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 fervor 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 modernizers, 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 organized 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 centers 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, mustache-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.

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The spatial distance from Labour’s powerbrokers matches a yawning political divergence. The mood this year was somber. 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 graffiti-adorned theater 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 harbors 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 advisors 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.

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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, nationalized 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.

Labour runs on rage, which is why I dislike Corbyn: he is a raging man, but he tries to hide it. If you want to know who he really is, watch him shout at journalists and tell photographers they will behave better under Socialism. Was it a joke? If he lies about his rage — and he does — what else does he lie about? If rage attracts activists, it repels voters, because rage, by itself, has never changed a mind. That is not politics. It is psychosis.

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I first met Corbynistas in 2016 at the inaugural Momentum conference, ‘The World Transformed’. They discussed, among other things, how to control the Labour Party, how calling Hitler a Zionist wasn’t that offensive if you read fringe historians who explain how the Zionists really did collaborate in Jew murder, and, alongside such sideshows, how they would transform the world. I liked them — they share, as you do in Alcoholics Anonymous, and they don’t mind being vulnerable because vulnerability is their currency; they have plenty of pity for themselves. But I feared them too; they ran on narcissism, victimhood and rage.

I have never been afraid to call myself a journalist anywhere but there. I wasn’t even a Tory. I was a Social Democrat, but that didn’t matter. If you agree with Corbynistas they are the kindest people in the world; they are searching for a family. Their desire to renew the country mirrors their own search for self-renewal: their journey from brokenness.

It is a personal thing, which is why they take things personally. And so, if you don’t agree with them, they hate you, and that is why they are bad campaigners. They define themselves as who they are not; and that is the very opposite of consensus. Corbyn’s Labour offered a haven to everyone left behind — but they forget, in their commune of victimhood, to extend that haven to anyone who had ever been a Tory; to anyone who doubted them; and to the vast majority of British Jews, preferring instead to set them against other minorities in a race for perfect victimhood. In this, Jews failed, and the punishment was awful.

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All this came from Corbyn, who was a trade union apparatchik and an MP at the very Left of the party: a hero in tiny rooms. The bunker was always his preferred home; his mistake was that, instead of leaving it on his elevation to the leadership, he drew his whole party inside. He is a man who likes applause: vanity, then.

His world is Manichean: there is good, and evil; exploited and exploiter. Most people are a combination of both, and many voters have supported both parties; but what matters for Labour is whether you support them or not. That is why it took so long for Jackie Walker and Chris Williamson to be expelled, and why Ken Livingstone was allowed to resign and to campaign for Corbyn, when a decent politician would have said he did not want his vote.

Labour did not even, until the campaign, work hard to earn support. Go off and join the Tories, they cried, treating floating voters as plutocratic scum or imbeciles; and many did. I wondered whether the central principle of parliamentary democracy eluded them: the need to persuade your enemy to become your friend. But that is not Corbyn’s way. He loves the purity of the edges; the thrill of hating your enemy, but not conquering him.

Is it inadequacy? He became leader chiefly because he was a reluctant; there is something pagan, and ancient, about Corbynism, despite its promise of progression. The compromises of real power disgusted him, and it showed. If you can’t sing the National Anthem or convince your colleagues, you won’t be prime minister. You will be a noble failure; and I wonder if that, in his deepest self, was what he always wanted.

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Tory Conference can be the worst place on earth; but Corbynistas can match any monsters in performative rage and a desire to exclude and punish their enemies. I am not talking about Labour voters, who deserve better than their activists have given them. I am talking about the bourgeois Socialists who drive Labour to the Left so they can, at best, have free university education for their children and at worst, bloodless hands when the Tories win. They are the ones who should have joined the Tories all along; they benefited them enough. I am talking about affluent dead-eyed activists running on the energy of other people’s pain and young media activists gaslighting Jews and their allies for sport. They are journalists no longer, because they lie too much, and they had not a word of pity for a minority that was not vulnerable — or pliant — enough for Corbyn’s Labour.

The anti-Semitism scandal remains the best paradigm of Labour’s immobility and hubris; that is why it is so reported. They were wrong but they didn’t amend themselves. They blamed their opponents for noticing and accused them of their own flaw: racism. Labour could have fixed it with the Chakrabarti Report in 2016, but they saw anti-Semitism as a political, not a moral, problem. They don’t have moral problems, that is for others; and so, their penance was false, and Jews knew it. Everyone knew it, but them.

Labour is not self-aware enough to know itself, so if the project fails, they will blame enemies multiple and accuse two thirds of the country of a distressing false consciousness. There will be nothing else to say.