this is an interesting example of what I was talking about the other day. it's a fantastic victory and everyone involved should be really proud. but it raises some interesting questions about what the student left is and where it goes next.

the person who tweeted this, though still very young, is a Labour member who has said on here they will not vote for left candidates due to a range of factors including concerns about antisemitism and electability.

so what we are looking at is an active, radical student organiser who gets victories, but is at best a Starmerite. and that's an interesting contradiction, and not one you would have seen 5/6 years ago when I was involved in university activism.

you might posit Wes Streeting as someone on the Labour right who got victories for students through grassroots organising with NUS, but he wouldn't have been anywhere near a campaign like this.

so we're looking at a tendency I've noticed for a while now (full disclosure: I do not work at or attend a uni, but worked at one till last year and have kept up to date with student campaigns I was involved with while there)

younger students who do organising and activism work are increasingly soft-left. maybe that's because they're younger and their politics aren't fully formed, but again, sitting on the SU is different from being an active participant in occupations and battling management.

this tendency comes from a feeling that the hard left is bad on identity politics - they see the soft left as a place where they can be openly queer, pro-trans, not have to worry about their religion + 'our' side as somewhere where those things will be less/differently understood

I think they're wrong, fwiw, and their position is based on a misunderstanding of what ID politics is and can do, because I think ID politics has been warped beyond all recognition by its appropriation by capitalism, but this shift is real and it isn't going away.

it might be a natural swing towards a wonky formulation of the centre-left after the Corbyn years, but it's something that should give us pause.

I can only speak for what I've seen personally, but most of the socio-cultural signifiers of 'a hard-left student activist circa 2014-17': pride in one's queerness, a desire to resist homophobia and racism in all forms, understanding of casualised work ...

is increasingly being accompanies by Starmerite politics, or more alarmingly still, orange triangles in the bio!

a sidenote - I think Layla Moran, the politician who best encapsulates these contradictions, will get >20% of the vote at a GE one day in the future

I'm not suggesting any actions or any conclusions here, but it's something we ought to be aware of. and now a few words from my own limited experiences with Labour organising 2017-present:

youth Corbynism had many progressive and forward-looking elements, but a group of people it prioritised was the 'well-meaning heterosexual Lad', from the Big Bag Of Cans meme to Glastonbury, to Acid Corbynism. that is fine, but we need to refocus on reconstituting id politics...

... and minority politics both on a surface and deeper level (Corbynism was fantastic at the latter as its roots were in anti-imperialism), and refining what identity means beyond location or wealth or disenchantment.

quick disclaimer: this is not intended to directly criticise the person I've quoted or their politics - I've noticed we have a few mutuals! what's happened in Manchester is a great victory and I hope it's the first of many. more power to 'em.

another strand of this stuff is youth engagement with FBPE, which has faded away a bit as Brexit has worn on, but was always misunderstood but us lot on here as 'middle class kids lol', when it wasn't, it was marginalised weird kids mixed together with posh secure kids

not in terms of people who flag waved at marches, but people's private politics. pro-EU student sentiment was a mishmash of class AND identity in a way I'd never seen before, and it's foreshadowed much of this.

not that politics haven't always been a mixture of class and social identity , of course they are, but it feels like there's at once both a fuller and hollower understanding of how these things intersect, and I'm curious but slightly worried where it'll all be in 5 years time.

this is a really prescient point - think the image of yer average Swappie as some cum stained old codger, plus the disgraceful presence of Diane Abbott at Weyman Bennett talks c.2018, has helped create where we're at now.
https://twitter.com/mattrbliss/status/1332071643867467777?s=19

so the radical position is 'we are moving away from the old radical position', but that doesn't lead to e.g. Corbynism from below or pan-Africanism with an exciting young leader, but to Radical Starmerism.

see also why the 21-25 age group tend to like Corbyn being an old duffer who's secretly Good, and younger people often think him a ridiculous figure

this is it - they're not pro-Starmer so much as anti-Corbyn https://twitter.com/mattrbliss/status/1332074966922252289?s=19

apologies to Ben for not blanking out their name.