The world of student politics is a fraught one. With a general election looming, it becomes positively treacherous. Student political societies form the fabric of many people’s university experience; newly eloquent, better informed and away from the influence of family, polling cards are brandished with zealous enthusiasm. In Cambridge, conscious as we are of class backgrounds and their implications, questions of politics become even more plangent. But political affiliation does not come easily to all. Floating voters are a minority presence at universities, but this is perhaps less due to a lack of numbers than a reluctance to admit their indecision. In a world in which nailing your party colours to the mast seems a rite of passage, the position of the floating voter is an uncomfortable one.

In the UK, and increasingly elsewhere in the world, political landscapes have undergone seismic shifts. Ex-industrial Labour heartlands have been conclusively subsumed to UKIP’s thrall, and affluent metropolitan liberals form the core of Corbyn’s support base. With the rise of figures like Corbyn and Trump, politics increasingly feels like a personality cult with an image problem. Voters from both ends of the political spectrum now identify themselves not with a party, but with an individual, and personal idiosyncrasies are taken as representative of a party from whom they receive decidedly fragile support. Being polemical works both for and against politicians; depending on whom you speak to, Corbyn is either the Labour Party’s 21st-century Nye Bevan, or its fatal flaw. Attempting to negotiate this paradigm shift is the new voter: traditional political determinants upturned, we are uprooted, unsure and thoroughly confused.

“With the rise of figures like Corbyn and Trump, politics increasingly feels like a personality cult with an image problem.”

As destabilising as it is, by abandoning these binary and restrictive responses to political leaders and their parties, floating voters are not betraying their ignorance. In fact, they look beyond party conference sound bites to the broader parties that surround them. At no other point in recent history has this response been more apposite. In the queasy post-Brexit hinterland we now inhabit, divisive questions like those surrounding the EU have split not just the electorate, but also those they vote for. Corbyn’s early declaration that his Labour party was a “broad church” has so far gone unevidenced, and May’s stance on issues like grammar schools has received far from universal popularity amongst the Conservatives. Political parties can no longer coalesce around a single, unified body of ideology, and affiliating yourself exclusively to one party, and all the mixed messages that it transmits, it often neither appropriate nor even possible.

Neither is political ambiguity synonymous with apathy. I am not in any way arguing for inaction, but rather its opposite. Political activism by students is important and necessary, not least because young voters have been overlooked by generations of politicians. Putting young votes back in the field of play for politicians, convincing them that we too have a vote, and will use that vote discerningly, is the only way to change a political system biased in the interests of an older (voting) generation. Unbound by the strictures of party lines and loyalties, the floating voter is more capable than any other of making considered decisions about how to cast their vote.

Poll shows huge lead for Labour among Cambridge students

The power of the floating vote, however, depends on the fact it will eventually stop floating and secure itself, however tentatively, one way or the other. Indecision must end at the ballot box, even if the result is a vote for a party whose policies you cannot entirely agree with. A vote, of whatever colour, floating or not, is important: please use it