Although it seems strange to think of it now, as recently as 2015 it was broadly the consensus within public debate that young people didn’t care about politics. Why don’t young people care about politics? Came the cry with outrage and indifference in equal parts every time young people failed to turn out in high numbers for an election in which they were offered nothing.

The thinking went that a kind of juvenile apathy kept the politically illiterate youth of yesterday away from the polls. In the 2005 general election for example, the turnout for 18-24 year olds had decreased to a mere 38.2%, the lowest in this country’s recent history, and the lowest across all of Europe.

Youth turnout was still relatively low in the elections of 2010 to 2015 until, in the last election, the under-30 vote surged by between 12-14 points to around 65% the highest since the early 1990s, when rates had begun to decline steadily. Beyond the ballot box, this surge has been reflected in the creation of new political groups and identities, new ways of organising, new media, as well as a more general and widespread shift amongst young people in understandings of what is politically and economically possible and necessary. 

A condition of young people involving themselves in parliamentary politics was always going to be that it changed. Politics, or the struggle for power, for the left in modern Britain is the struggle to redress toxic power imbalances in our society, in our economy, and in our democracy. The fact that much of this struggle is being led and carried out by the very demographic who, in the wake of rising house prices and education costs, had disengaged ten years earlier should come as no surprise. Change is in their interest. 

There’s an irony in that the corners who pour most scorn upon the UK’s young left movement are broadly the same ones who had for so long decried their lack of involvement in politics. The same corners of the media who called for young people to engage in politics are the ones who denounce the idealism of anyone who asks why real wages haven’t grown for eleven years. The same corners who invoke the notion of a cult whenever investment in public services is suggested as a solution to our economic drift. Juvenile naivety has replaced juvenile apathy as the fundamental threat to democracy.

We’ve seen attempts to persuade parents to stop their children from voting, articles chiding the ignorance of anyone who hasn’t lived through the fall of the Soviet Union—broad dismissals of an entire brand of politics, much of which aligns itself with a tradition of strong Northern European democracy; a politics which attempts to seriously confront the oncoming climate emergency; that seeks to understand why the so-called party of the economy has been custodian of the worst decade, in terms of wages, since the Napoleonic wars. ‘Why are young people so stupid?’ is the new cry, although this time with more outrage. The message is clear: young people should get involved in politics but only if they agree on the inherent value of existing consensus.

This generational antagonism is an economic relation. Older people who’ve been able to accrue assets in scarce markets can rely on economic rents paid out to them by people, often young (although of course not always) and often in debt, who have to use income to access crucial services like housing and transport. In other words the class divide has become more closely aligned with the generational divide now than ever before, where the dominant position is held by those who live off wealth and the other by those who live off work. 

A good demonstration of this is the fact that, in the 20 years after 1996, home ownership for 25 to 34 year olds on middle incomes fell from 65% to 27%. Ever greater proportions of an ever greater number of people’s incomes are being siphoned off. In times of slow economic growth such as now, past wealth takes on a disproportionately high level of importance because it only takes a small flow of new savings to substantially increases one’s holdings, and this has greatly exacerbated the levels of class and intergenerational inequality in this country. 

Despite overwhelming evidence that the neoliberal project, or raw capitalism, has roundly failed to achieve the outcomes it was supposed to—withering productivity, decreasing life expectancy and living standards, rising levels of child poverty and homelessness — attempts to build new ways of organising society, new forms of politics, new economic policies and new forms of communication are still met with anger and confusion. Whatever the result of Thursday’s election, “millennial socialism” has permanently disrupted a consensus that seems far more unsteady now than it did only a few years ago.