These elections determine the national committees for Young Labour and Labour Students – bodies that, while often dismissed as minor, “careerist” and “cliquey” internal structures, actually sit at the intersection of representation and organisation within the party. They’re designed to give young members a voice and also to help coordinate campaigning and recruitment. In addition, the party’s youth wing will, in summer, elect the youth representative who will hold a dedicated seat on the National Executive Committee (NEC). 

The Young Labour and Labour Students contest has been dominated by two slates with opposing views on the government. Organise, widely seen as the pro-leadership faction, has positioned itself as focused on delivery – promising a “youth wing that speaks to the whole country” and emphasising unity and campaigning strength. Renew, conversely, has warned that Labour is at a “crisis point” and criticised the Organise-majority youth committee for being “shamefully silent” on “the issues most important to young members”, while promising a more open and politically engaged youth wing.

The elections took place throughout February with results announced in early March, but this year’s came with an unusual complication. Following an administrative error over voter eligibility – the wrong membership freeze date was applied – the NEC took the seemingly unprecedented step of ordering a full rerun of contested ballots. The original ballots, however, still offer a glimpse into the direction Labour’s youth membership is heading.

Initial results showed gains for Renew, the anti-leadership slate. Its candidates won eight and three seats on, respectively, the Young Labour and Labour Students committees. At the previous elections, in 2024, there were only four successful non-Organise candidates across both bodies. And if the NEC’s rerun suggests that some contests were close, then the results may be more dramatic still for Renew.

Renew pitched itself as the platform for critique. Several candidates rallied against Young Labour’s “expectation of loyalty”, as one put it, and the idea that young members can only progress by keeping to the party line.

It is not a takeover, but it is a meaningful shift. Organise, closely linked to Labour to Win – the organisation associated with the success of Keir Starmer’s leadership is disciplined and coordinated, supported by high-profile MP endorsements. Renew, by contrast, has emerged without backing from either Momentum or newer soft-left groupings such as Mainstream. Instead, it operates as a looser coalition arguing for a different internal culture. It appears that, even without tight coordination, alternative offers can attract a significant portion of the internal electorate.

Members across the youth wing have voiced frustration with the administrative issue that required the elections to be rerun. Party officials have stressed that the decision “wasn’t taken lightly”, but candidates from both sides reported that issues with the ballots were identified early but not resolved. Action was delayed until after party staff returned from the Gorton and Denton by-election. “We knew there were people who hadn’t received ballots,” said an Organise representative. “Issues weren’t resolved – that was disappointing.” Willow Parker, the Organise candidate for Labour Students chair, said “no one’s really happy”. She noted the risk that some who voted the first time will not participate in the rerun.

For many, the error exemplifies why young members already feel dismissed by the party. Amelia Tamblyn, the Renew candidate for Labour Students chair, described a system that has been “hollowed out”, in which engagement is reduced largely to campaigning. “Every single Young Labour event… has been going canvassing and then maybe [to the] pub afterwards,” she said. “No socialising or policy development – it’s really alienating.” This disengagement is already playing out in the elections with nominations for candidates sharply decreasing since the last election, a shift that suggests a declining confidence in these structures and a shrinking pool of members willing to engage with them. The party has also been in the process of hiring a youth and student coordinator for the past month after the previous incumbent vacated the role in November, leaving a gap at the centre of the very structures between young members and party that are under scrutiny.

Even those within Organise acknowledge the challenge – despite holding almost the entirety of the roles on the outgoing committee. It has pointed to “a problem… of young members feeling left out”. Emily Moore, Organise’s candidate for Young Labour chair, argued that rebuilding trust would require a “massive listening exercise”.

Disagreement within the party’s youth membership is not over whether there is a problem – all agree there is. The contention is what these structures should be for. Organise has emphasised unity and campaigning capacity; Renew has focused on creating space for debate and allowing members to criticise leadership. The broader question facing Labour is whether its youth wings are primarily tools for mobilisation or space for political development.

For a party already struggling to maintain its youth base, the answer matters. Membership of young people has fallen sharply in recent years, and on campuses Labour faces greater competition from other progressive parties. As reported last year, many students see official party structures as distant and overly controlled, with limited space for dissent.

These elections reveal the shift in expectations. Younger members are still participating – but they are more selective about how and why. “When you see things starting to mount up you understand why members are getting more pissed off,” a Renew-backed independent candidate said. “Something needs to give.”

The new results of the Young Labour and Labour Students elections are expected within the next two weeks. The local elections are in May, and the NEC elections will happen in the summer. The results, when they come, will not just determine who leads Young Labour and Labour Students – they will offer one of the clearest early signals of where Labour’s internal politics is heading next.

[Further reading: Will Labour embrace electoral reform?]

The explanation was unapologetic. The clinic was not funded to provide coils unless they were being used for contraception. I listed the symptoms again: pain unresponsive to painkillers; pain that left me unable to work; pain that immobilised me in bed. I used the language women learn to reach for in medical settings to ensure they are taken seriously – the careful phrases designed to translate pain into legitimacy: “quality of life”, “daily routine”, “non-responsive pain”. None of it mattered. My pain wasn’t up for discussion. My relationship was.

Only later did I realise I’d never actually disclosed my sexuality. It must have been added to my record at a previous appointment, without my knowledge. A simple note classifying me as the wrong kind of patient. Later, my partner and I joked about staging a break-up on speakerphone at my next appointment. It’s no longer the 1980s, but there’s something deeply unsettling about realising that access to routine healthcare can still depend on performing heterosexuality.

I was sent back to my GP – another retelling, another referral – this time to community gynaecology, with a telephone appointment now scheduled for January. From there, the familiar NHS timeline opens up: maybe a couple of months if I’m lucky, three to 12 months if I need a hospital referral. At best, I’m looking at spring. At worst, early 2027.

I later learned that the same clinic would have fitted the coil within four weeks – two months tops – if for pregnancy prevention. The capacity existed. The service existed. The expertise existed. I simply didn’t meet the right kind of need.

This is not an unusual story, nor an especially dramatic one. It is what it looks like to be a gay woman navigating a healthcare system still organised around heterosexual assumptions – assumptions that don’t merely inconvenience us, but actively determine whose pain is recognised as legitimate. When contraception is recognised purely as a tool for pregnancy prevention, queer women fall through the gaps. We encounter this not out of hostility, but because we don’t conform to the default definition of patient. This is not a system designed to exclude gay women – it is one that little thought to include us at all.

The result is exclusion all the same. Many women rely on coils, pills and implants not just to avoid pregnancy, but to manage pain, regulate cycles or treat gynaecological conditions. These are not marginal or optional uses, they are core medical needs. Yet funding models continue to tie access to contraception services to contraceptive risk. Those who fit the model are seen as worthy of resourcing for and move through treatment quickly. Those who do not, become administratively inconvenient. Negotiable. Easier to deny.

This does not mean straight women have it easy. Anyone seeking contraception for non-contraceptive purposes is pushed into the same fragmented system – in which availability varies according to region, services contradict each another, and waiting lists stretch for months or years. But gay women often encounter an additional hurdle. If you cannot demonstrate pregnancy risk, you are not simply delayed – you struggle to be recognised as a legitimate patient.

What is striking is how rarely this problem is acknowledged. Where research does exist on queer women and contraception, it tends to stop at the observation that lesbians use contraception less than straight women (what a surprise!). Separately, there is growing recognition that all women struggle to access long-acting reversible contraception for non-contraceptive purposes. But the point at which these two realities meet – queer women needing contraception as medical treatment – remains entirely absent from public debate.

That gap affects policy. In 2018, the government published “Improving the health and wellbeing of lesbian and bisexual women and other women who have sex with women”, the most comprehensive official attempt to map queer women’s health needs in England. In the report, there is no reference to contraception. Not as healthcare. Not as pain management. Not even in relation to bisexual women using it for pregnancy prevention. Contraception is assumed to be irrelevant, rather than recognised as routine medical care.

The pattern persists elsewhere. In the LGBT Foundation’s 2023 report, “Hidden figures: LGBT health inequalities in the UK”, the word contraception appears only once, and solely in relation to STI-prevention in same-sex relationships. Queer women’s use of contraception as treatment – for pain, cycle regulation or chronic conditions – remains invisible. When the system fails us, it does so quietly.

Patients are silently being sorted by legitimacy. Our credibility is assessed not through our symptoms, but through assumptions about the sex that we are – or are not – having. Pain becomes conditional and we have to prove we are in enough to be treated.

The emotional toll of this process is difficult to capture. There is a particular humiliation in knowing that even with the right words, the right history, the right level of pain, the structure still works against you. Every delay, every referral carries the same instruction: wait your turn; try somewhere else; start again. Not quite enough. Not this time. So for now, I am still waiting, pain ongoing. This delay isn’t unlucky, nor is it a misunderstanding. It is the system functioning exactly as designed.

[Further reading: Why can’t I choose when to die?]

The landscape looks fractured because it is. This is less due to ideological splits than a lack of structure to the entire project. Students are attempting to create a youth wing with no mandate, no framework and no route into a party that still hasn’t defined its own internal architecture. Across campuses, young members are hosting discussions, exchanging ideas and loosely attempting to coordinate. Yet none of this is connected to the party’s national machinery, because the machinery simply doesn’t exist. Attempts to reach the tiny HQ facilitating committee routinely go nowhere; with its members described as “essentially impossible to reach.” Confusion stems not from political disagreement but from this vacuum. Student groups are improvising independently, each unsure where they stand within the party. 

As well as this scattered youth effort, there is the equally confused and under-resourced world of local proto-branches. One local member described the reality of trying to function without the basics: “On a boring level it’s really annoying; trying to set up a bank account, for example, requires a constitution and name but we don’t have any of those practicals.” They summarised it bluntly: “We’re in a limbo.” With no central organisation to refer back to, the entire process has become, “bureaucratically and administratively… a bit of a pain.”

Even where branches do exist, they can be uneasy spaces. A member in Your Party Birmingham described strenuous internal cultural tensions. He mentioned ongoing questions about what role – if any – social conservatism should occupy in the movement, with several younger and queer members leaving the branch as a result, citing recurring issues with transphobia. Older members tend to emphasise sticking together “for the sake of the movement”, while younger activists refuse to compromise on views they see as fundamentally incompatible with their politics. The divide is generational: those who feel unity must be prioritised versus those who believe certain lines cannot be crossed.

These two spheres – youth circles and local branches – both struggle with ambiguity, but different versions of it. Branches feel stuck, unable to move forward because nothing exists on paper; while students remain unanchored, unsure whether, and how, they should slot into the party’s eventual structure. 

For some students, this lack of clarity is encouraging. The absence of hierarchy feels like an opportunity, a chance to shape a movement before any formal leadership defines it. There is a sense among many that the point is not clarity but possibility – that things may be “bad right now” but that this “doesn’t mean it’s going to be bad forever.” For ex-Labour and Green members, especially, the lack of entrenched practice feels liberating.

But these same conditions also produce drift. Work is duplicated. Communications are lost. No one knows who answers to whom. Cambridge’s Left Society made its position clear early on, when asked about joining a unified youth network: “That’s not happening.” It is a simple logic: there is no point affiliating with a party that cannot even define itself. Versions of this decision repeat across the country.

Meanwhile, the absence of structure has allowed tensions at the national scale to replicate at the youth level. One student described how the “the vast majority of the youth… particularly those organising the youth movement… lean towards Sultana.” It isn’t formal allegiance, but an interesting signal of where young people feel the movement’s momentum sits. Sultana’s appearance at the wing’s unofficial launch rally only deepened that impression.

All these tensions played out at Your Party’s recent conference in Liverpool. Students describe a warm atmosphere but almost no organisational substance. The gap between rhetoric and reality was stark, with plenty of enthusiasm, but no actual mechanism for youth involvement. In this space, informal moments took on disproportionate weight. Erik Uden, a youth representative from Germany’s Die Linke, described a brief private exchange with Jeremy Corbyn in which he expressed personal support for creating a youth movement – a fleeting interaction that felt meaningful only because so little else exists around it.

Asked about these claims, a Your Party spokesperson commented: “Building this kind of democratic party doesn’t happen overnight. But with a constitution and election strategy agreed by members, elections for our executive coming up and local branch formation in the works, we’re making good progress. In time, we will establish youth and student sections, too, as we offer young people an alternative to debt and decline with the mainstream parties.”

The risks are obvious. Without a defined relationship to the main party, the youth scene could dissipate long before it develops anything coherent enough to survive – and local branches risk grinding to a halt under the weight of administrative tasks they have no tools to complete. The cultural fractures emerging in places like Birmingham are unlikely to be resolved by structure alone, but the absence of that structure has made them sharper, more volatile and more personal.

For now, Your Party’s youth wing occupies a revealing but precarious position: fragmented, uncertain and structurally adrift. The branches aren’t in a much stronger position. If students are struggling to work out where they stand in the party, branches are struggling to function at all – without even the most basic governance, because nothing exists above them to give shape or permission. Both groups are trapped in different echoes of the same void.

Their problems aren’t quirks but symptoms: expressions of the party’s wider contradictions. Your Party wants to build a movement rooted in bottom-up democracy, but has not built the structures that popular democracy requires. What is happening in the youth wing and what is happening in the branches are not separate stories but one shared consequence: a party whose ambition currently outpaces its systems. 

[Further reading: Inside the battle to lead Your Party]

The first half of the programme offers a series of observations – pigs are competitive, horses see humans as co-workers – delivered between jarring jumps and loud, grating animal noises introducing each creature. Mullen’s narrative about Orwell’s countryside experiences is intersected by readings from Animal Farm, although they rarely provide deeper meaning. Even the more interesting details, such as that Orwell lived near Manor Farm (which he fictionalised for the novel) and heard the constant hum of its operations while writing, are barely explored.

In the latter half of the documentary, however, Mullen situates Animal Farm in the heart of 1940s agriculture, evoking the clash between efficiency-driven modernisation and traditional, organic husbandry; the movement behind the Agriculture Act of 1947; and wartime anxiety over Britain’s reliance on imports. The discussion reveals just how interested Orwell was in competing political visions of the countryside, particularly in anarchist communal farms, where he spent some time recuperating from tuberculosis.

In The Farmer’s Guide…, Orwell’s Manor Farm becomes more than a stage for barnyard politics. Instead it reflects a juncture in agricultural history, where the push for utility was seen to threaten the farm as a cultural ecosystem. It offers a fresh perspective on his concerns about totalitarianism. For Orwell, the farm is one of the first casualties of the totalitarian state, resulting in the erasure of local farming and, therefore, of English rural culture.

The Farmer’s Guide to Animal Farm
BBC Radio 4

[See also: The millennial parent trap]

This trend is already visible on the ground. Warwick Labour Club disaffiliated at the beginning of August, and they have now been joined by the defecting Newcastle Labour Club (now known as Newcastle Socialist Society), following a statement emphasising a desire to “promote true socialism”. These moves indicate a growing willingness among university clubs to distance themselves from official Labour structures and assert their political priorities, with Warwick Labour Club openly backing Zarah Sultana as part of its realignment.

At a national level, the stakes for the party are high: Labour’s youth membership has already collapsed from 100,000 to 30,000 since Keir Starmer became leader. And, importantly, student voters are worth far more than their immediate share of the ballot box. Win their trust now, and you can anchor them in the party for decades. Lose them, and they may never return – just as they’ve abandoned the Tory party. This is why the question of who is winning over these young voters matters so much: alienating them is not just a short-term risk but an open invitation for rivals to shape the values and voting habits of an entire generation.

These rivals are already on manoeuvres. But while Starmer sees Reform UK as the “real opposition”, that’s not the case on campus. Among students, Reform barely registers. Students across multiple campuses say the real competition for Labour’s university base comes from the left: the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, and a growing ecosystem of emerging campaigns, including the Jeremy Corbyn-Zarah Sultana vehicle, “Your Party”. By framing the contest as Labour vs Reform, the leadership risks boxing with an opponent that barely exists in the student imagination, all while ignoring the rivals already making inroads from the left.

Polling suggests this is already playing out. YouGov data from early August ties the Greens and Labour at 26 per cent among 18- to 24-year-olds, Lib Dems at 13 per cent, while Reform sits at 21 per cent. But include support for “Your Party” (which many pollsters are not yet doing) and the picture shifts. Recent polling by Merlin Strategy found that four in ten young voters were open to voting for “Your Party”, and that Corbyn is the most popular politician for newly enfranchised 16- to 17-year-olds. Stuart Fox, a senior lecturer in politics at at the University of Exeter, highlights the same trend: nearly two thirds (61 per cent) of 18- to 30-year-olds said they would never vote Reform, with the party’s base concentrated in deprived areas rather than the urban hubs of most university campuses. These students represent the fluid “progressive swing” who are loyal, not to Labour, but to their political ideals. Speaking to the New Left Review, the “Your Party” associate James Schneider has already identified “downwardly mobile graduates” as a key party bloc.

As a result, even university Labour clubs that remain loyal to the party are publicly softening the link between themselves and the government. Committee members have decided not to push the party line at all, fearing it will alienate potential members. For some, survival depends on emphasising their distance from the government, replacing policy debates with low-stakes socials in the hope of keeping members engaged; stopping campaigning with their local party; and, in some cases, openly opposing government policy. The perception problem is made worse by how Labour’s national student structures are viewed. Many students see Labour Students – the party’s official student wing – as “careerist, cliquey and parrots for the government”. Young Labour, the party’s official youth wing for all members aged 14-26, fares little better, described by students as “cliquey” and “disapproving of dissent”. There is a sense that the official channels have no interest in hearing student voices.

It is not only Labour activists who see the problem. The National Union of Students’ vice-president of liberation and equality, Saranya Thambirajah, told me that “students in particular remain overwhelmingly progressive [and] their voices can’t be sidelined because of fear over a small minority drifting to the far right… if Labour is worried about losing young voters, and students in particular, it shouldn’t stray too far from its core values and principles… to trust Labour, they [students] need to see principles they recognise”.  As one St Andrews student described, it was once far easier to persuade people Labour was “fighting on the right side”, but that moral confidence has eroded. If the party fails to address this, it risks more than losing votes in the next election.

None of this means young activists want Labour to fail. Many – myself included – are deeply invested in the party’s success and recognise the potential of aspects of Starmer’s agenda. But good policy on paper is not enough if the party appears unwilling to speak to the moral concerns animating students now. On campuses, the Greens and Lib Dems, as well as the emerging “Your Party”, are increasingly seen as offering spaces where progressive concerns are heard rather than managed, and where support for movements like Palestinian solidarity is not treated as a political liability. Fundamentally, Labour’s student societies cannot compete if their national counterpart treats these priorities as secondary to defending against a right-wing threat that most young people have already ruled out.

Young people are not demanding perfection from Labour, but they are demanding principles they can recognise, and a party that treats their priorities as part of its own. University Labour clubs are not just recruitment hubs for young Labour voters; they are training grounds for future campaign organisers, councillors, MPs and ministers. Lose them, and you lose one of the pillars upholding the modern Labour Party.

[See also: Inside Labour students’ revolt over Gaza]

Just days after the announcement on Palestinian statehood, some of this frustration came to a head. Warwick Labour Club – long regarded as one of the most active and engaged in the country – publicly backed the resignation of local councillor Grace Lewis, who left the Labour party in favour of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party. In her resignation letter, Lewis accused Labour of being “active participants in the genocide in Gaza”, alongside explicit criticism of the party’s welfare policy as a continuation of austerity, and a comparison between the treatment of minorities by Labour and Reform. The party’s response was swift: Warwick Labour was formally disaffiliated and quickly rebranded itself as the Warwick Labour Movement. Though no other Labour clubs have followed yet, the rupture sent a warning shot.

Warwick’s departure was the most dramatic break to date between the party and its youth movement – the language used by the club’s chair, Ed Swann, struck a wider chord in a post on Instagram on August 1st. He described the increasing difficulty of justifying “continued involvement in the Labour Party” to peers. Similar sentiments have been echoed across Labour’s political spectrum: Young Labour’s international officer, Ryan Bogle, told me of the frequency with which members have contacted him asking how they are supposed to defend the party’s stance on Gaza to friends and family.

Your Party has already begun to position itself as a political refuge for young people alienated by Labour’s direction under Starmer. As the new academic year approaches, the party’s foothold amongst students may deepen further, especially if Labour continues to offer little that resonates with first-time voters. Polling still remains thin, but recent data by YouGov suggests that 42 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds would choose Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister over Keir Starmer – who was the preferred candidate for just 16 per cent.

Though anger over Gaza is widespread, the alienation playing out is not merely a question of young voters versus older voters. It’s about a disconnect between political instincts rooted in moral urgency, and a leadership perceived as coldly transactional in the pursuit of votes. Many young activists feel that issues such as Gaza and transgender rights are non-negotiable moral causes. For these voters, Labour’s position on Gaza feels not just disappointing, but indefensible.

Senior figures within the youth movement describe what they see as a profound “naivety” from the leadership about the scale and seriousness of younger members’ anger. Instead of recognising students’ frustration as part of a wider humanitarian concern, party officials continue to frame the dissent as a fringe issue: an ideological hangover from Corbynism or a potential antisemitism liability (a characterisation which Labour HQ firmly denies).

The parallel with No 10’s treatment of dissenting MPs is striking after the suspension of four Labour MPs earlier this summer, effectively stalling their parliamentary careers and signalling to backbenchers that public dissent comes at a professional cost.

Young Labour and Labour Student groups have described increased restrictions on their work and communications, speaking of the emotional toll of being “pressured by our members to act” on Gaza, while feeling abandoned by leadership-affiliated organisations they had previously supported and “felt welcome in”. The party, however, said it has no record of such measures, and instead pointed to its role in supporting Young Labour to hold its largest congress in a decade earlier this year in Wales (where polls show Labour currently losing next year’s Senedd election), and the creation of a next generation training programme.

Behind the scenes, rumours have circulated that students have been warned against speaking out on Gaza, with the threat of reputational damage or future career jeopardy. Youth committee members describe being strongly cautioned by HQ staff that speaking out on this issue could damage their reputation and credibility. These warnings were even given to senior, well-established youth figures who have spent a long time working in an unpaid capacity for the party. In one case, a young member’s non-Labour employer was contacted by a senior backbench MP, who warned the employer to be “wary” of the student, and to “not trust them” after they were unable to attend an organised study trip to Israel. Others have allegedly been offered secure jobs after graduation if they toe the party line (Labour strongly refutes this claim).

Senior figures within the youth movement have also indicated a fear of speaking out – even among fellow moderates – for fear of being labelled a Corbynite. They feel that for HQ, constructive criticism is no longer productive but a real and dangerous threat, whether coming from senior MPs, party grandees or a simple student. This criticism stretches far beyond the party’s internal left-right divide. What unites those voicing concern – whether from the parliamentary benches or from student halls – is a shared sense that internal dissent is being met with defensiveness and discipline, rather than reflection and reform.

A growing number of politically engaged students are no longer just frustrated – they’re actively stepping back, disengaging or seeking out alternatives. Lewis Warner, national vice chair of Labour Students, said “good, hard-working activists are switching off and disengaging, and it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to persuade them to come back”. Warner linked this directly to the party’s handling of the crisis in Gaza, describing how Labour has “completely underestimated” how this has “affected young members across the party”. For Labour Gaza, is becoming not just a question of party management, but of its identity and survival.

The risks aren’t just to campaigns. Labour has long been reliant on its young members as a key talent pipeline. Young people continue to dominate amongst staffers in party HQ and in parliament, and lots of current MPs and cabinet members began their political journey in university Labour societies, from Keir Starmer at Leeds to Bridget Phillipson, Ed Miliband and Rachel Reeves at Oxford. The party’s longevity depends on talented young people seeing Labour as a place where their voice matters. Right now, increasing numbers no longer do.

Ahead of next year’s local elections Labour cannot afford to ignore this rupture. The crisis in Gaza may have been the trigger, but the disillusionment it has uncovered runs much deeper. Unless the party finds a way to listen, respond and rebuild trust, it risks losing not just the strength of its youth movement, but a generation of voters that once believed that by backing Labour, they could change the world.

[See also: Keir Starmer would be a much happier politician in Japan]