Tom Slater

Brexiteers are occasionally depicted as being a little paranoid. If you listen to some elite critics of Brexit, you would think that a sizeable chunk of those who voted to Leave are sharing dodgy anti-George Soros memes long into the night. You might think, too, that a few Brexit voters see elite stitch-ups everywhere and never let the truth get in the way of their anti-Brussels prejudices. But if there is a paranoid style in British politics at the moment, it is not being practised by the 17.4million. It’s coming from that small set of elite Remainers in politics and the media who are resorting to desperate measures in their campaign to overturn the referendum result and stop Brexit.

Vince Cable has succeeded by one measure at this year’s Lib Dem conference: he’s actually managed to make news. With his Boris-esque aside in his speech today, that Tory Brexiteers are guilty of inflicting ‘years of economic pain justified by the erotic spasm of leaving the EU’, he has, however briefly, drawn attention to a conference that few will be attending, and even fewer will realise is happening; a conference at which the highlight so far has been anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller telling the crowd of assembled Lib Dems that she’s not a Lib Dem. His quip does, nevertheless, reek of desperation. After their bruising years in coalition, the Lib Dems had hoped, after Brexit, that they could turn themselves into the party of the 48 per cent.

Those pushing for press regulation claim to have the people on their side, and since the phone-hacking scandal, Hacked Off has posed as warriors for the victims of press intrusion, standing up to the big media barons. Today, MPs vote on amendments to the Data Protection Bill that would effectively force publications into state-backed regulation for the first time in 300 years. The amendments, tabled by Labour’s Tom Watson and Ed Miliband, would also kickstart the second part of the Leveson inquiry. Watson claims this is ‘for the many, not the few’. But if that's really the case, why are these plans being sneaked into obscure amendments to a dry-sounding piece of data legislation?

Farewell then, Malia Bouattia. The only president of the National Union of Students to earn herself a condemnation from the Home Affairs Committee, Bouattia has been defeated in her bid to win re-election at the NUS conference in Brighton. Her time in charge of the NUS was ended by Shakira Martin, the Union's vice-president for further education, who received 402 votes to Bouattia’s 272. Malia’s presidency was dogged by scandal. And as deluded as the NUS is, even it couldn’t continue to tolerate a leader who called Birmingham University a ‘Zionist outpost’ and once refused to back a motion condemning Isis, because she thought doing so would justify Islamophobia.

In the past 12 months a curious thing has happened: student politics, for decades the most irrelevant, cut-off sphere of public life, has become headline news. The explosion of campus censorship – the primary means through which twentysomething politicos vent their political passions today – is followed, reported on and critiqued by greying commentators on a daily basis. The shock-horror headlines about the rise of 'no platforming' and the sclerotic growth of speech-policing 'safe spaces' seem a little strange. Not least because the No Platform policy – introduced by the National Union of Students in 1974 – is about as old as some of the commentators currently filling column inches with their castigations of the illiberal yoof.

You can’t be on a campus for more than 10 minutes nowadays without hearing about inclusivity. Universities and students’ unions are mad for it. At the University of Sussex, a statement declaring that ‘The Union is committed to providing an inclusive and supportive environment’ has to be read, aloud, before every students’ union meeting. Students who want to set up a new society at the University of Bristol must satisfactorily prove that they will ‘respect and promote the Bristol SU values of equality, diversity, safe space and inclusivity’. It’s big in America, too.

‘If you’re not a socialist before you’re twenty-five, you have no heart; if you are a socialist after twenty-five, you have no head,' goes the old, oft-misattributed saying. But if you’re a Green party supporter on a university campus today, you’re more likely to have no friends. It was reported last week that the Green party's share of the student vote has almost halved in the past two months – falling from a peak of 28 per cent to a paltry 15. In January, the Greens’ vote was creeping up on Labour (the consistent student favourites) but it has now plummeted below even that of the so-called ‘Tory scum’ you hear so much about on tuition-fees demos.