Student Life Tours – event 1 review
Last Thursday the first of the Student Life Tours occured down in Exeter. I was not able to attend, but Ed Hallam over on TheYoungConservative has written a review:
On Thursday evening TYC joined the CF Coalition Campus Tour panel at Exeter University in a Question Time style event, taking questions for the award-winning Exeter Conservative Future. We were in sound company, seated between Simon Richards of the Freedom Association and Mark Wallace of the TaxPayers’ Alliance to one side, and CF NME member Patrick Sullivan to the other. Kudos to Patrick for having put together this entire nationwide tour under his remit as Student Life chairman; undoubtedly the highest achievement of the NME this year, and hopefully a new fixture in CF life for the years and administrations to come.
The abiding sense I took away from the evening was the value and importance of going into schools and universities and disseminating ideas. We were undoubtedly preaching to a home crowd and there wasn’t a great deal of dissent, for better or worse. But I do think it was of great worth to bring non-Party speakers before the activists; people prepared to give fresh answers, not trite Party-line ‘isn’t it exciting to be a Conservative’ platitudes. I was particularly impressed by the quality of the questions asked. All were well thought out, erudite inquiries, not simplistic paeans for tax cuts and the like.
Following the event the Freedom Association laid on one of their famous ‘Free Spirits’ events for all who attended, as well as a raffle, won by Alexander Cook, for a bottle of ‘Free Spirits’ Gin. We thank them for their generosity!
Undoubtedly there were some lessons to be learnt from this first date, and we’ll be channelling our feedback to Patrick, but the principle of the evening was sound, and was a welcome step towards a YAF-style interfacing of activists with the broader conservative movement. We see in this event the foundation of something indispensable, a new facet for Conservative Future which should grow and become a mainstay of what CF is about. We’re now very much looking forward to the next stop on the Tour – UEA.
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