The Cambridge University Conservative Association’s invitations of young Reform Advisor Jack Anderton and YouTuber with links to““eugenicist” organisations Tom Rowsell sparked outrage across the student body, a backlash strong enough to force a hasty climbdown by its chair, who abruptly cancelled the talk with Rowsell. Anderton’s appearance would still go ahead and looked set to deliver a showdown between the controversial online commentator, who has called for “mass deportations” as the solution to the problems faced by Britain’s young people, and a crowd of angry protesters. In a previous appearance in York, hundreds of students turned up to protest.

Instead, the event drew a relatively small crowd, of around thirty, and the protest outside, while certainly passionate, boasted even fewer. Members of Cambridge antiracist and socialist organisations chanted their desire to throw both CUCA and Jack Anderton “into the sea,” while Anderton spoke about his desire to reduce immigration to “practically zero”.

While perhaps the least remarkable stop on Anderton’s controversial ‘A New Dawn’ tour, it still managed a mention in the national press – with Cambridge University Society for Women (CUSW) co-founder Thea Sewell remarking in The Telegraph that “the university’s Labour club organised a protest demanding the de-platforming of a guest speaker.” CUSW continue to make a name for themselves denouncing a supposed culture of censorship among the University’s student body.

“In a previous appearance in York, hundreds of students had turned up to protest.”

Yet it was not CULC’s protest that struck me as infantile, but rather CUCA’s decision to hold the event in the first place. My feelings were validated in a later conversation with one of the protest’s ringleaders – the student I spoke to was not a proponent of cancel culture, and did not believe deplatforming speakers like Anderton was an appropriate response.

What he was protesting instead was the fact that CUCA had chosen to give Anderton a voice without proper scrutiny. If the intellectually dubious and morally abhorrent ideas that Anderton expresses about immigrant and minority communities in the UK could not be challenged inside the event – political society talks are rarely spaces for proper debate – then it was only fair that students got to express their disapproval from outside. Anderton’s security presence was so heavy that they could scarcely get close enough to drown him out.

Trying to turn this into another row over free speech and cancel culture is missing the point. CUCA’s leadership has chosen to throw the society’s weight behind Anderton – they have chosen to be influenced by him. It is rare for a political society to invite a speaker they do not agree with – CULC are hardly issuing invitations to revolutionary communists. CUCA’s invitation of Anderton implies that they, to some extent, agree with him.

“Trying to turn this into another row over free speech and cancel culture is missing the point.”

CUCA’s leadership, various sources in political societies have alleged, stand at odds with many of their members, who consider the ideas promoted by individuals like Anderton to be the antithesis of their Conservatism. CUCA is famous for producing Cambridge’s ‘mafia’ of young tories, men who would later hold senior posts under Thatcher. It provided an early political education to big-wigs of the Thatcher and Major governments, people like Norman Fowler, Michael Howard, Kenneth Clarke, and Norman Lamont. If CUCA continue down their current path, and reject sensible Cantabridgian conservatism in favour of the ethnonationalist beliefs of Reform’s most extreme agitators, they will be providing the next generation of young Cambridge tories with a very different political education.

This comes as uni Tory societies across the country are increasingly turning to Reform – with Conservative societies at Newcastle, York, and Durham recording dismal turnouts as right-wing students flock to their Reform counterparts. This is underpinned by some evidence showing a shift among younger voters towards Reform. While suggestions that young people are exhibiting a “Reform surge” are rather overblown, young men in particular, diverging significantly from young women, are showing rising levels of support for Reform, with around 20% of young men choosing them in recent polls, the same number as Polanski’s Greens.

It is not hard to imagine that the message of agitators like Anderton is playing a part in this. He taps into very real anxieties young people have about economic insecurity and barriers to secure careers, home ownership, and family life. Yet he misdirects this anxiety towards an undeserving target – Britain’s migrants and minority ethnic communities.

What Reform lacks currently is a proper intellectual foundation beyond simple populism, offering little in terms of a comprehensive political plan. People like James Orr appear to be trying to change this – and now CUCA have chosen to throw their institutional weight behind the movement. I hope that members who feel uncomfortable about this might feel confident enough to challenge the party’s rhetoric. Simply letting themselves be swept up in the tide is cowardice.