Universities in Britain have offered Irish students up to £110 to travel home and vote for liberalising abortion laws, as recent opinion polls show a serious narrowing of the ‘yes’ camp’s lead ahead of Friday’s referendum.
Assisted by the far-left National Union of Students (NUS), universities have set up bursaries to help students fly back for the vote, which would repeal the Eighth Amendment of Ireland’s constitution which grants the unborn child an equal right to life as its mother.
Student newspaper the Tab reported Tuesday that at least six universities are involved in efforts funding Irish students to fly back and cast a vote, including Oxford, Cambridge, Birmingham, Nottingham, Goldsmiths, and the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Asserting that it supports “the right of pregnant people” rather than ‘pregnant women’ to abort their baby, the NUS said it would match any monetary contribution towards a student’s travel to Ireland made by local union branches up to a maximum of £110 — which it warns is the cut-off for political ‘donations’ under Irish law before funding must be declared.
Despite almost unanimous support from the media and establishment and foreign money having poured into Ireland — the target of an international campaign to dismantle its strict abortion laws — opinion polls show repealing the Eighth Amendment has only a narrow lead.
While stressing they support the ‘yes’ camp, the unions at Oxford and Nottingham said the bursaries are available to all Irish students regardless of how they intend to vote. At Cambridge, however, the women’s campaign said funding is dependent on voting to repeal abortion laws.
Constant political campaigning by the NUS, which is affiliated with around 600 student unions accounting for more than 95 per cent of higher and further education unions in the UK, has led thousands of students calling for their universities to break ties with the far-left organisation.
#LiberateMyDegree, which demands universities “dismantle the Eurocentric curriculum” and prioritise narrowing achievement gaps between groups over providing high-quality courses, supports ‘Preventing Prevent — We are Students Not Suspects’.
The union’s campaign to abolish the government’s counter-terror programme has become a “vehicle for extremist interests”, The Henry Jackson Society think-tank warned earlier this year.
Students Not Suspects slams the “chilling effect” Prevent could have on radical Islamic preachers’ freedom to speak on campus, while at the same the union’s ‘No Platform’ policy barring speakers “with racist and fascist views” is routinely used to block anyone with socially-conservative views, and even feminists who believe that male-bodied individuals who identify as “transgender” are not female.
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