Thanks, Jezza

I had been telling anyone who would listen (my husband, mainly) that there would be a huge surge in support for Labour thanks to the youth vote. Because I could see that Jeremy Corbyn was enthusing and engaging with my sons and their friends in a way no political party ever has before.

Of course, having left or about to leave university saddled with debt, my boys were attracted by labour’s pledge to abolish tuition fees. And they loved the fact that Corbyn was having brunch with grime stars like JME.

But the fact that Jezza appeared to be offering them everything but free beer in order to entice them to the polling booth, while getting down with the rappers at the same time, was only part of it.

The 18-year-old had been taking part in Facebook discussions about the Labour manifesto, with unfiltered, peer-to-peer chats about housing, the NHS, public transport and education. Like most of his friends, he was using the party’s Snapchat filters to say he’d be voting Labour.

None of the Tories’ stilted attempts at communication with them offered anything like it. It was as if someone in head office had decided that generation snowflake probably wouldn’t bother getting out of bed to vote anyway so weren’t worth engaging with.

If so, they couldn’t have been more wrong. My 23-year-old, who has displayed a total lack of interest in politics up to now, texted me a copy of a tweet from Jeremy Corbyn with a Facebook link to a Labour rally, featuring the band Clean Bandit.

“Jezza has convinced me to actually vote for the first time in my life,” he added.

His older brother, who was at the rally, in Birmingham, and can’t see a future where he is ever going to be able to afford to buy his own home, has voted Labour before.

But this time he and his girlfriend, who is about to graduate from Warwick University, could take advantage of a new internet tool which advised whether their Labour vote counted more at home or at their university address.

And so, their votes contributed to the astonishing result in Warwick and Leamington, where Labour took the seemingly safe Tory seat, once held by Anthony Eden.

Railing against austerity, they say they want a fairer society, where corporation tax is higher and the rich pay more: “They keep saying there’s no money, but of course we have money. We’re the fifth richest country in the world,” they point out.

My 21-year-old, who didn’t vote in the last general election, nor in the EU referendum, was similarly energised.

Like his brothers, he feels particularly aggrieved by the Brexit result which divided the generations. The fact that three-quarters of the under-25s didn’t bother turning out then certainly woke him up to the importance of casting his vote this time.

Interestingly, none of them paid any attention to the tabloid press and consider papers like The Sun and Daily Mail, traditionally regarded as having the power to sway public opinion, as out-of-date and out-of-touch.

The Mail may have been showing pictures of Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott under the headline ‘Apologists for Terror’ while The Sun announced on its front page ‘Don’t chuck Britain in the Cor-bin’.

But my 23-year-old was Tweeting: “The Sun and the Mail are so irrelevant – like a drunk man shouting at a wall at 4am.” Even the TV debates, in which under-25-year-olds were largely under-represented, left them cold.

The youth surge wasn’t enough for Labour to win. But I have never seen my boys so politically engaged. And every one of them cast their vote.

Thank you, Jezza, for that.

MY friend could hear her teenage sons having a loud and angry bust-up in the hallway. One of them suddenly appeared in the kitchen, shaking his head. He pointed towards his brother, just outside the door: “The trouble with him is he’s just been through puberty, and it hasn’t gone well for him,” he said.