Former SU president will be voting in line with majority of rookie lawyers surveyed in Legal Cheek General Election poll
A City solicitor who in his uni days was instrumental in the march by 50,000 students against rising tuition fees thinks it is time for us to forgive the Lib Dems.
In autumn 2010, the time of the student uprising, Rahul Mansigani had just finished his law degree at the University of Cambridge and was the president of its Students’ Union. Reflecting seven years on, Mansigani wrote last week in The Independent:
[L]oudspeaker in hand, with an obligatory sense of wounded betrayal, I would never have thought that I would ever encourage people to vote Liberal Democrat again.
Now a junior associate at a City law firm, Mansigani is proud to say he’ll be voting Lib Dem next month. Not only that, he has become a member of the party.
Why? He believes Brexit is the “defining issue” of this general election, and that the Lib Dems are “the only party that is fighting for an open, tolerant Britain in Europe”. He concludes:
For those of us who felt so keenly betrayed in 2010, it is time for us to forgive the mistakes that the Liberal Democrats made in office.
Mansigani will not be the only young lawyer voting for Tim Farron and co next month.
A recent Legal Cheek poll of over 1,000 law students and junior lawyers showed 30.8% of you are planning on placing your crosses by the Lib Dems. Theresa May’s Conservatives bagged second place with 29.8%, while Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour secured third with 24.4%.
But for those law students bucking the Lib Dem trend, Mansigani has a message. He told Legal Cheek:
While tuition fees were and are an important issue, the government’s approach to Brexit is now the most significant political question students and universities have faced in a generation. Law students should vote for representatives who oppose a hard Brexit, and the Liberal Democrats are the only party that is clearly and proudly pro-European.
He continued:
A ‘hard’ Brexit will affect law students in many different ways, including their ability to study, work and live in other European countries, for their peers across Europe to study and work here as lawyers, and for the funding of British universities and their work with other European institutions… We’ve all studied constitutional law and appreciate the vital importance of a principled, credible opposition to hold government to account — only the Liberal Democrats will provide proper scrutiny of May’s plans.
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