The twilight of the millennial socialists The Corbynistas don’t want power

In the 2010s, the fallout from the global financial crisis produced a new social type: the graduate with no future. These were the déclassé millennials, squeezed by austerity and unable to enjoy the fruits of bourgeois respectability bestowed on their parents’ generation; the young victims of what the scientist Peter Turchin has called “elite over-production”. That process was turbocharged in this country by Tony Blair’s initiative to get 50% of young people into higher education. The result was a bloated class of young people who were overflowing with fashionable ideas and social and cultural capital, but then radicalised by the housing crisis, a depressed jobs market, and their own unmet expectations. In response to their downward mobility and the diminishing returns from a degree-level education in an era of stagnation, the trendy young city-dwellers involved themselves in new political formations that were loosely identified as a wave of post-2008 “millennial socialism”.

Being a millennial socialist in 2025 must feel like being a hippy in 1974: The Beatles have split up; Hendrix and Joplin are dead; Nixon is in the White House; and another, more aggressive youth subculture — punk — is emerging to replace your fading utopian idealism. The party is well and truly over. Keir Starmer has expunged any trace of radical fervour from Labour. And, as a result of his adoption of bland, buttoned-up technocracy, many young, enthusiastic Left-wingers have left the party. To make matters worse, the stuttering launch of Your Party, the new vehicle for Corbynism, turned into a carnival of infighting, undermining the reputations of all concerned. Across the Atlantic, Trump has returned to the Oval Office, and here in the UK, Gen Z voters are more likely to opt for Nigel Farage than for the Greens’ fledgling “eco-populism”. With woke-liberal messaging adopted wholesale by the upper echelons of the corporate world, the contemporary transgressive pole is now the backlash against the painfully self-righteous, the censorious, and the overtly politically correct. When academia, the arts, cultural institutions, the educational establishment and the civil service demand acquiescence with ultra-liberal social mores, it’s little wonder the counter-cultural moment lies with the populist New Right rather than the progressive Left.

In today’s climate, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when the Labour Left, resurgent with the energies of millennial socialist activists backing Corbyn, felt like it was ascendant, that anything was possible, and that the future of the Labour Party, if not the country, belonged to a class of cool kids shaping an ultra-progressive form of socialist revival. Unlike the party’s tired moderate wing, the millennial Left was brimming with ideas and high-minded, quixotic intellectual debate, and it attached itself to the Labour Party like a limpet during the Corbyn era. The Blairite modernisers, discredited by their Faustian pacts with a sub-prime City and the disasters of Iraq, would call for moderation and sober managerialism, but Labour’s millennial Left organised workshops on Italian revolutionary philosophies, followed by grime and acid house listening parties hosted by Turner Prize-winning artists, and set up “mega-games” in which participants could simulate responses to establishment attacks in the first year of a Corbyn government that never quite came. The millennials were riding a wave of optimism as the official opposition engaged in an institutional turn towards what a Marxist shadow chancellor called “socialism with an iPad”. They were enthused, not repulsed, by Jezza, who was lovingly referred to in the activists’ community centres and Glastonbury Pyramid Stage crowd not disparagingly as “Magic Grandpa”, but reverentially as “the Absolute Boy”.

Rather than spend their nights listening to drunken parliamentary staffers belt out “Things Can Only Get Better”, the Corbynista cool kids would retreat to darkened warehouses to smoke roll-ups, talk about Judith Butler and the Kurdish communes, and dance to trendy sub-genres of electronica until the early hours. Ditch the Marks & Spencer apparel and business-friendly media-speak of bland traditional Labourism, and replace it with septum piercings, oversized jeans, vintage T-shirts, moustache-mullet combinations and neo-Maoist views on landlordism, and you’re approaching the world of millennial socialism. It was dynamic and counter-cultural, with an agenda full of knowing nods and winks towards the anti-authoritarian New Left tradition and Sixties creative “happenings” — homo ludens to the old party establishment’s homo economicus.

And this wasn’t a purely British phenomenon. In the US, Bernie Sanders had led an insurgency against the Democrat’s Clintonian establishment, and on the continent a wave of upstart populist parties — Podemos in Spain, La France Insoumise and Syriza in Greece — found success in challenging the more moderate proclivities of traditional social democracy in their own countries. Like Corbyn’s Labour, they garnered the votes of mainly young, university-educated urbanites, but also built a larger electoral alliance that included older public sector workers, sections of the low-waged metropolitan precariat, and some ethnic minorities.

But the continental experiments in radical Left social movements-cum-parties have largely faded out or else collapsed completely, mirroring the diminution of the Labour Left. Millennial socialism is on the wane. And so, for the beleaguered cool kids, the outlook is rather bleak. This is the context in which the 2025 edition of their annual Corbynite festival The World Transformed (TWT) took place in Manchester last week, for the first time running separately to Labour’s own official conference. In its earlier versions, during the Corbyn years, the festival took place in either Liverpool or Brighton: suitable bastions of working-class anti-Toryism and middle-class progressivism respectively. Back then, TWT received praise from some unlikely quarters, including from Blairite apparatchiks and Corbyn-sceptic commentators, with innovative events aimed at a more youthful, vigorous and once-dominant Left wing — a Momentum-aligned fringe in vegan-friendly venues. But the millennial socialists are today looking for new solutions to their old problems.

The spatial distance from Labour’s powerbrokers matches a yawning political divergence. The mood this year was sombre. A hodgepodge of competing Leftist interest groups came to Manchester to state the case for their own version of the socialist creed and to fight over the diminishing scraps of the socialist mantle in a set of grafitti-adorned theatre spaces and worthy, charity-run community venues in Hulme and Moss Side. It was not so much a united, popular front but a threadbare, garish patchwork, pulled in different directions and coming apart at the seams.

The millennial socialists were still there in force. They still have their fashions and their radical philosophy, but they’ve lost their mojo, their once-obvious vim. Marooned outside the Labour Party, they are lost, uncertain, divided, without clear strategy, and without a viable or agreed vehicle for power. Gone are the playful attitudes, the joyful optimism and post-ironic, cultural-political exuberance. Instead, there are speakers from the Revolutionary Communist Party, rs21 (Revolutionary Socialism for the 21st century), as well as issue-specific campaigning groups such as the Trans Liberation Group. Every meeting harbours nervous talk of countering an incipient “fascist threat”, by which speakers mean the Reform part. Forget the £40 billion in extra taxes levied on employers, and forget £100 billion in extra capital spending. No: Starmerism is actually “austerity 2.0”. Worse still, the government is “genocidal” and “authoritarian”. And, worryingly for these radicals, nobody quite agrees what a rebuild looks like.

At stake is the future of the British radical Left. There remain several competing tendencies among the millennial socialists, including those who want to build an anarchic, “bottom-up”, ultra-democratic “social movement” rather than a traditional party, uniting Just Stop Oil and BLM-type activist groups into a federated structure that contests elections without sacrificing an ethos of direct action. Others in Corbyn’s own camp of old-fashioned, trade unionist advisers wish for a more conventional “top-down” Left-wing operation, using Your Party’s small parliamentary platform to present an anti-war, social-democratic message to the public, getting support from trade unions, and shifting the Labour Party to the Left just as UKIP shifted the Tories to the Right.

Zack Polanski’s Leftward turn at the helm of the Greens has won more than a few converts, and a so-called “Red-Green alliance” has been mooted by Polanski. But before any formal co-operation is agreed between the Greens and a putative Corbyn-Sultana-led Your Party, recriminations abound over Your Party’s form, policymaking, personnel and purpose. In a forced display of unity, Sultana and Corbyn appeared together to speak in front of a crowd of keffiyeh-clad enthusiasts last week. A well-placed source tells me their allies are in the process of sending legal letters to each other. Nevertheless, the two sat to listen admiringly to a French parliamentarian talk of her party’s refusal to countenance a national retirement age above 60.

But there was no sign of the four other independent MPs who form the parliamentary nucleus of Your Party. Despite having joined with Corbyn and Sultana (for now), these Muslim men have shallow socialist pedigree. They sit in the Commons as the beneficiaries of a groundswell of revulsion toward the Gaza war in their heavily Islamic constituencies. And yet all four of these MPs are landlords; they voted against Labour’s new VAT taxes on private schools; and predictable spats over transgenderism broke into public view weeks ago, with Sultana calling out the gender-critical views of a Your Party comrade.

One TWT speaker confided to me that the Left “just need to learn how to speak normally. Stuff like this [festival] is important, but we’re not going outside our comfort zone.” But others will militate against any position that doesn’t imply principled, glorious detachment from anything approaching the general public’s values or everyday concerns. Historically high levels of migration are the number one issue for voters, but at TWT any suggestion that we should reduce numbers is enough to invite immediate excommunication. The cost of living and a faltering economy come next on the list of public concerns, but these concerns are little addressed here beyond the illusory panacea of a “wealth tax”. There’s much talk of “the working class”, but few suggestions of how a group of post-graduate Leftists will persuade low-income blue-collar workers in post-industrial towns that they should ditch Farage and instead vote for people who are part of groups with names like “Queers for Palestine”, and who also, by the way, advocate for open borders.

There’s still some lip service paid to actual power among the depleted crowd of millennial socialists, who still talk of strategy, of mass movements, of what a good Leftist might call “hegemony”. But there’s little of its application in evidence. During the halcyon days of Corbynism when the cool kids were in the office of the leader of the opposition, and when TWT speakers and attendees seriously influenced policy, it felt like maybe, just maybe, the millennial socialists might one day win. True enough, the social milieu that they represented would never represent a majority of the electorate. But there was a willingness, a recognition that their project would make a hegemonic offer to the broader social body. Indeed, promises on higher public investment, nationalised utilities and the minimum wage could attract widespread support. At the apex of a genuine, mass party of government that was attempting to weave together a cross-class electoral coalition, millennial socialists were kept on the straight and narrow. But, having rejected Labourism, they have capitulated, relegating themselves to sub-cultural obscurity.

Today, like the hippies in Nixon’s America, the movement is a shadow of its former being, a set of disparate strands goading themselves into ever-more radical positions. Instead of a vehicle for political power, it’s a set of niche, minoritarian fan clubs that hold their purisms as axiomatic. The discord is the latest symptom of an increasingly fragmented body politic, with dozens of separate cultural-political tribes talking solely to each other and consuming reams of self-affirming timeline content that merely buttresses their own group prejudices. Mass politics is over, and the two-party system is imploding. But as long as the Left is kept clean, with all the correct positions, they are seemingly unconcerned that their success in detaching a chunk of Labour’s vote at the next election can only possibly result in a victory march for the very “fascism” they’re claiming to oppose most vehemently. No matter to them — as long as it’s only the cool kids at the table.

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