It is hard for anybody with any historical memory to understand how a backbench relic such as Jeremy Corbyn could so galvanize the youth vote and keep the Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, from achieving an overall majority in the snap election Thursday. Bernie Sanders is an obvious comparison. But for it to work you have to imagine a Bernie Sanders who spent his life campaigning alongside every anti-American group going.


Perhaps, in the end, the thing about the young is that history is distant to them. Which is partly understandable, of course. British people born after 1998 have lived in the peace created by the Good Friday agreement. To them the conflict in Northern Ireland seems not just distant but baffling. They don’t remember the swiftly evacuated pubs and train stations, the daily news of lost lives, and the endless bleak news of civilians murdered. When Corbyn answered critical questions during this election cycle by insisting that he had spent the period of the Troubles working for a peace deal, it seems young people believed him. Or didn’t care enough about the details to be detained by them. Anyone who pointed out that Corbyn solely spent the Troubles campaigning for the IRA were dismissed as pedants, liars, or (in a now familiar abuse of language) “against peace.”

The same went for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the slew of other Islamists that any observer of British politics from the 1980s onward knew to be Corbyn’s allies. But at this election this too was presented as an indication that Corbyn was one of the leading peace negotiators in the Middle East, sent in by the international community as the crack-squad for all sensitive negotiations. To know the fatuousness of this claim you would have to have some historical memory. Again, the young apparently do not. And even three Islamist terror attacks in Britain in 10 weeks turned out not to concentrate their minds and direct them away from a sympathizer and onto an opponent of Islamist terror.


It would appear that the economics works the same way. Anybody who pays taxes must at some stage intuit that someone must pay for things and that this someone could turn out to be you. When the Conservative manifesto announced plans for the elderly to pay more for their old-age they were making a fiscally logical suggestion. But it turned out to be electorally suicidal. The Labor manifesto, by contrast, promised the young a whole raft of uncosted financial incentives, including the abolition of university tuition fees. And while this might be financially impossible (as the Liberal Democrats discovered to their cost after making the same promise and then going into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010), it was electorally brilliant. Who wouldn’t want “free” university education?

And then there is the “B” word. In last year’s referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, the young disproportionately voted to remain within the EU, but turned out in low numbers. After the country voted for Brexit, a narrative grew that the young had their future stolen from them by ardent and selfish elderly voters. There was even serious discussion that people above a certain age should not have a say in the future of their country — it being a place the young would inhabit for longer. When May announced this snap election, she did so in order to improve her majority and strengthen — as a result — her negotiating hand with Brussels. Corbyn’s Labor party — despite him having spent his political life opposed to the EU — turned out to be the most viable receptacle of voters opposed to such hand-strengthening. And so they weakened May, and her party, sending her into the forthcoming Brexit negotiations (if she goes in at all) with a worse hand than she had before this ill-chosen race.


What is one to say about all this? The country is waking this morning to a realization that we may be ungovernable, or that crisis will from henceforth be normal. A crisis forced upon us by an “anti-selfish” generation of students who think the politics and economics of the past are the politics and economics of the future. The young were the future once. Not any more.

Douglas Murray is a British journalist. His latest book, “The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam,” will be published on June 20.