Hearing the cold, staccato thwack of an eskibeat grime instrumental underneath Roll Deep MC Jamakabi, spitting in his trademark patois-flow, that “Jeremy Corbyn is the wickedest ting” is one surreal highlight from last Friday night. Another is my conversation with gruff Channel U legend Bruza, who says, “I like Labour because I labour, I graft.” Another is when Stevenage-based teenager SBK, one of several new-gen artists in the company of countless veterans – Durrty Goodz, Lioness, Scrufizzer and Sharky Major, who curated the list of performers – bellows, “If man ain’t voting Labour, man can’t act like my bredrin.”

Politics and music are the glues binding this coalition. Grime scene architects and Labour Party campaigners alike have gathered in the studio of producer Pepstar, on the fourth floor of a converted factory in Wood Green, North London. Across four hours of back-to-back sets, MCs take turns to lay down their bars in search of a wheel-up: the triumphant sound system ritual in which the DJ rewards whoever has the mic by rewinding the spinning CDJs to the beginning of the track. Gun fingers fly up. Plastic cups of brandy are cheersed. People grin at old friends, fist-bump and hug new arrivals. The muted hue of an electric-blue strobe light illuminates everyone’s faces and waving phone torches help broadcast the event on social media. This is #Grime4Corbyn, on 29 November 2019, in the lead-up to the most important general election of our country’s history.

“It’s about maintaining energy, keeping people interested. There are lots of ways we can talk about politics. We can read about it or watch the news. But music and culture is a really important way of articulating the issues and struggles people are going through,” says Adam Elliot-Cooper, co-founder of #Grime4Corbyn, which launched in the build-up to the 2017 election to encourage young people to vote. After AJ Tracey, Novelist and JME all signalled their explicit support for the Labour leader, the campaign helped what became known as a “youthquake” to erupt: the highest rate of 18 to 24-year-olds turning out to vote for a quarter of a century – 62 per cent of this age group voted for Labour, contributing towards an unpredicted hung parliament.

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This youthful surge in politics has only increased in the two years since as concerns about the future of Brexit Britain and a global movement of climate change activism among young people have both crystallised. 452,000 adults under the age of 34 registered to vote on the deadline of 25 November this year as part of an overall 236 per cent spike in voters registering compared to the day before (some of them catalysed by Stormzy’s impassioned tweeting).

Nonetheless, recent murmurs have suggested that #Grime4Corbyn’s momentum has petered out in the lead up to the 2019 election. But in reality the campaign continues, repurposing itself to move with the times. Its team of organisers, all of whom are volunteers, has been working behind the scenes, engaging with young people by visiting youth groups and applying their collective efforts to relevant causes. They have worked with human rights organisations, such as Liberty, lawyers and academics to fight the criminalisation of drill music after Skengdo & AM were banned from performing their music in January of this year. More recently, they signed and helped coordinate signatures for a letter written last month by activist-cum-rappers Akala and Lowkey, giving more formal support to Labour in the upcoming election.

Like many of his fellow activists, Elliot-Cooper – a supporter of the “Fuck Boris” campaign, which, like #Grime4Corbyn, throws events in protest of our problematic prime minister (the next one is 7 December), aiming to unseat him from his West London constituency of Uxbridge – grew up among the conception of grime music in East London at the start of this millennium. “For me this isn’t just about Jeremy Corbyn being our leader,” he says, defining the campaign’s scope beyond its namesake. “It’s more about the fact that youth clubs, community projects, cultural institutions, all of the infrastructure we need in order to make change, have been decimated by the current government. Reinvesting in that infrastructure will provide us with the resources to make the changes we want to see.”

© Alfred Bronson

This election is, in the debates of parliament, meetings of Whitehall, and pub conversations, dining rooms and angry internal dialogues of many voters, being fought along the rigid fault-line of Leave vs Remain. But widespread public service failure, from transport to schools to the NHS, have levelled the grounds for an argumentative battlefield about which party is fittest to rebuild the country after a decade of austerity.

Labour’s manifesto promises to spend more than their competitors, which has been dismissed as unrealistic by skeptics and rivals – despite amounting to less spending on social goods as a percentage of GDP compared to France, Sweden, Greece and Germany. But its approach has won the support of many, including people who work with the most vulnerable people on the frontline and therefore recognise the full extent of the crisis we are in. From my standpoint as a youth worker in South London, for example, more and more children are living in absolute poverty, relying on food banks to eat, being excluded from school, creating their own dangerous sources of income via the growing illicit drug economy, arming themselves with weapons in distrust of the bare-bones police force, suffering from soaring rates of depression and anxiety and being left to their own devices without suitable, consistent youth provision.

Given how blindingly obvious all of these solidifying emblems of social dysfunction have been for years, it is frankly impossible for those of us who can see the brutal, trickle-down realism of this on the ground to believe that the Conservative Party care about anything apart from serving the most well-off. For many, a vote for Labour is, as it has been since time immemorial, the best way of rejecting the unjust status quo and redistributing privilege. Now, however, the stakes seem higher than anytime before in living memory.

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Because of the tragic attack on London Bridge which took place hours before the #Grime4Corbyn event began, Corbyn couldn’t make it down in person. But I received a message over WhatsApp the next morning expressing thanks to people for coming together. The MP for Islington North says of the night: “All the artists that performed have shown that the genre does not forget its roots and the power the arts have to make important political statements about the choice facing our communities. Through grime you’ve shown how creativity and originality can thrive. Supporting our arts and the development of our young people will be the priority of the government I lead.”

Grime music would not exist in its all-pervading current form, perhaps the most successful vehicle of contemporary British culture – Dizzee Rascal becoming a global superstar; Wiley receiving an MBE; Kano performing at the Royal Albert Hall; Stormzy, after headlining Glastonbury, and Dave appearing on front covers of British GQ; D Double E narrating an Ikea advert this Christmas; George The Poet, who started off as a grime MC, winning across five categories at the British Podcasting Awards and reading at the royal wedding; P Money featuring on the Fifa 20 soundtrack – without properly funded youth clubs at the start of this millennium. The genre’s DIY, entrepreneurial inception relied upon artists’ capacity to organise and hone their craft with facilities at their local youth service. Then they would replicate and communicate their skills to the masses on self-built pirate radio stations and at energetic raves scattered across London, then the country, then Europe. Now, nearly two decades later, the whole world knows about grime.

“I think it’s important to make people realise that they have the power to affect change,” says former Rinse FM, Kiss 100 and BBC Radio 1 DJ Logan Sama when we speak after his lively set on the decks. “A lot of people under the age of 40 are very disenfranchised and don’t feel like however they vote is going to have any effect. Over the last decade or so, a lot of the things have made it a lot harder for working-class people who rely on things that are slowly being taken away from them in austerity. It’s really important for me to support Labour in general because I feel like they will enable people to work hard and lift themselves up, rather than be stuck where they are treading water, not able to get on the housing ladder, not able to relocate because they don’t have enough savings to move to an area where the cost of living is lower, where they don’t have access to education and children don’t have access to community projects.”

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Two dovetailing tenets of Labour’s current pledge that are relevant to grime are to reverse the attack on the arts that has taken place under this Conservative government and revamp community and youth services from their hollowed-out current state. First, Labour has its own Youth Manifesto, which includes £1 billion of investment in youth services and a commitment to lowering the voting age to 16. Second, it wants to create a statutory youth service. And third, Labour is the only party offering an “Arts For All” policy, which, alongside a long list of steps towards ensuring young people have access to forms of creative self-expression, like learning to play musical instruments, rightly recognises that “as automation changes the world of work, creative jobs will become even more important to our economy”.

The policy was formally launched last month by grime MC Saskilla, who speaks to me on his arrival to the #Grime4Corbyn event. “People from an urban background are not really being shown why Corbyn relates to them, so I see it as my job to try and narrate that,” he says. “I wanted to continue the message from 2017 because I love youth engagement and young people knowing about politics.”

Another of the evening’s special guests, Nadia Rose, stated on Newsnight last week that because of Jeremy Corbyn, it is the first time she has felt like a politician is relatable. When I ask why she thinks events like the one organised by #Grime4Corbyn are important, she explains that it is “because there is a stereotype about grime music that’s been put in a bad light, alongside drill and other genres. But these things are championing Corbyn and his movement, so it breaks down that stigma a little bit.”

The door to rising political engagement has been propped open for subcultures likes UK rap and drill music. Brixton Hill group 67’s masked frontman and drill scene originator LD recently released a song called “Labour”, in which he raps that he is “from the red zone of Lambeth” – referring to the Labour Party’s traditional hold over the South London borough. Earlier this year, Krept & Konan appeared alongside Skengdo & AM in parliament to speak out against the criminalisation of drill music. And Drillminister has put out a slew of political songs such as “Choke” – about pollution – and “Brexit”, appearing repeatedly on primetime television news programmes such as ITV’s Good Morning Britain and BBC’s Newsnight to criticise the out-of-touch political establishment.

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It is difficult to imagine that any of this would have been possible without initiatives like #Grime4Corbyn and the way grime’s old guard helped to build many of the established mechanisms enabling unprecedented levels of cultural production in British cities to take place: pioneering music studios such as Defenders Entertainment and Finesse Foreva, which essentially double up as youth clubs; broadcasting platforms such as SBTV, GRM Daily and Mixtape Madness; and all-city videographers such as Elmino, Risky Roadz and Pacman TV.

What’s more, the achievements of these cherished institutions have all been despite coming up against constant Orwellian, racist measures rained down from whitewashed heights. Form 696 was restricted grime for many years, used by police to shut down music nights. The “gangs matrix” has been condemned by Amnesty International yet is currently used to surveil thousands of young, mostly black British boys and young men, creating an even larger sense of paranoia among young, inner-city communities. And “gang injunctions” now grant judges the power to ban young artists from writing lyrics that aren’t screened by police, performing songs arbitrarily deemed to be “inciting violence”, or even entering certain postcodes.

In other words, the roots of the musical solutions of survival invented by communities of colour that have been churning out some of the most popular, exciting and lucrative music for years, as well as the injustices these communities have faced, run deep into grime’s history. The genre’s naturally political energy and collaborative ethos, connecting people of different backgrounds, leveraging technological skills to achieve mass social mobility, and gaining media representation for young, multicultural audiences, is the foundation for so much worth celebrating in modern British life.

© Alfred Bronson

“I’m a mentor, I work with a group of young people and we try to transition them from the streets and gangs into employment,” says Roachee, another member of the Roll Deep crew, which featured Wiley and Skepta. He explains that he came down in the hope of meeting Corbyn so that he can “help him get ready for government” and emphasises the role he plays as a result of having graduated from a background in grime. “There’s been a lot of experiences from the music and the streets that have given me perspective to work with the younger generation and say to them, ‘We can see what’s happening, guys, we’ve been there. But before you guys ruin things, let’s see if we can achieve something great.’”

The music stops abruptly on the four-hour mark. History has been made; over 15 years of blood, sweat and tears culminating in the name of political change like never before. People say their goodbyes and I grab my coat to leave. On my way out, before heading through the factory’s long, labyrinthine corridors, I get speaking to Manga, another member of Roll Deep. I asked him why he came down tonight.

“It’s Labour’s who I’m voting for. Man’s backing it,” he replies with conviction. “The other parties don’t really care about us, man. They’re racist. They don’t understand us. So I hear Jeremy Corbyn. But it’s not like he’s the saviour. This isn’t an X Factor ting. It’s the whole of Labour and their policies. I hear their ideals. What they stand for will change stuff.”

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