Stella Tsantekidou column: ‘Let’s campaign with Oomf!’

 Ah, youth.

I was 19 once, too. Ed Miliband was leader of the Labour Party, a university mate ran a Facebook group called “Ed Miliband Is Fit,” TikTok hadn’t been invented yet, and Instagram was still only for latte art and bathroom selfies. I’d been dumped by my Tory boyfriend and was firmly in love with a Labour parliamentary staffer. I had nothing to do and energy to burn. So I joined the Miliwagon.

Abby Tomlinson’s Millifandom focused teenage girls’ minds. Our juvenile feminine instinct knew the country craved chaos with Ed Miliband. But, to our detriment, the world never listens to girls.

More than ten years on, a meme of 45-year-old Ed Miliband is still my screensaver. He’s reclining on a sofa under the caption “Debate me like one of your French girls” – a pastiche of the scene in Titanic where Rose lies nude on the couch and tells Jack to “draw me like one of your French girls,” crossed with Miliband’s own infamous challenge to David Cameron before the election: “Debate me! And let the people decide.”

Chin-strokers won’t get it, but Milifandom kept me curious about Ed Miliband long after he stopped being leader. There was no logical basis for my teenage devotion then, but I have put meat on the bones since. He deserved every meme page and hashtag he got. The fandom didn’t distract me from serious politics. Creating memes at 19 didn’t stop me from drafting policy papers at 29.

Which is why I am hell-bent on encouraging Labour’s very online zoomers. If you haven’t noticed them yet, log on and keep up. They are late-teen and early-twenties students flooding TikTok and X with Blair-era nostalgia and aesthetic compilations of the Labour Cabinet. Their interest piqued with Cool Britannia moodboards, Noughties political documentaries and Blair/Brown-era SpAd memoirs. It turned them into some of the most active campaigners on the ground in the Makerfield by-election, posting like their exam grades depend on it. A fair few style themselves “oomfs” (one of my followers) and call their meet-ups “oomfchella.” Aren’t we lucky that their idea of a fun weekend was the train to Wigan North Western to canvass for Andy Burnham, pausing only for a refreshing buzzball (look it up, boomers) at the Ashton Wetherspoons.

There is a clever objection to make to all this. Morgan Jones (formerly of this parish) wrote a critique of political fandoms for the New Statesman two years ago. Jones was reviewing Phoenix Andrews’s book “I Heart Politics”, which aims to dissect the phenomenon of political fandom. It is fair that she was critical of a non-fiction book that claims to dissect a phenomenon and, according to Jones, does so poorly. She was also right that politics is a matter of life and death, and that gamifying it distracts from the difficult choices and real-life impact. 

READ MORE: Head North… to Makerfield

Just don’t map that argument onto Keir Starmer’s Labour as it stood when she wrote it: a farcically self-serious, institutionally constipated party that had most young people running for the hills. Jones doesn’t refer to Labour, so this is not an argument with her column, but with the strawman social democrat reading that article, stroking their chin, patting themselves on the back for scoffing at those who get social pleasure and a creative outlet out of politics. Campaigning doesn’t count unless you suffer! You can take the Fabian out of the Protestant church, but you will never take the Methodism out of the Fabian.

Jones fears that demanding seriousness will get her called a killjoy. I fear that pleading for more warmth, excitement, and spontaneity will get me called a liability.

The kind of organic, infectious behaviour that makes Gen Z youths take a field trip out to Makerfield, and a fandom out of Andy Burnham, requires space to breathe. It needs Labour’s powerbrokers – that includes us millennials now – to reward enthusiasm, to be understanding of the awkwardness of youth, to give attention and praise. The worst-case scenario: you walk into a campaign office and nobody speaks to you except to warn you away from the staff side of the room. The best-case: MPs and staffers move freely among volunteers, talk to journalists like human beings, act as though the party belongs to everyone in it. The people who control our resources and our channels can do the second thing, but not if they’re the kind of micromanager who fears whatever they can’t control.

I am sometimes jealous of Green, and even Reform, activists. I bet some of their campaigns are a riot. They feel alive in a way a century-old head office bearing down with diktats can never allow. Their MPs haven’t had their bins searched yet. Their staffers don’t have PTSD from front pages built on a drunk “u up” text. Some of their activists are voting for the first time in their lives. And if all we’ve got to offer in return is an endearing middle-aged dad with the eyelashes of a pony – don’t let your massive brain talk you out of finding the humour in that. Or – why not – the love.

Become a friend of LabourList and join our community. Our friends support our vital non-factional work and get access to exclusive content and events. 

What do I miss most about being the Oomf’s age? In 2016, I was a field organiser on the Bernie Sanders campaign. At HQ in Iowa – the first and most important primary, because it sets the tone – I watched unregistered first-time voters walk in, shyly asking for help signing up. In the Las Vegas office, anonymous deliveries of free pizza and doughnuts kept turning up for staff and volunteers. I arrived in Cleveland to set up the field office and found the locals had already built a makeshift one out of donated space, canvassing door to door without a spreadsheet or an app, just notes on a pad. Can you imagine the heart attack that would give Labour HQ? And in New York, sent to set up the Astoria office on my own, I got a tsunami of volunteers the day a Hollywood starlet dropped by – and it probably didn’t hurt that Emily Ratajkowski wore a cropped sweater with “Bernie” knitted across it in fuchsia, visible underboob and all. None of it came from head office. All of it won people over.

So, two years ago, Jones asked us to reject fandom and embrace seriousness, and of course, she’s right. It wasn’t misplaced libidinal energy that made me a socialist. It was growing up during the Greek financial crisis. I’ll half-concede: seriousness of her kind – curious, rigorous, resistant to concessions and right-wing spin – is part of the solution, not the problem. It’s the other kind I’m warning about. Because I’ve seen this play before, and I know how fast we clip people’s wings. It is sheer luck that just as our very online zoomers hit adolescence, someone held the Labour Party up in front of their noses and they imprinted on our politicians. That luck won’t hold, and the millennial girlies are tired, y’all. We have bills to pay and GB News panels to fight. We can’t romanticise our front bench forever.

So here is my warning to the fun police, to our Labour killjoys, to the suits who know how to write and speak but not how to feel and live. We are entering a stretch of politics where emotions run high, and your old tricks won’t be enough. You need people with a pulse. And above all: keep your hands off our zoomers. Unless you’re handing out buzzballs.

Subscribe here to our daily newsletter roundup of Labour news, analysis and comment– and follow us on TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp, X and Facebook. You can also write to our editor to share your thoughts on our stories and share your own. The best letters are published every Sunday.

• • SHARE: If you have anything to share that we should be looking into or publishing about this story – or any other topic involving Labour– contact us (strictly anonymously if you wish) at [email protected].
  • SUBSCRIBE: Sign up to LabourList’s morning email here for the best briefing on everything Labour, every weekday morning.
  • BECOME A FRIEND: If you enjoyed this, why not consider becoming a Friend of LabourList? Help sustain our journalism, and of course Friends do get benefits…
  • PARTNER: If you or your organisation might be interested in partnering with us on sponsored events or projects, email [email protected].
  • ADVERTISE: If your organisation would like to advertise or run sponsored pieces on LabourList‘s daily newsletter or website, contact our exclusive ad partners Total Politics at [email protected].