 The Institute for Economic Affairs is, by any measure, a neoliberal think tank. Yet, it's published a report which is of profound interest to socialists. It's titled Left Turn Ahead, Surveying Attitudes of Young People Towards Capitalism and Socialism. I've read it, and so should you, because a lot of the data it's collected and its original data doesn't just build on these stories we've heard for five, 10 years about how young people are turning left, but actually show pretty dramatic majorities for socialist policy. Before we get into the meat of that report, it's kind of funny how it talks about Teen Vogue as kind of the load star of all of this. Some of the headlines from Teen Vogue over there have been pretty funny. One is, Who Is Karl Marx, Meet the Amity Capitalist Scholar, Meet Ash Sarka, the Communist who called Piers Morgan an idiot, and perhaps my favourite one of all, Rosa Luxemburg, who was the revolutionary socialist and author. Now, what the report makes clear is that Teen Vogue isn't just an echo chamber. Navarra media, it might feel like that sometimes when you're on the left. It's not just a bunch of people talking to one another in isolation from the rest of the population. In fact, reflects broader changes in public opinion which can map onto age. That doesn't mean all young people are left-winging. It doesn't mean all older people are right-wing. But there are clear shifts in public opinion when you look at distinct generations. So some of the original findings on this is remarkable. Like I say, we've had these stories repeatedly over the years, you know, particularly when Bernie Sanders was running primaries, record numbers of a certain age group, things left-wing ideas are good. That famous, at least for me, bit of a political dweeb, front cover of the economists about millennial socialism. But this is, I think, a whole other level. Seventy-five percent of young people agree with the assertion that climate change is a specifically capitalist problem, as opposed to a side effect of industrial production that would occur in any economic system. Seventy-one percent agree with the assertion that capitalism fuels racism. Seventy-three percent agree that it fuels selfishness, greed and materialism while a socialist system would promote solidarity, compassion and cooperation. Seventy-eight percent of young people blame capitalism, not Nimbism and supply-side restrictions for Britain's housing crisis. Seventy-eight percent also believe that it requires government intervention to solve it through things like rent controls and public housing. Elsewhere, seventy-two percent of young people support the nationalization or renationalization of industries such as energy, water and railways. The same figure, seventy-two percent also believe that private sex involvement puts the NHS at risk. Now, the report concludes, if these trends continue, then in the future, these will become the mainstream views of the population as a whole. This is a phrase I love, a sentence I love. Generation left will become population left, nor can we brush the phenomenon aside as just a social media bubble or an online echo chamber. It's definitely wrong to think of millennial socialists as weird outliers who have nothing in common with, quote, normal members of their generation. Now, discussing this report on BBC Politics Live was our very own Ash Sarkar. Let's watch that now. Right. Well, Ash, that question is for you. Is it because young people here haven't really ever experienced what it might be like to live under a proper socialist government? Well, I think what young people have is an experience of living in a capitalist economy, which is failing them. And there's one thing which I'd like to disagree with that was said earlier, which is, well, haven't young people always been more left wing? That's simply not the case. People always forget that Margaret Thatcher won majority of young voters. We're talking 18 to 24 year olds, that exact cohort, which we all like to think of as, you know, living the life of the young ones, left wing firebrands. That wasn't the case in the 1980s. But what has happened since then, I think, is less to do with shifts of values, but actually a shift in how the economy works and the fact that that has systematically disadvantaged young people. So in some parts of London, the average house price is 20 times the average wage. And we've seen the single biggest squeeze on living standards since the Napoleonic Wars following the financial crisis. And young people have been the biggest losers in all of that. So you've got an economy where fundamentally people like me are locked out of asset inflation. So we are looking at incredibly vulnerable, incredibly precarious futures. You add on to that the climate crisis that we look at the fact that the government is not set to meet its own legally binding targets of achieving net zero by 2050. You look at this sense of, you know, you can buy anything you want. You've got all this consumer power and yet you can't get the things that you really need or a dignified and secure life. And I want those young people are turning away from capitalism. We're going to now watch a clip from Tok Radio, which I'm only going to share because we want to mock it. But before I do, I want you to keep in mind, quote, from the report by the IA Margaret Thatcher's favourite think tank. It is definitely wrong to think of millennial socialists as weird outliers who have nothing in common with normal members of their generation. The remarkable document has come across our desk here at Tok Radio, in which it says, as a survey done by the IA, 67 percent of young Britons want a socialist economic system. I can't believe they even know what that is. Christian, how are you doing? I'm very well. Thank you. Nice to talk to you. Nice to talk to you. I'm very well as well. I mean, this sort of confirms my prejudices, I would say, about some of the kind of bedwetting, limp-wristed young people that we have in this country who seem to think that socialism is a good thing. I mean, these are all the same people that sang Jeremy Corbyn's name at Glastonbury, I'm assuming, you know, that sort of the sort of slightly overprivileged middle classes who, despite the fact that they have benefited massively from their parents' own capitalism, they think that maybe they should try something else. Benefitted from their own parents' capitalism. OK. I mean, I don't know where to start, Darlia, with this one, because you've kind of got a real yin and yang there of media performers. You've got Ash Saka, Articular, Enformed, Congenial, Big Smile. And then you've got Mike Graham, deeply uninformed, almost comically so, whose job appears to be just public ignorance. How is it possible, Darlia, that 70 percent of young people can be privileged and go to Glastonbury? Choose your warrior, right? If Mike Graham is the best frontier that capitalism has to offer, then, you know, we might actually have a planet in 100 years. It makes total sense, right? And Ash did cover it really, really well. There is this huge fissure, right? Between the story that people are told about what it means to live under capitalism, which is, you know, if you work hard, then, you know, you'll be OK. You'll have security. You'll have, you know, all these great things. There's a huge fissure between that and the life that people are actually experiencing, the life that people, you know, have in front of them, like, reasonably have in front of them, which is that, which is actually that often those who work the absolute hardest, the most hours, the most, you know, tiring and exhausting jobs are the ones who are the most precarious, the least well paid. And, you know, wages are stagnant across so many different sectors that people work in. And it really is down to that kind of collapse of the post war contract, which, you know, was this kind of sort of compromise where, you know, OK, you maybe work more than you perhaps need to. And maybe you work a job that's kind of a bit of a bullshit job. And, you know, you're you're just sort of making money disproportionately to your boss and you don't really get much diversity in terms of like who's going to politically represent you and you sort of live in a colonial state because let's get the straight, you know, the post war social contract in the global north was funded and sustained by extraction in the south. But at least, you know, at least you get a pension like you get sick, pay when you're ill, you, you know, get a home that you can live in and that, you know, you're not going to be evicted out of or you're not going to have, you know, your rent spiked, you know, randomly. You're not going to have to spend, you know, way more than half of your paycheck on rent for the rest of your life. You know, that contract didn't exist for everyone, even in the US and the UK. And I'd actually be really interested to hear what the opinions on capitalism are globally and not just in the US and the UK, because that will really tell us if something's really going to change. You know, that contract, it didn't exist for everyone, but now it's collapsing even for those who expect it to have been the reality for them, right? University graduates, et cetera. And you then pair that kind of personal experience of the economy with things like the climate crisis, as Ash, you know, talked about, but also the handling of the COVID pandemic as well, the public health crisis, and it becomes clear to so many people that, you know, if this is what capitalism is, it's literally killing us. And, you know, if you think that millennials are radical, like you wait until you see what Gen Z have to say, because Gen Z, they're not only like radical in their thinking, but they're really organised. And they're actually a lot more effective, I think, than a lot of the sort of millennial movements were, you know, when you look at the BLM marches, for example, you know, they weren't making mealy-mouthed demands for, you know, diversity and inclusion and, you know, a black prime minister. They were saying, you know, economic justice and climate justice is racial justice. We want a total economic and ecological rehauling of our system. As this is starting to happen and as particularly we kind of saw a glimpse of it there in the talk radio segment, but especially as, you know, within neoliberal elites, this recognition is starting to happen. We can expect a real backlash. I think in many ways the culture war stuff is kind of a backlash in part to the power that has been gained and the gains that have been made by the anti-racist and the feminist movements over the past few years. It's that kind of technique of putting a lot of money into and resources into caricaturing and straw manning and deflecting in order to deal with the fact that there is a threat of a real consciousness shift. So, whilst it's really great to see this kind of stuff, I really don't want to think about what kind of, you know, media and cultural strategies that they are kind of plotting in order to try and crush this. But yeah, I mean, it's and this is also, you know, just to kind of end it to connect it back to that the second story that we spoke about. This is where you really ask yourself, you know, what are the Labour Party doing? Like these these millions of young people who are kind of having these thoughts and who are sort of turning it like really questioning the system that they're living in, they're not going anywhere, right? You can't and you're not going to be able to continue to try and focus group them into the Labour Party. They will find ways of organizing and expressing political culture outside of the party. The Labour Party is going to become irrelevant in their lives. And if it was sensible, if it wanted to actually have a long term strategy for existing in the future, the Labour Party would harness that and, you know, marshal it into concrete systemic change and, you know, be part of that shift. But instead, you know, it's choosing to just completely divest and abdicate from that. And so in that context, including with the context of hemorrhaging Muslim voters, it's like, guys, like time is running out for you to turn this ship around. I suppose the council argument from from not even a supporter of Kistama, but the council argument would be from somebody within Labour is that young people don't win general elections right now. And you're the argument you're making that may be true in 10, 15, 20 years, but it's not right at the moment. I mean, that's clear what happened in the last general election in 2019 Labour piled up votes amongst 18 to 35 year olds, fundamentally. It won amongst, I think, under fifties, but that wasn't still enough to actually form a government. So how do you make sense of that? Does the left just say, OK, well, you know what, we prepare our politics for for the 2030s, the 2040s, but we accept we're not going to be near sort of parliamentary political power in the meantime, you sort of just give it up or or is there sort of an alternative to that? Of course, just having young people on board isn't going to win elections. But how do you expect to win elections without young people on board? And also, I think that a key when you look at the key difference as well, I think that part of the Labour Party's failure in the last election was that it failed to galvanise enough galvanised people who don't typically vote. And I think that understanding that just trying to kind of skim off the top of a couple of disillusioned Tory remainers, that is not really going to win you elections. What's going to win you elections is mobilising your base, getting out people who aren't typically accounted for to vote, which is what happened in 2017. That is it's not an easy pathway to power because, you know, if you follow this kind of line, you're going to get a lot of backlash from the media. It's going to be very difficult. We all saw it. It's not easy, but at least it's not impossible. Whereas the the track that we're having now, the track that Starmer is going on now, which is, you know, being ashamed of his voter base, offering nothing to young people, being a somophobic, that's impossible. You know, it's not difficult. It's impossible.