Jeremy Corbyn’s rise has attracted young people drawn to politics for the first time and ex-Labour supporters who came back

Why I joined: 'I believe in the NHS, the welfare state and Labour values'

Laura Fisher

At 25, Laura Fisher is one of the older members of Young Labour (the age range for the group is 16-26).

According to a YouGov poll, young people were most likely to select Jeremy Corbyn as their favoured choice in the run-up to the Labour leadership election, and thousands of them crowded into halls to hear him speak. The ranks of Young Labour swelled in areas where the group was almost defunct.

A charity worker living in Tooting, south London, Fisher was one of the many young people who became enamoured of Corbyn in 2015, joining the party in June after supporting Labour for the first time at the general election. She did more than just cast her vote in favour of Corbyn, she also worked on a phone bank, attempting to persuade constituency Labour party members to vote for him, and went out door-knocking.

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“I’ve come close to meeting him but getting through the crowds of people was too difficult,” she says. “He reminds me of those teachers in school who were really cool and you really liked and didn’t want to annoy them because they’d tell you they were disappointed with you. I did convince one person on the phone to vote for him, which was the greatest moment.”

A key reason for Fisher’s involvement in Corbyn’s Labour party is the anti-austerity stance. She has seen close friends and family struggle with the benefit cuts and the bedroom tax.

“My cousin is going to university soon and her mum is being forced to look for new accommodation. It’s ridiculous that she’s going to be penalised because her daughter is going to be away getting an education,” she says.

Fisher, who grew up in Lincolnshire, does not come from a political family. She explains that her politics have been influenced by a combination of studying the subject at A-level and her personal experiences. Her mother, who lives in York with her grandfather, came close to being flooded this Christmas which, she says, reminded her of why she dislikes the Conservatives.

“You saw people’s lives and livelihoods completely ruined. If you drove out of my mum’s house there was this whole stretch of road which was a basically a pond. The Conservatives focus so much of their attention on what’s beneficial to them. I don’t feel like Corbyn would operate in that way.”

Fisher finds the idea that Corbyn’s politics are a return to the 1970s and 80s, as has been argued by some commentators, to be a naive line of argument. She feels “old white men” in Tooting were using her age against her when they employed this rhetoric.

“Corbyn would not have got elected if he was saying things that were rooted in the 70s and 80s, because he couldn’t possibly have engaged people who were my age or even younger. Actually I think he’s more rooted in Labour origins which have been lost over time,” she says. “If he is going back it’s only in a positive way.”

Joe Bryce

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joe Bryce. Photograph: Oliver Milne/The Guardian

“I had always voted Labour. Always. That was until there came a point where I just couldn’t any more,” Joe Bryce, 54, from Glasgow says. “Iraq was the heart of why I left the Labour party.”



Bryce, a lawyer, is one of the thousands of former party members from across the UK who have returned to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour after leaving while Tony Blair was leader.

He lives in a city that comprehensively rejected Labour in the general election, and looks set to do the same in May’s Scottish parliament elections. Despite that, Joe is now cautiously optimistic for the future of his party.

“We’re on the way back. It won’t be easy, but it can be done.

“I was a member of the Labour party because I believed in the NHS, the welfare state and traditional Labour values,” he says, “and too often we didn’t live up to those values.”

Political parties are generally tight-lipped about their membership numbers, but figures suggest that between the start of the Iraq war in 2003 and Labour losing the 2010 election, 70,000 people left the party.

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For some it was an immediate reaction, tearing up membership cards the day that MPs voted for the invasion of Iraq, but for Joe his anger had begun earlier: “My support began to wane after clause IV, but I kept voting for Labour up until the Iraq war.

“I wasn’t totally critical of New Labour. There were a few good things about the Blair/Brown governments, especially during the first term.”

But Iraq that was the final straw. “I couldn’t continue to support the party after that. The alienation after Iraq was always total. It quickly became apparent that there were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no accountability. No punishment for what happened there.”

Bryce, who specialises in asylum law, gave his support to other parties.

“I voted yes in the referendum on Scottish independence. I was disgusted by the rightward lunge of the UK, and I thought we could claw it back if we left. I voted Green in 2010. I liked Ed Miliband but I thought his team was a little too far to the right, and he was dragged there.”

On 12 September, Bryce rejoined Labour. When asked the reason he’s emphatic: “Jeremy Corbyn is a great man who has the right ideas for the country.”

He doesn’t see Corbyn as a dangerous radical. “The only place he really went on a limb,” he says, “was with his views on nuclear disarmament, where I agree with him completely.”

So what does Labour have to say to win back Scots, and, more specifically, people like him?

“Jeremy has said that austerity is a choice – that resonates with people. If Labour make that message clear it can only be a good thing.



“If we get behind this movement it could really change the UK for the better.”

Lloyd Wilson

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lloyd Wilson. Photograph: Jonathan Bucks/The Guardian

One evening last October Lloyd Wilson strolled into the backroom of a Bedfordshire pub and sat down to his first Labour meeting in 47 years.



“First there were a handful of us, then a dozen or so. Before long there were at least 40 people there. They just kept coming in and coming in,” he says. “It was absolutely extraordinary.”

When the 80-year-old retired teacher was last a Labour member Harold Wilson was prime minister. He recalls the heady days of Labour activism in the late 60s when his life was consumed by party involvement and his branch in Nottingham collected dozens of new members a week.

“We all wanted to move society forward and I felt totally at home because we had a common cause. We were caught up with Harold and there was a general feeling of going forward together,” he says.

But in 1968 when he moved to the village of Turvey in Bedfordshire for work, Wilson discovered the local Labour branch was moribund. “Only the Tories came knocking, hoping we would reinforce their ranks,” he adds.

At a national level too Wilson felt disenchanted with the party. What he saw as Labour’s feeble support for the miners convinced him it had strayed from its leftwing roots. He distanced himself from the party.

“I think if John Smith hadn’t died I might have gone back and got involved but then there was Blair. Well let’s just say I wouldn’t have bought a second-hand car off Blair. The Labour party very quickly became a party I had not been a part of.”

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Wilson became heavily involved in a teaching union – running a branch at his school and at county level – and had a brief flirtation with the Communist party. He says Labour’s lurch from the left drove him into the communists’ arms for a brief period before, he says, he discovered it was “an awful, nasty party”.

In the mid-90s, Wilson and a few friends went to hear Dennis Skinner speak. “That nearly got us going again,” he recalls, but not even the Beast of Bolsover could reignite his interest in rejoining Labour.

It took another 20 years, and the extraordinary surge of support for Jeremy Corbyn to persuade Wilson to return to the fold. “I heard him speak at the Burston Strike School rally [to mark the longest strike in British history] and I was knocked sideways by the turnout there. I was impressed with how he spoke and the things that he said.

“I stood there and thought, ‘I’m 80 now. I’m not going to live too much longer. If anything is going to happen about this awful, awful government this is the only chance. So don’t sit on your backside, Lloyd. Get up and at least pay a sub and occasionally go out and do something.’ And that’s why I rejoined.”

Wilson sees Labour’s sea change as a “throwback” to the party’s halcyon days before Blair and the New Labour adventure. “To the extent that members will have a say in policy, in what the party’s about,” he adds.

“Nothing’s ever a lost cause because if people are encouraged to believe that something can happen other than the current awfulness then it’s bound to spread. Personally, I feel the need to find a bit of energy, to really do my bit. There’s something almost rejuvenating about it.”