ABSTRACT
The final three months of 2010 saw the UK’s student population engage in perhaps its most sustained, coordinated and widespread acts of protest for a generation. This followed the publication of the Browne Review into higher education funding in October 2010 and the ConservativeLiberal coalition government’s subsequent proposal to increase tuition fees for English students from £3290 to £9000 per year from the 2012/13 academic year, as well as cut 40% from the higher education teaching budget by 2014/15. Much of the public anger was initially directed at Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats, as the party had campaigned extensively on the issue of higher education in the run-up to the 2010 UK general election, pledging to vote against any parliamentary proposals to increase fees whilst promising to abolish fees altogether if voted into government. When the election result produced no majority victory, however, the Liberal Democrats took the position of junior coalition partners in government with David Cameron’s Conservatives. Clegg’s decision to reverse his party’s position and support plans to increase fees represented a double blow for many young people: not only did it represent defeat on one of the few exclusively youth-based election issues, it arguably reflected an instant betrayal to the thousands of first-time voters targeted by the party’s election campaign.
