She listened to him quietly and hung up the phone, he said. A single mother, she had worked two or three jobs the whole time he was growing up and still takes in ironing for extra cash. His applications to college had been thrilling for her, and she went through the choices with him, one by one.

“She wants me to have a better future,” he said. “For her, that is going to university, getting a degree, earning loads of money.”

The next day she called to tell him to stay in school. He said he would.

At home for the holidays, he was warned not to discuss politics with his Thatcherite grandparents, and tiptoed around the subject. No one in his life has brought up the bitter, divisive strikes of the 1970s and ’80s, which soured public opinion against the labor movement.

“Either they are left-wing or they aren’t political at all,” he said. “That’s young people. That’s us.”

Mr. McIntyre has begun to count the months until he will graduate and throw himself into full-time activism.

Before Christmas he was invited by the bakers’ union president, Ian Hodson, to speak to students in the left-wing stronghold of Liverpool. He drank pints of beer with veteran organizers, men with meaty forearms who spoke to him in a Lancashire twang about Maggie Thatcher and the Peasants’ Revolt. On his way home he stopped by a picket of shipbuilders at Liverpool’s docks, his first old-school industrial picket line.

He was bleary, after nightclubbing with the bakers’ union president until 3 the night before, and wheeling a carry-on bag behind him.