Meet the young, British and angry activists reshaping the UK

Without young people, the UK’s long, patchwork-history of protest would be threadbare – we wouldn’t have seen 750,000 people marching in 2003 against the Iraq War, or the Rock Against Racism movement of the Seventies. The Eighties miners’ strikes and occupation of Greenham Common would have been a little quieter, and the 1990 poll tax riots, where 3000 people clashed with police in central London after anti- Thatcher protests, wouldn’t have been quite so vicious.

Despite these decades’ worth of protest, over the last 10 years, millennials have been framed as entitled wusses, out to ruin the economy by daring to not have as much money to spend as their parents’ generation did. The London riots in 2011 were regarded–and punished – by authorities as idiotic looting rather than a rallying cry of a disenfranchised youth inheriting a vastly unequal society. In the years since, a more academic cohort of millennials have garnered a reputation for prioritising ‘superficial’ identity politics over tangible change. The generation below – or ahead of – them, though, are refusing to be defined as rebels without a cause – or entitled snowflakes. Leveraging social media not just for self-expression but collective change, their own identities and experiences are helping inform where their activism goes – and therefore what happens to the world next.

Sincere emotion tying in with a sense of pragmatism forms the crux of what they do, and it’s no wonder, when the dangers can be so grave. In 2018, over a third of London’s homicide victims were aged 16-24. Carol Pierre, 25, who only joined social media this year (“there are so many hashtag activists there”), works with some of the thousands of young people who will have grown up around serious youth violence.

Starting off in childcare, Pierre entered higher education by way of bursaries and scholarships and soon paid it forward, helping inform working class school children local to Goldsmiths University “that there is help out there, university is for everyone.” She now works on youth outreach in the arts, “highlighting the barriers that young people are facing accessing funds, education and youth clubs closing.”

Serious youth violence helps inform Pierre’s work, and “having known victims of serious youth violence,” she joined the advisory panel of Power The Fight, a charity aiming to equip various organisations to engage with issues of youth violence. Pierre’s work, she humbly points out, doesn’t directly intervene in youth violence, but provides “a look at structural changes that can be made within institutions. Grassroots activism is where so much happens, but there needs to be a continuum of change and that’s the direction I’m taking.”

That means sitting on EqualiTeam Lewisham, a board looking to improve equality and fairness for local African and Caribbean communities, and organising workshops with young people to help them understand their entitlement within the arts establishment. Pierre’s work on the Young Historians Project, for instance, recounted how the inadequate police response to the New Cross Fire of 1981 (in which 13 young black people died in an unsolved arson attack, a catalyst for the Brixton Riots that year), went national and eventually successfully agitated for more stringent rules regarding police conduct. This history’s shadow is long: in England, black people are still 40 times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched by the police.

Alongside Pierre’s hyper-local work is the international Youth Strike for Climate movement. Each month in the UK, on a Friday, in 60 towns and cities from Manchester to Exmouth, thousands of schoolchildren and students go on strike. Inspired by 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg’s climate protests, the aim is to “rise up and take direct action where older generations have failed.”

Noga Levy-Rapoport, 17, is one of the many young people rising up, and a core organiser at the UK’s Student Climate Network ever since her first Youth Strike for Climate protest in February. She wanted to march that day because, “I’d read about it on social media. We’ve always had this thing in the back of our heads saying, ‘At some point your future will end, you just don’t know yet.’ And we’re angry and afraid and I couldn’t live with myself not doing anything about it now that I had the opportunity to.” Once there, though, she was dismayed because, “I saw everyone standing around and realised, this isn’t going to disrupt as much as we want, this isn’t going to make people sit up and listen.” Her simple but effective solution was to “move up from Parliament Square to Trafalgar Square to stop the cars and say,‘We’re here, to stand.’”At Levy-Rapoport loud command, thousands of children then walked up Whitehall, making the protest more visible.

Toxicity, to Levy-Rapoport, exists in both our air and our public discourse, where she anticipates certain types of identity-based criticism as inevitable: “As a Jewish woman you’re always going to come up against disagreement,”she says. Her foremost concern, however, lies with the “working class people across the world who contribute nearly nothing to climate change yet will be the most hurt by it.” Levy-Rapoport is currently organising and helping front the weekly London Youth Strike For Climate protests in pursuit of a Green New Deal, and will only stop “when I see corporate leaders realise that it’s not about profit anymore, it’s about survival.”

Similarly thick-skinned is Saffiyah Khan, the 22-year-old anti-racist activist who smiled in the face of a far-right EDL (English Defence League, co- founded by Tommy Robinson) protester in Birmingham in 2017. Squaring up to a shouting, aggressive man, she was calm and brave, with nothing but pity and derision for him and his politics. The image went viral after her local MP, Jess Phillips, tweeted it, commenting: “Who looks like they have the power here, the real Brummy on the left or the EDL who migrated for the day to our city and failed to assimilate.”

Khan now explains: “The EDL always have coaches of people coming from across the country.They don’t understand the intricacies of social dynamics, they don’t know anything apart from what they’ve been told by right-wing propaganda. So when they ask, ‘Where are you from?,’ it’s always best if you can say: Actually, I’m from round the corner, so please don’t try to educate me on minority issues in this area!”

Up until this moment of viral fame, Khan had kept her social justice activism local. That was until The Specials, the Coventry band who appeared on the shirt she wore to that protest, got in touch. At first, the anti-racist group behind political Eighties ska tracks such as Ghost Town (about deindustrialisation), The Lunatics (Have Take Over The Asylum) (about Thatcherism), and Free Nelson Mandela (an anti-apartheid anthem), offered her free tickets to one of their gigs. Since then, she has written a song called Ten Commandments with the band, touring with them across the world to perform it:“I’m not a poet but everything in it has come from things I’ve experienced or heard of, they’re incredibly important.” She sees her activism as fully entwined with “getting the crowd dancing to old skinhead tracks” as she DJs to the crowd before each gig The Specials perform. To her, it’s about beating hate with joy. “It opposes the image [the far right] have of people on the left of politics as fragile and humourless or easily triggered. It’s difficult to offend me!”

Not that people haven’t tried, though. On Twitter (which Khan checks every couple of weeks just to “know what people are saying about me … I want to make sure people aren’t keeping too close tabs on me”), speculation about her personal life has been extreme. She laughs, though, at trolls suggesting that her sister is a jihadist: “She has long hair extensions and wears Adidas every day. I don’t see how that works!”

On her way to success via a 271,000-strong petition and a protest of 2,000 outside Number 10, George uncovered a lot of stigma. Some towards the girls who were using socks stuffed with newspapers in lieu of menstrual products – “people blamed bad parenting, inadequate budgeting, wrong priorities … but children are not in control of the family’s finances!” Some of it was simply directed towards people having periods: “[Critics] said I was a typical teenager wanting something for nothing, how periods were disgusting, how I was putting people off their breakfast talking about periods all the time!”

So George’s work continues. As well as meeting with the Department of Education to ensure the quality of provision (“there needs to be a variety and there needs to be a focus on sustainable products”), she is trying to increase conversations about periods under the hashtag #FreePeriodsStories. She explains: “We need a total change in the way menstruation is framed, and the language used around periods has to be way more positive, empowering and much less bound up in shame and apology.”

Sadly, though, many reproductive issues exist in the shadows. Rachel Watters, 25, found it strange in 2014 that her student union at Queen’s University Belfast was silent on one major issue. “We have one of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe yet we had no pro-choice group”, she recalls thinking, before launching her own, “calling for the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland and mainland UK.”

Watters’ activism, in a part of the UK where abortion is still illegal, has since involved “education on abortion myths, changing her university’s policy on abortion, demonstrations calling for a Yes vote in the Republic of Ireland’s 2018 referendum on the legislation on abortion.” She has also been involved in calling for ‘buffer zones’ around abortion clinics in the Republic of Ireland, where anti-choicers harangue service users and staff alike. Meanwhile, she’s continued calling out the “misunderstanding of devolution … there is still a human rights obligation from our British government.” With this work, she hopes to be the last in a long line of women who’ve campaigned in Northern Ireland, for over 50 years now, for rights over their own bodies, because “the person asking for an abortion is an autonomous human being who can make decisions for themselves.”

Today’s young activists come armed with a diversity of goals and methods, able to influence each other as well as major institutions and authorities via the internet, a platform they understand like no generation before them. What doubly unites all of them – Pierre, Levy-Rapoport, George, Windust, Khan and Watters and the many like them – is a conviction to treat other young people as equals, and the belief that they all deserve so much more than they’re getting. TheHansard Society has found that political interest from 16-34-year olds is at a 13-year high and is continuing to rise with every new young person coming of voting age. Just as younger ears hear at a higher frequency, it seems these young people are able to envisage a positive future with much more clarity. And what lies ahead is brighter than the rest of us can dream of.

This article originally appeared in SLEEK 62, out now. Order your copy here.