Every few years, an event hits the radical bookshops. A clutch of new writers appear, telling you the story and how it will change everything. A typical book might have a cover with a clenched fist, and it might be called, for instance, Rise. Then the movements fail, and the books join each other in the bargain basements. For the British left, the snap election of June 2017 really was an event, and an ecstatic one – a sudden, thumping statement that enthusiasm and anger mattered more than media and received opinion. Helped by a massive youth swing leftwards, 40% of those who voted supported Jeremy Corbyn’s bid to become prime minister – 10% more than for Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband, and only 2% less than Theresa May, whose polling data mere weeks before showed her on course for a 1983-level landslide. Maybe this event is different. Is the book?
Liam Young is a 21-year-old Corbyn aide; the first half of his account charts how the “youth surge” happened. It combines a media survey – journalists sagely opining that Corbyn supporters were “thick as pigshit” and that “campaigns didn’t matter” – with interviews with eager young Corbynites. The enthusiasm and honesty of the latter, the reasonable nature of their demands, and the sneering entitlement and condescension of their elders and betters couldn’t be in starker contrast. As Young points out, those under 30 rely much more on social rather than mass media, and that their concerns are not reported is a potentially fatal mistake that most of the mainstream press shows startlingly little interest in wanting to rectify. Similarly, Labour’s party machine ran a defensive campaign based on the fear that it could lose its northern “heartlands” to Brexit nationalism; Corbyn’s inner circle and Momentum ran an offensive, optimistic campaign, which won them outlandish seats such as Kensington and Canterbury, and easily retained the north. They have earned the right to be listened to.
Only in flashes does Rise give some insight into how surreal and thrilling those extraordinary weeks last spring were. But Young’s limitations as a writer can’t be explained just by his youth. When taking on the unintentionally amusing anti-Corbyn talking point that “Corbynistas” ate “croissants”, he points out that they cost “69p for three in Aldi”, but then continues “it would seem, given Labour’s success, that Corbyn doesn’t have the appetite for croissants but he certainly has one for exceeding expectations”. It is not, as the younger generation say, a sick burn. In the run-up to the election, reading the pro-Corbyn online media that Young rightly credits with great importance was a blast – the glee and excitement and humour, the silly meme-making, “slug-baiting” and neologism-coining. None of this comes across in Rise. I suspect that’s because it’s less a book for the people Young is writing about, more a means of explaining them to those that just don’t get it.
That’s fine, but this is no kind of a history either; it gives very little sense of the moments of political strangeness before or peripheral to Corbyn’s surge. There are only glancing references to the enormous pro-remain and pro-independence youth votes in the EU and Scottish referendums, to the 2010-2011 student protests and the riots of August 2011. In hindsight, all of these appear to be signs that something was afoot. The promised “New Socialism”, meanwhile, wouldn’t scandalise Edward Heath or Harold Macmillan.
No utopian ponderings about full automation, basic income or direct democracy for Young – this is bread and butter stuff. Fairer finance, cleaner air and energy, secure employment, free higher education, investment in health. Decent as it is, nobody between the 1910s and the 80s would ever have called this “socialism”. In fact, at times he is to the right of the postwar consensus, as in his analysis of the housing shortage. Here, his solution to the crisis – that he correctly stresses particularly afflicts young people – is based not on de‑commodification through building more social houses and flats, but on helping the young on to the property ladder by extending the “right to buy” scheme into the private market.
In places, Rise hints at tensions within the Corbyn coalition – after all, an odd one, where greying anti-imperialists and the precarious younger generation have united to take over what was previously the most conservative social democratic party in western Europe. Young is brave to make clear his opposition to any pandering to fear of immigration, something Corbyn is repeatedly urged to do, including by some in his inner circle. On Brexit, Young argues, I think rightly, that the pro-EU youth vote of 2016 was driven by a belief in “values, not institutions”, that is, by an attachment to internationalism and cosmopolitanism rather than to the single market or Frontex. Whether Labour’s policy on Brexit will be able to match those values is still an open question, as is so much else. The rudiments of a new left are here; let’s hope what comes next is more ambitious.
- Rise: How Jeremy Corbyn Inspired the Young to Create a New Socialism by Liam Young (Simon & Schuster, £12.99). To order a copy for £11.4, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
