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Shakira Martin, the 31-year-old president of the National Union of Students, is so angry with Jeremy Corbyn, her voice shakes.

She ‘actually and personally’ campaigned with the Labour leader before the EU referendum in 2016, she says. ‘He knows me. He knows my name.’ She voted for him in two leadership contests and the 2017 General Election. She pledged her allegiance to him and spread his message among the seven million students who make up her confederation. She persuaded friends to vote for him, too, which wasn’t hard because ‘I loved this man’, she says. ‘He was a role model, an idol almost.’ Now? ‘I wouldn’t wave at him. I wouldn’t even say he’s an ally.’ He has broken her heart. ‘He lied to me.’

Martin, like many who felt a ‘betrayal of trust’ over Labour’s handling of Brexit, didn’t initially speak out. ‘I didn’t feel confident saying anything.’ She wandered around Labour’s conference in Liverpool last September thinking it was ‘an absolute joke’. For her, the spirit of Corbynmania had died. What surprises her now is how many other young people feel the same; a sentiment echoed during more than a dozen interviews for this piece.

“Corbyn is happy to facilitate what he knows young members don’t want, but he’s not been honest about it” Richard Brooks

Remember, it was politicised young people — hundreds and thousands of them — who carried Corbyn, a now 69-year-old, beige-jacket-wearing vegetarian, to leadership victory. They swelled the party’s membership from 200,000 to more than half-a-million by 2016. This army of ‘millennial socialists’ was forged in the fallout of the recession a decade ago, which left many young people with a dire economic inheritance. They were the corps of the 42,000-strong grassroots organisation Momentum. He may seem an unlikely hero of a youth movement, but his campaign learned a lot from Bernie Sanders, the US Democrat with socialist politics and an army of young supporters coming up with slogans like #FeelTheBern.

With its message of ‘a kinder, gentler politics’, a benign economy and a fairer society, Corbyn’s moral socialism galvanised a generation otherwise mistrustful of politicians. In doing so they contributed to the greatest surge in the Labour vote in 2017 since 1945. Despite being led by an elderly man with old-fashioned left-wing policies, Labour was suddenly perceived as fresh, populist and modern. (Nowhere was this better crystallised than in the fields of Glastonbury that year, where his name was chanted as an anthem.) Using social media, these new young supporters revolutionised Labour’s election campaign. This was not the work of Corbyn, or his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, or Jon Lansman, co-founder and chair of Momentum, but the digital natives they had inspired to work for them.

So why are the young falling out of love with Jeremy Corbyn?

At first glance: Brexit. Labour’s membership is overwhelmingly Remain — 88 per cent according to YouGov polls — and the party’s confusing policy on leaving the EU has resulted in a dramatic drop in confidence among 18- to 34-year-olds. According to an Opinium poll, their approval of how Corbyn is handling the issue has dropped 27 percentage points since last July. While Corbyn says he officially backed Remain in the referendum, he was always Eurosceptic. Footage recently emerged of him in 2009 describing Europe as ‘a military Frankenstein’. Tariq Ali, a friend since the Seventies, told a reporter in spring 2016: ‘Jeremy is completely opposed to the EU’. Even during the campaign, Corbyn described his passion for the EU as a damp ‘seven, or seven and a half’, out of 10.

At the heart of Labour’s civil war over Brexit is the explosive question of whether and when to support another referendum or ‘people’s vote’. Most young members and supporters back a second referendum. They were frustrated when, at Labour’s 2018 conference, a motion opening the possibility was passed, but only as a last resort.

Today, policy depends on who is speaking. Labour has either arrived at a historic point of backing a second referendum thanks to figures such as Sir Keir Starmer, shadow Brexit Secretary — or is only doing so as an empty gesture before swinging back to Brexit. Corbyn himself is seen as the hostage of the four Brexit-supporting Ms: Len McCluskey (Unite union boss), Seumas Milne (Corbyn’s comms director), Andrew Murray (his political adviser) and Karie Murphy (his chief of staff).

“No one actually thinks Corbyn is cool — there are pictures of him with massive marrows. But that is why it’s funny. It’s Corbo-irony”

Shakira Martin believes that Corbyn was hoodwinking Remain supporters all along. The stupid thing is, she adds, ‘I believed in Jeremy Corbyn so much that if he’d have given me a reasonable enough explanation two years ago as to why leaving the EU was beneficial, then he potentially could’ve swung me. But he didn’t.’

It’s precisely this intransigence that has drawn many members to groups like For Our Future’s Sake (known as FFS, one of the youth movements for the People’s Vote campaign), Another Europe is Possible, and Led by Donkeys, the guerrilla activists who expose the hypocrisy of politicians by pasting their quotes on billboards around London.

Richard Brooks, 26, co-founder of FFS, believes Corbyn ‘triangulated’ on Brexit — which to activists of his generation is emotive because that strategy of casting policy to appeal both to right and left is so associated with Tony Blair. Brooks says this damages Corbyn’s greatest asset: his authenticity. ‘Corbyn is happy to facilitate what he knows young members don’t want, but he’s not been honest about it.’

Many, like Rosie McKenna, 24, who works as a policy co-ordinator for a charity, believes Corbyn to be ‘a secret Lexiter’ (a Labour or left-wing Brexiteer). As a ‘proud socialist’, McKenna believed in Corbyn’s ‘vision’ when she joined the party in 2015. She stayed loyal, despite her disappointment with his lacklustre backing of Remain. ‘But this year I’ve become very frustrated,’ she says. ‘Some of that is to do with Brexit, some with anti-Semitism.’

But there is another issue. Corbyn promised her generation — young people born into an era of self-empowerment — a say in the political process. ‘When I voted for him, I was voting for a new kind of politics where our politicians listened to the grassroots membership,’ she says. ‘Right now he is going with his own opinions, not the grassroots, which is the opposite of the platform he stood on.’

How damaging is this for Labour? Very, says McKenna. She says many friends are leaving Labour — ‘good principled activists [who] don’t feel they can any longer be part of what should be the biggest party in the UK. When it comes to the next General Election, people will say: “Corbyn might say all the right things, but when you look at his actions, does he do them?”’

Other members have similar concerns about how this millennial malaise might translate at the ballot box. Interviewed over beer, Jonathan, 24, agreed with Michael Mackenzie, 23, that ‘if a snap election was called, Jeremy Corbyn would take a hammering. Labour would be stuffed.’ This is a shame, Mackenzie says, because he joined Labour precisely because he saw Corbyn as someone who ‘represented a change from the really stagnant politics of the past’.

The other unsettling issue for Labour has been, of course, the crisis over anti-Semitism. Whether founded or not, there is a sense that, although not racist, Corbyn is too willing to tolerate those with warped views. Jacob Armstrong, 23, says that ‘it exposes large flaws in the party’s discipline mechanisms, which have not been expanded since the massive influx of members and have great weakness for factional misuse.’ Armstrong won’t leave the party — he believes ‘it’s a socialist’s duty to stay and fight’ — but feels more despondent about it than when he joined aged 17.

"Life is going to be pretty tough until you get to the election, then it’s going to start to get fun" Michael Walker

What has been surprising is the extent to which Momentum has avoided the whole Brexit row. One Labour commentator put its silence down to a ‘dual loyalty to both EU-supporting members and Corbyn. It hasn’t been their policy to call for a second referendum because they want to stay on board with the leadership.'

That doesn’t mean Momentum activists don’t have their own frustrations with the Labour leadership. Some fear the policy isn’t radical enough and would like to see more dramatic policies on climate change, housing, education and justice as well as perhaps devising a Green New Deal along the lines of that offered by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the American Democrat (which was voted down in the Senate this week after strong opposition from Republicans). They feel Labour could go further, and hope that in future it will find its own version of Ocasio-Cortez.

To many young supporters, Corbyn is a figurehead, a spiritual guide. A Momentum source says the press never quite grasped the fact that there was humour in this. ‘It’s irony that is really particular to my generation. Stuff like the jumpers with the Nike tick. No one actually thinks Jeremy Corbyn is cool — there are pictures of him with massive marrows. He’s teetotal and rides a bike and goes on his allotment. But that is why it’s funny. It’s Corbo-irony.’

I ask how the two sides of Labour — the dynamic young activists like him, and the older leftists, those of interminable meetings in stuffy rooms — coexist. ‘My generation is very conscious of how we spend our time,’ he says. ‘Frankly, most of those meetings are really boring. We’ve got better things to do.’

The way he engages them is with campaigns that have ‘a demonstrable theory of change’. For instance, ‘If you say to activists, “Knock on doors”, that doesn’t land. If you say, “This might be the one shot we’ve got to get a socialist government, and the way to do that is to go and talk to people face to face, in this marginal constituency where the Tories are just a couple of hundred votes ahead,” then they’ll say, “It’s worth spending my afternoon doing that.”’

His modern socialism is not the ‘state socialism of the Sixties and Seventies’, which he describes as ‘incredibly bureaucratic and inefficient’. Instead he regales me with ideas of post-capitalist futures, tech utopias (‘in which we mine minerals from asteroids and where there’s so much solar power that we will have an abundance of power’) and ways in which you can create universal basic income and universal basic services in a society with robots.

But Michael Walker, 29, a commentator at left-wing media organisation Novara Media, draws similarities between the older and younger Labour activists. He says the socio-economic contexts in which they grew up are not so different. ‘They had the Vietnam War, we had Iraq. They had the Seventies economic crisis, we had 2008. You’ve got the same in the US: a point when young people are more inclined towards socialism.’ I ask if he thinks we’ve passed the apex of Corbyn’s popularity. ‘There is a lull,’ he says, ‘but there will always be a lull between election periods. Life is going to be pretty tough until you get to the election, then it’s going to start to get fun.’

The Momentum source charts the mood of party conferences since 2015. ‘The mood in 2016 was really split,’ he says, remembering a BBC film that cut the excitement of The World Transformed (‘someone was sculpting Harold Wilson’s face out of clay’) with Labour’s main conference hall (‘stale, eerie: lots of people walking round in suits’). At the post-election, post-Glastonbury conference of 2017, however, ‘the crossover between the two audiences was huge. It had the celebratory feel of arrival.’ On 2018 he stalls. ‘Obviously all the anti-Semitism stuff was really difficult,’ he says. ‘The atmosphere at conference was different.’

Here, perhaps, Momentum is aligned with Martin who asks wistfully: ‘The Jeremy Corbyn we loved, where has he gone?’

Additional reporting by Ailbhe Rea