When Playbook met Blomfield

An in-depth interview with the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Students

“I represent more students than any other member of parliament by a long way,” Paul Blomfield tells Playbook as we kick off our wide-ranging chat about higher education—taking place over the phone, which feels a little anachronistic in the Zoom era. “About a third of my constituents are students.”

This quirk of the Sheffield Central constituency makes it one of the safest Labour seats in the country. In fact, it was in 1935 that the seat was last won by a Conservative MP—although the Liberal Democrats made a fist of it in 2010, coming within 200 votes of an upset (with those student voters no doubt invigorated by the now infamous pledge to vote against any rise in tuition fees).