Are students as radical as we think?

It took us a while to find our table – partly because we were looking in the wrong place. After stumbling through a rabbit warren of corridors and rooms, we finally found our table for the Edinburgh University Political Union’s annual dinner. The crowd in the room that night offered a snapshot of Gen Z’s political future.

My table included an ambassador’s son, a working-class Yorkshire lass, a daughter of two civil servants and a boy raised in a single parent household. They all had one thing in common: an anger at the mess they’ve been left to clear up; an anger at those 3 “Bs” that have dominated the political landscape – Boris, Brexit and “that bloody pandemic”.

I’ve come of age in a world where the institutions of public life resemble not so much a respectable, stable establishment, but more a raging brothel fire. My earliest political memories are of the 2010 election, which marked the beginning of the Conservative Party’s grip on Westminster. My parents talk about Thatcher’s tenure and how it stirred radical anger among their generation. Yet for mine, I fear we’ve reached the point at which anger has turned to disillusionment, and disillusionment to apathy. Why would anyone be a radical in a system that will never truly change? Besides, we have enough going on just making it through this cost-of-living crisis.

Back at my table, it feels as if I’m surrounded by the last people standing. As we drink and eat, we try to put the world to rights – with various degrees of naïve, youthful success.

To my left sits a feisty Yorkshire socialist. She wears a velvet suit, and shakes off gender stereotypes with every bounce of her curls. She’s veggie, woke and everything that Boris Johnson and his pals fear. In the past few months she’s marched against the university’s sexual assault procedures and visited the Scottish Parliament to discuss how to help students in the cost-of-living crisis. Her determination that things can – must – change is refreshing. For her, this change can’t be brought about by either main party: Labour has forgotten its working-class roots, the Tories are… well Tory.

The restless activist sits next to a smooth-talking home-counties boy who preaches about Labour’s failings and Tory corruption. He’s the sort of charismatic, “nice-smile guy” who seems too good to be true. So it’s only fitting that he’s the most enthusiastic of my dinner companions about going into politics – perhaps for that reason alone, he shouldn’t.

Sometime during the evening I suggest that people shouldn’t study politics without economics. I’m met with guffaws, as well as assurances that a first-year module is sufficient. As an economics student myself, I clutched my pearls. Ours is a generation of ideology over practicality. But when you’ve got to rebuild a house after a fire, maybe vision is where you begin.

As the night went on, I was introduced to another character who was more pragmatic in his political views than our fellow dinner companions. An economics student, he was also the son of Silicon Valley royalty. He coyly told us his plans for a startup.

As he joked of bankrolling my friend who dreamed of elected office, I realised the frustrating irony – that despite our puffed-up chests we perhaps weren’t as anti-establishment as we thought we were.