opposition to the UK nuclear programme Trident, condemning Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson for her willingness to ‘press the nuclear button’. Kirk defended his party’s stance, arguing that “a nuclear deterrent works if other people believe you might use it […] That’s why Jo is absolutely right to say, until we move to a nuclear free world, which is the goal, that she would be prepared to use a nuclear deterrent.”
Photography by Daria Mosolova
Recovery from austerity
Conservative policies such as the re-introduction of 20,000 police jobs as well as increased NHS funding are said to be countering the 2010 coalition government cuts that drastically reduced spending on public services. “Austerity is tough but there is a reason why people did it, because we had a lot of debt. So now, after 9 years, and finally some economic growth, we have been able to reinvest in police officers,” stated Luk.
Chuka Ummuna, a former Labour candidate, spoke on behalf of the Liberal Democrats, having joined the party in June 2019. Previously publicly critical of the Lib Dems for ‘enabling Tory austerity’ during the 2010-2015 coalition government, Ummuna recently told the BBC that “things have changed.”
Nevertheless, Ummuna’s colleague Matthew Kirk went on to back the Conservative statement by reiterating that “In the coalition years, we implemented the exact same budgetary restrictions as Labour had in their 2010 manifesto. That is because there was no money to do any more than that.”
In turn, Caroline Russell opposed the consensus by claiming austerity to be an “economically illiterate” policy, protesting how the government “spent billions bailing out the banks and yet we were not able to maintain public services in the public sector.”