Youth Truth

The fate of Young Labour, as an organisation, is a small matter, but it is a sign of the times. If you believe in economic equality and in international peace, then you recognise the leading role of those who suffer most as a result of their absence, namely the working class and the youth. We know from the Coventry bin drivers' strike what Keir Starmer and his party think of the working class. And now, this.

Local Labour Parties are dominated by people whose professional lives consist of the publicly funded and the frighteningly state-empowered control of the young, the working-class, the black and the male. They were scared out of their lives at Jeremy Corbyn's influx of youth in general, and of youth that was disproportionately one or more of working-class, black and male in particular.

There those uppity sorts sat in meetings or in online fora, unable to be marked down or put on report, and under no social or institutional obligation to pretend to be less clever or well-read than the people who were used to having such sanctions at their disposal. They had used their antogonists' early finishes, sacrosanct weekends and long holidays against them, by using the time to get an education.

Starmer is the kind of politician that the old hands like. He is a white public schoolboy who looks able to deliver the electoral goods that would preserve and strengthen the power of the liberal bourgeoisie, and most especially of the women of the public sector middle class. 

Especially but not exclusively in middle age and above, the liberal bourgeoisie is the class least likely to fight in a war, and the women of the public sector middle class are practically certain never to do so. Hence their enthusiasm for such interventions. They can do without being talked to out of turn by the cannon fodder.