Youth Equality Coalition: fuck yer flags, fund our future

The UK left is fucking tired. We are slow, bureaucratic, and too often are waiting for an invitation to the table that will never come. Yet whilst a lot of the older guard is fussing over procedure and policy, a brand new force has erupted onto the scene. And they’re so shockingly effective, it should terrify every career politician and columnist: The Youth Equality Coalition (YEC).

The YEC has been born from a fierce necessity. The organisations founder who we shall call ‘K,’  quickly realised that the platforms that supposedly existed for young activists were dead ends. Time and time again they found they were silenced, rather than having their young voice amplified. As K states:

The platforms that existed actually infringed on young people’s ability, they actively pushed them to the side.

This movement they have created from this desperation to be heard is a political furnace. It is a fierce response to a sense of being ignored not only by the system, but also by their supposed allies. Purely out of spite, in less than twelve months, this little alliance of young socialist voices has exploded onto the scene.  They’ve has gone from a tiny founding group in the North East of England to a global movement boasting nearly 3,000 members. In the course of only three weeks, they have spread to eight other countries.

And you cannot tell me we can’t learn something from these firecrackers.

Youth Equality Coalition: the ageism that sparked a revolution

For fucking decades our young activists have been stuck in a rut, neglected by the state and in many cases, silenced by a movement that claims to speak for them. These youngsters have watched their futures shredded to fund tax cuts for the rich, only to be ignored by older, middle aged, and middle class champagne socialists.

K recalls the moment he finally realised it was time to take matters into his own hands:

I understood very quickly that there were tens of thousands of students who wanted a place in activism but when entering those spaces they were silenced, pushed to the side and ignored.

The attitude of the established Left towards them is disgusting, dismissive and patronising. K’s response was not to fight these gatekeepers anymore, but to ignore them entirely. YEC’s core purpose is to fight that marginalisation, making a movement that wouldn’t just provide a space from young people, but would be led by them.

Their message is simple: They are sick of waiting.

They will no longer be told that the path to change is ruinously slow, that politics has to be polite. They know that to get real change you have to seize the moment and confront power head on. For them, this isn’t about lengthy policy papers or boring hierarchy. It is about immediate, high-impact direct action that leaves the establishment shitting themselves.

Rewriting the militant playbook

The Youth Equality Coalition doesn’t just sit in a pub and discuss their values over a pint. They show them to the world with targeted and confronting actions. They are on the streets, organising their own campaigns and sweeping through the nation’s student population. The YEC is doing something the left has struggled to do for years: unite the youth under one banner to create actual fucking change.

Take their ‘Feck Yer Flags’ campaign. I’m in so many online leftist groups and in so many all I can see is apathy. I can see established activists whining on about the infestation of Union Jacks, psychoanalysing the people who put them up, debating the cost of taking them down. But I am yet to see anyone willing to take them down, something the YEC is taking the lead on. These infectious little scamps are getting together at the drop of a dime and they’re ripping these racist flags down at a stunning rate. Even better still? They’re cutting them up and recycling them into activist patches. This is the ultimate middle finger to colonialism and nationalism, and these kids are leading the charge.

You won’t just find the YEC ripping down flags. They’re on the forefront of the resistance against the UK’s complicity in war crimes. Just this morning I woke up to one of their Instagram videos taken in the early hours. These young people were masked up and outside of the Rafael factory in Newcastle at 6am, screaming against the manufacture of Israeli weapons. They’re absolutely fearless in these videos, blockading roads, turning away employees and screaming through megaphones at the police. It’s fucking stunning.

The anatomy of a young revolution

The success of the YEC’s structure is as radical as its politics. It began with an idea of providing young people with a platform:

where our speeches are listened to, our actions are noticed and our impact to be accelerated.

The key to this wild growth – nearly 3,000 members in the UK and branches in eight countries – as freedom and autonomy. This budding movement provides new groups with initial building blocks and strategic guidance, but actively encourages them to self-organise. These young people are encouraging each other to resist and to fight for change on their own terms. This decentralised model allows them to move fast, react quickly and all without the bullshit bureaucratic processes slowing them down.

Yet this doesn’t mean they ignore each other. They are constantly promoting each branch, elevating all the protests they organise and they are in constant communication.

That’s how it should be done.

Changing the social media game

This furnace that the YEC has lit under the nation’s youth is fuelled by social media. They have got it down to a fine fucking art.

The older left has struggled for years to get it’s principals heard by anyone beyond the academic bubble, but not the YEC. Striking graphics and videos of their activism that are punchy and to the point dominate my social media algorithm. They have cut out the bullshit of bureaucracy, cut out mainstream media entirely and communicate directly and colourfully.

This digital tsunami isn’t trivial, it’s the key to the YEC’s success. It’s not just a political group, it’s a cultural force of nature that is teaching an entire generation of activists how to use technology to build a unified, global movement.

Yes, the YEC are young but their passion and their drive is fucking compelling. They’ve built websites, give out activism guides, they write news articles and make memes. And it’s fucking working and dominating the algorithm.

We’ve watched the far-right indoctrinate kids on TikTok for years. Every week there’s another viral video of a wild-eyed Tommy Robinson spewing racist bollocks, or Andrew Tate belittling women. Kids have been flocking to it, so why the fuck aren’t the left using social media too?

Gone are the days of long-winded essays debating the ins and outs of fuck all. It’s time to reach out in a new way, surely?

The necessity of young defiance

The Youth Equality coalition isn’t a polite entry to the political spectrum, it’s a disruption. They’ve gained momentum so quickly, it proves these kids are anything but apathetic.

Like it or lump it, but we need to embrace these younger people to effect real change. We need their speed, passion, defiance and voices now more than ever.

Their founder ‘K’ said it best:

Our message is that we won’t be silenced. We will be heard, we have no intention to ‘prove’ our worth, but to let the proof be seen in our activities from Paris to Newcastle, California to Washington, Berlin to Bangladesh. We will not be quiet.

Time to embrace these youthful activists, listen to what they have to say and incorporate their ideas because without them, we lose the fight again.

Featured image via Youth Equality Coalition