The £40k campaign condemning Lib Dems

If you paid attention to your news feed in the last week, the likelihood is that the story of the National Union of Students (NUS) spending £40,000 on a campaign against the Liberal Democrats has come across your radar.

The most iconic of the posters displays two clenched fists, with the words ‘liar liar’ tattooed across the knuckles with the first ‘I’ being pointed with the Liberal democrat logo. The NUS describes the campaign as seeking to end the “cycle of broken promises.”

Their website describes how “In 2010 hundreds of thousands of students were abandoned by politicians who broke their promise on tuition fees… They traded lies for power.”

The main purpose of the campaign is to encourage students to vote against MPs who broke their pledges not to raise tuition fees, although the posters are specially targeting the Liberal Democrat party, something some students aren’t too happy about.

Critics are keen to point out that other MPs too broke similar pledges, but were not necessarily members of the same party. Other members of the NUS are questioning the necessity of such expenditure on what is being called “a political smear campaign.”

The campaign has received even more press due to the fact that national rail has refused to display the billboards for any longer, emphasizing that it has no expressed desire to have a political opinion as a company.

One commentator online suggested: “The NUS need to stay politically neutral. Why should our union fees go towards pushing a political agenda we never said we support?

“Furthermore why does the NUS act as if they speak on behalf of all students?”

Joseph Miles, a PPE final year student at Wadham college recently saw his counter campaign, #trolltheNUS, go viral, after sharing a page on facebook named: ““Troll the NUS executive; donate to the Liberal Democrats!”

He told the Oxford Student: I never expected the #trollNUS campaign to take off like this. When I heard of the #liarliar campaign, and having seen the NUS’s increasingly desperate attempts to plug it on social media, I started the Facebook event…as a joke and invited several people who I know are Lib Dems at Oxford.

“I do think the NUS has a problem with accountability, and its internal structures are almost impossible to understand.

“Clearly I am not the only person who thinks that the NUS has become dominated by small internal cliques who are nowhere near representative of the entire student body.”

An article on the Liberal Democrat Voice website, targeted for Lib Dem supporters, pointed out that the campaign is not endorsing those MPs that did keep to their pledge. They also asked: “Where was their campaign against Labour MPs who introduced tuition fees and top-up fees when they said they wouldn’t?”

Some are more sympathetic to the cause; many commentators who sympathised with the campaign, citing the fact that the student population needs to be reminded of the broken promises, and even offering the point that this campaign will put more pressure on the Labour party to follow through with their plan of reducing tuition fees.

When I contacted Brian Alcorn, President of the Lincoln Student Union and a heavily involved member of the NUS, he did offer the fact that the campaign was originally voted on at last years NUS Conference in the form of a mandate to hold those who raised the tuition fees accountable: “In the grand scheme of things, it’s not a lot of money, and we did vote on it last year,” he told Felix.

Despite the protests, however, three more billboards are planned to be put up at London Victoria, Sheffield Central, and Manchester Piccadilly from midnight Wednesday until May 8.

The NUS leader Toni Pearce cited large amount of bitterness within the student population: "Students queued to vote for the Lib Dems in 2010 on the sole basis of this pledge. It wasn't a minor misdemeanour. It was an outright lie. We have an obligation to hold them to account for this, and we will."

Will the billboards even make a difference to student voting? Although it is too soon to tell, they are certainly generating debate around the topic, which can only be seen as good thing.