"Put down that wrench!"

Following some irregularities, the UK Border Agency has revoked London Metropolitan University's visa license. Not only can the university no longer recruit overseas (non-EU) students (a major source of income for all UK universities, and one of the few things that stops them from going bankrupt), but their existing overseas students have been told that they have sixty days to find alternative visa sponsors or they will be deported. LMU have estimated their annual income from overseas students at around £30M, about 20% of their total income. They currently have over 2000 overseas students.

This represents a loss for the Libdems and a gain for the Tories; the returns at the last election for this ward were otherwise quite similar (Lib 975, Con 681, Lab 457, Green 260). The city council is No Overall Control.

The Tory campaign was distinguished by being largely anonymous (a series of flyers for meetings of concerned residents) and focussed on a NIMBYish opposition to a transit site for travellers on the edge of the ward. I wouldn't go quite so far to say that it was a dirty campaign, but it veered close to ad hominem in places and played heavily on unreasonable fears, rather than presenting a positive manifesto.

The Libdems produced exactly the sort of reasonable campaign I'd expect from them, but they necessarily had to rebut the Tory scaremongering.

I didn't see any material from the Labour candidate, who was previously the SU president, and ran a campaign aimed solely at students (the ward contains three halls of residence). I'm quite disappointed at the local Labour party for allowing such a minority interest candidate to stand in their name; the sole presence I saw for him was on Facebook (login required, alas). His election poster here rather beggars belief. He failed to respond to any of my questions on broader ward issues, so I'm quite glad that he wasn't elected. He doesn't seem to have substantially increased the Labour share of the vote, in any case.

Finally, I neither saw, nor expected to see any campaign flyers from the Green candidate. In this at least I was not disappointed.