Why I’m proud to be part of this Youth Movement

By Emily Richards

It’s great to see so many young people have posted on LabourList over the last week discussing such a broad range of issues around Youth Day last Saturday.

It’s often the case that young people can be brushed off or sidelined in politics and in political parties. The youth movement can easily be dismissed with a simple ‘you don’t know you’re born’ or be stereotyped as simply lazy. Or patronised and talked to only about so-called ‘young people’s issues’ like the environment – things that are safe and uncontroversial.

But all of these ignore the great successes of our youth movement and of our Party’s young members up and down the country. It ignores the fact that Labour Students recruit more young members to the Party than almost any other avenue. It ignores the enthusiasm with which Labour Students head out on campus year after year to spread the message of our party, winning new members and establishing new clubs, many of which build and grow exponentially, developing a momentum of their own – recruits recruiting. And it ignores the hours that young people spend on the doorstep every week, out campaigning in just the same way and for the same party as those who may consider themselves to have “earned their stripes”, and for the same reasons.

Labour Students consistently delivers success on campuses up and down the country. I’m proud to have worked for an organisation whose members work tirelessly to recruit new members year on year and who set up Labour Clubs in new places, reaching out to new people time and again. In my year as Membership Officer we saw new clubs established in more further education institutions than ever before and on previously untouched higher education campuses such as Manchester Metropolitan and Sheffield Hallam. It was these new members who again last autumn were out on their campuses recruiting record numbers of new members to our party. It was these activists who were out on the doorstep in Sedgefield, Ealing Southall and Crewe making a difference. Some of our strongest campaigning local parties are supported by strong campaigning university Labour clubs – Manchester, Oxford and more. And it was these members too who signed up to Labour Students’ campaigns over the years on issues such as reducing the VAT on condoms and child poverty. And whilst these members stand up for the government over Labour’s record on campus, in NUS and on the doorstep, they also stand up and say it when they think they have got it wrong – higher education funding and an equal minimum wage are just two examples.

Young Labour too serves a vital purpose in our party. It reaches out to those young people who didn’t attend further or higher education, and to those who did but did not get involved in the student movement. It also provides a place for those who have left university to carry on being involved with other young members. As other contributors to the Young Labour takeover of LabourList have said, Young Labour must be a flexible, accessible and welcoming environment. As a young member myself it was very difficult to get involved. Meetings were held on a Friday night in a busy bar in the centre of town. I was sixteen when someone approached me about going along. Under age and on my own I was in no position to get involved. The reforms proposed this year are a welcome step in the direction of a fully functioning Young Labour but more must still be done to reach out to all young members and also to those young people who are political, on the left and share our values but have not made the leap to join the party.

We have shown over the years with Labour Students, for example with the last youth conference in Glasgow where hundreds of activists came together to start this process of reform, that young people can organise for ourselves, can get involved not just as themselves but use well thought through structures and hard work to get other young people to follow them into our party. That experience and the example that ‘it can be done’ should show us that it is only by not trying that we won’t succeed. And that’s why I’m delighted that Steph, working with others, has begun the task of delivering on that early promise.

There are of course improvements to be made in the structure of our youth movement and lessons to be learnt from each other. Above all however we should be proud that through the efforts of members of both Young Labour and Labour Students we have a thriving youth organisation and one that the party as a whole can be proud of. Take a look back to the Tory youth movement over the past few decades and it is a very different story. The Federation of Conservative Students were branded more Thatcherite than Thatcher and paraded NUS conference in ‘Hang Mandela’ T-shirts. The Young Conservatives’ drunken balls and right wing policies were an embarrassment to the leadership. Both were such an embarrassment to the Tory machine that they were disbanded.

In contrast, the Labour party has an ever growing and enthusiastic youth movement that we can all be proud to be a part of and that the party can be proud of too.