Student rebels in search of a cause Why don't they mobilise in their own interests?

As should be clear, in idiom and action Youth Demand is a fitting addition to the paramilitary wing of the student-led activist movement. As of April this year, it already claimed a 10,000-strong mailing list, with representatives at 17 British universities. Among its recent political achievements, it has spray-painted Labour Party headquarters and the Ministry of Defence, and staged a creepy protest involving children’s shoes outside the Starmer family home in Kentish Town, leading to three of its members being convicted of public order offences. (Apostates being worse than infidels, it is the Labour Party that seems to come in for the worst of Youth Demand’s ire, despite the group’s offhand acknowledgement of the Conservative Party’s responsibility for “14 years” of unspecified “atrocity”.)

It is tempting to think that the rapid turnover of political fashion over the past decade has had a curious effect on protest-oriented youth. More than at any point in recent history, today’s student protestor must be a generalist rather than a specialist. In a style characteristic of a conspiracy theorist, their background theory of the operant forces in society encourages them to see every injustice as standing in close explanatory connection to every other: and a failure to see these sometimes quite obscure links can be a worrying symptom of bad faith, privilege-induced blindness, or something even more culpably malign.

Under such pressures it is easy to acquire the monistic belief that there is really only one political problem — though one that perhaps has different manifestations — as people have started calling it, the “omnicause”. In the mouths of today’s protestors, what often seem like quite different political objects of disapproval — global capitalism, the patriarchy, white supremacy, Gaza, environmental terrorism, settler colonialism — are slurred over in a way that makes them seem fungible. They are all vantage points on the same monolithic oppressor. Something like that deflationary urge might always have been with us. But unlike their ancestors, who would have urged each other perfunctorily to “stick it to the man”, today’s activists feel shamelessly compelled to spell out the weird consequences of their background theory. Hence, the unabashed existence of vividly maladaptive movements such as Queers for Palestine.

The resulting political movements are characterised by an unhealthy mix of political disengagement and global fixation. The ordinary mechanisms of electoral politics are judged too feeble to be of any service to the extravagance, urgency and scale of their cause — which is, at the limit, the whole world and its unjust past and endangered future — and are promptly bypassed.

It is of course easy to find activists led astray by such a totalising theory a comical spectacle (or an obvious anti-social menace, depending on how nearby they happen to be). They are in a straightforward way politically short-sighted: the immediate, local, and graspable problems of political life seeming to them blurry and unimportant, only expansive, universal, and unobtainable objectives snapping into focus.

Such moralism arguably involves a practical mistake. Its proponents misidentify the sorts of problems universities, book festivals, private firms, political parties, or even national parliaments are suited to solving. As a means of effecting political change, such mistakes are a recipe for making oneself irrelevant and one’s cause disliked; though one could litigate the exceptions, indiscriminately-targeted direct action has a comparatively poor track record of securing lasting political progress. This shouldn’t be surprising: its aims are often ill-defined, and its methods deliberately calculated to avoid engaging the socially established channels of political action.

At a theoretical level, however, comical though it undoubtedly still is, such moralistic overreach is at least an intelligible form of error. The fact is that moral and political progress in the past often has been achieved by gradually expanding the sphere of ethical concern both outward in space and forward in time. The extension of moral concern provides one easily-grasped paradigm of moral progress. Most psychologically normal people, however, find it clear that uncontrolled reliance on this heuristic quickly yields silly results. In fact, part of the comedy of Just Stop Oil, Youth Demand, and their fellow travellers, is that despite their grandiose dogmatism the meagreness of their actions reveals that they, too, find it difficult to take their theory at anything close to face value. (If the fate of the earth really were at stake, action more drastic than the spray-painting of Taylor Swift’s Jet or boycotting book festivals would be morally required.)

More curious than the way young activists misunderstand the collective interest is the way they routinely fail to understand even their own self-interest. Though charitable interpreters will be inclined to think that youthful idealism, even in overreaching, serves as a socially useful corrective to a jaded and politically unimaginative status quo, from another point of view it represents a gross diversion of political resources.

Despite the widespread trope that they are excessively self-centred, one of the most striking facts about people in their teens and twenties is their near total neglect of their distinctive interests as a political class. Young people form an increasingly natural constituency for political solidarity, yet time and again age is overridden by dividing lines of more doubtful importance. In fact, to learn of the agenda of a misleadingly-named group like Youth Demand would lead you to think that the young had no political causes of their own worth pursuing and so had generously moved on to solving the world’s problems.

The complete absence of a sense of intra-generational solidarity among the young is, in a way, baffling. The dysfunctional political decision-making of the recent past has been utterly prejudicial to their interests. Electorally outnumbered by a politically active gerontocracy, the young now leave university with mountains of debt. They can look forward to a future cramped by an effective graduate tax on even small earnings, national infrastructure degraded by long-term under-investment, a chronically under-supplied housing market, and little hope for the life-enhancing arrival of economic growth. All of this is the political legacy of older generations who, unlike the young, vote in high numbers and ruthlessly in their own interest. According to the CPS, someone born in 1956 will extract £1.2 million in state benefits, and someone born in 1996 only half that. These are the basic ingredients of intergenerational injustice.

The totemic political betrayal of the young in recent years — the casual use of lockdown as a tool of public health policy — involved a catastrophic transfer of wealth and opportunities away from children and young adults, towards the elderly. The ongoing and expensive Covid inquiry will presumably reach no holistic judgment as to whether this was a justified action. Recent university cohorts had their A-levels cancelled, were placed under effective house arrest in their university accommodation at their own expense, and then had the delivery of their final university grades delayed by university strikes. That all of this was accepted in a spirit of compliant resignation makes it hard not to want to blame the young for their want of vitality.

Such political quietism is the natural accompaniment of a style of activism which is pathologically moralistic and holds the actual practice of politics in contempt, as today’s frontline student activists do. Is it too much to expect that, at least as a default, student activism should be about students’ interests?

All this is enough to make one nostalgic for the anti-tuition-fee riots of 2010: perhaps the last time an impressive number of students mobilised in their own interest. Then, as even The Daily Telegraph recorded, “perhaps because their cause was justified… [the protesting students] had none of the swaggering, self-righteous manner of the student protestors of legend”. City traffic ground to a standstill; students occupied the Millbank tower; Conservative Party headquarters were graffitied over with a crude drawing of an ejaculating penis accompanied, ironically or perhaps not, with the message “don’t kill the arts”. Nick Clegg took to the airwaves to explain cravenly that he should have been “more careful” in making his ill-fated manifesto pledges; days later, as Clegg was delivering the Guardian’s Hugo Young lecture at Kings Place in London, students outside the building brought out a Clegg-like effigy which they sentenced to death and promptly executed while chanting “Nick Clegg, shame on you, shame on you for turning blue.” All very invigorating stuff.

It is hard not to warm to these protestors in a way not possible with the student activists of today: grounded self-interest is so much more sympathetic than unworldly moralism. They had a just grievance — they had been misled, perhaps even lied to, at the ballot box. They owned their own cause. They had a realistic grasp of the party political structures they were attempting to influence. Best of all they had a lively sense of their own material interest. That is a precondition for getting a political hearing though by no means a guarantee of one.

Today’s student activists could do with being a little less self-involved and little more self-interested.

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John Maier is an UnHerd columnist and PhD student at the University of Oxford

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