Into the Boarchive – Volume 48, Issue II

This section – looking back at stories from The Boar’s archive – originally appeared in Volume 48, Issue II of The Boar, published on Thursday 6 November, 2025.

1975: Food for thought

It’s been a long day in the library or in lectures, and you’re in desperate need of a sweet treat. You rock up to Co-op, only to find your favourite chocolate bar has somehow acquired a £1-plus price tag (this wouldn’t have been a shock if you’d read page three of The Boar beforehand). You complain about the injustice of rising food prices, insisting that our generation has it worse than any other.  

Just a decade on from Warwick’s opening though, students were left similarly raging as prices in the University Refectory were hiked by two-thirds, despite student grants only rising by a comparatively mere 22%.   

The mysteriously first-name-less University Catering Officer, Mr Garcia, said the increases were needed to cover rising costs – 40% food, 60% labour.   

The fact that catering takings had actually risen by £12,937 (equivalent to over 3,000 meal deals today – 2,999 of which purchased in panic due to a lack of meal prep – again) on the previous year was kept rather quiet. So much for putting students first.  

Take one glance at the cost of food at Warwick in 1975 though, and you’ll be quickly lobbying the SU to hold an ASV on replacing the shiny new Co-op with a retro ‘70s canteen.  

A 23p steak and kidney pie, served with 10p chips and 8p baked beans, anyone?  

1998: Empty promises

Student grievances over tuition fees have been a fixture of this paper’s coverage since September 1998, when Blair’s New Labour government introduced them for the first time at £1,000 a year. Circuiting back to that era, The Boar‘s front page on 11 November ’98 ran the headline ‘Local MP denies misleading students’, after Labour MP for Coventry South, Jim Cunningham, seemed to reverse his position on the controversial policy.

Written up by former Boar editor and current BBC Assistant Editor, Giles Edwards, who reconnected with this paper at a summer open day on dad duties, the story told how Cunningham reiterated to The Boar the 1997 manifesto’s intention to wait for the Dearing Report’s findings on higher education before introducing student payments. This was despite the MP having penned a letter to the then-SU President a month prior to the report’s publication, stating that tuition fees would not be brought in.

Cunningham stressed that the letter merely represented the party’s views at the time, and attempted to shift the blame onto the government for its too-soon committal.

SU President at the time, Jon Pycroft, nevertheless urged the Coventry South member to vote against fees in the House of Commons, while the National Union of Students (NUS) announced a ‘time bomb’ campaign to ‘out’ pro-fee MPs at the next election.

27 years on, however, here we are, with the prospect of £10k+ fees by the 2029 General Election. The Cunningham fiasco was the beginning of a saga which has since ballooned out of proportion.

Frustration has inflated in tandem with fees, and students will surely bear the ensuing financial brunt for decades to come (he writes teary-eyed).