£11bn tuition fee bribe saw under 24s rush to vote

HIGH turnout among younger voters has been credited for boosting Labour’s results.

A surge in voters aged 18-24 was believed to have been fuelled by the party’s promises to end university tuition fees and reinstate maintenance grants for the poorest students – costing £11billion a year – and to increase the minimum wage.

Some pundits claimed the turnout for the age group was as high as 72 per cent after the number was tweeted by a youth vote activist and retweeted by Labour MP David Lammy.

Polling experts said the figure was unlikely to be correct but said early analysis suggested turnout for younger voters was significantly higher than the 43 per cent seen in the 2015 election.

Jeremy Corbyn received backing from celebrities including Lily Allen and several rappers who used social media such as Twitter and Snapchat to urge young people to vote. As the results began to emerge yesterday morning, singer Miss Allen wrote on Twitter: ‘Respect your youngers.’

Official exit polls do not ask voters’ ages, although pollsters from Ipsos Mori are expected to produce an age breakdown for voter turnout next week.

Seats with the highest proportions of 18 to 24-year-olds saw above-average swings to Labour, and there were queues outside polling stations in several university towns.

More than a million new voters registered to vote after the election was announced, and Labour won the majority of seats where turnout was up by more than 5 per cent.

Overall turnout was 68.7 percent, an increase of 2.6 percentage points from the 2015 general election. Polling expert Lord Ashcroft said 67 per cent of 18 to 24-year- olds had voted Labour, compared with just 18 per cent who supported the Conservatives. Support for Labour remained high among 25 to 34-year-olds with 58 per cent saying they had voted for the party, compared with 22 per cent for the Conservatives. Polling sta- tions in university towns such as Nottingham, Canterbury and Southampton saw queues of students waiting to vote.

In Canterbury, Labour won a shock victory in the traditional Conservative stronghold, winning by 187 votes. It was the first time the Tories had lost the seat since 1918. In Bristol west, Labour increased its share of the vote by 30 per cent. The seat has the eighth highest proportion of 18 to 24-year-olds in the country.

David Cameron’s former director of communications Andy Coulson said young voters had ‘lashed out’ against the Conservative campaign.

‘The youth vote has come out in strength and lashed out pretty aggressively,’ he told ITV.

Turnout has historically been low for younger voters but pundits suggested the eU referendum had galvanised new voters. Several Labour MPs praised Mr Corbyn for engaging with younger voters.

Matthew Pennycook, the new MP for Greenwich and woolwich, in south- east London, said the Labour leader had brought ‘ young people out in record numbers’. Labour veteran Paul flynn, who was reelected in Newport west, said he was ‘thrilled and exhilarated’ by the support from young voters.

‘we can look forward with great excitement to the future of those young people, politicised now by hope, by idealism, by integrity,’ he added.

former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who lost his Sheffield Hallam seat to Labour, warned of a ‘huge gulf’ between young and old in Britain.

He said: ‘ we saw that in the Brexit referendum and we see it here again – polarised between left and right, between different regions and nations and areas of the country but most gravely of all, this huge gulf now between young and old.’

‘Thrilled and exhilarated’