A new organisation calling itself Youth Demand has hit the headlines in recent weeks after spray painting the Labour party headquarters and the Ministry of Defence, as well as staging a protest outside Keir Starmer’s home.
Rows of children’s shoes were laid at the Labour leader’s front door in Kentish Town, north London, at the beginning of the week. A banner surrounded by red handprints was hung outside the house he shares with his wife and children, with the words: “Starmer stop the killing.”
Rishi Sunak has said he will not tolerate protests at the private homes of politicians. Three people in their 20s have denied public order offences in relation to the demonstration. The trio are members of Youth Demand – but what does their organisation want?
What is Youth Demand?
On 27 January, a meeting was held at the Old Print Works in Birmingham by some of those involved in direct action group Just Stop Oil and it was decided that more needed to be done across a range of issues, including but not limited to the climate crisis.
Four sub-groups set up an umbrella coordinating group, entitled simply Umbrella. These four sub-groups are Just Stop Oil, which has made high-profile attempts to bring an end to the continued exploitation of fossil fuels through the closure of motorways and other direct actions; Assemble, which will seek to organise local groups of people to discuss how to fix the “broken system”; Robin Hood, the purposes of which are yet to be determined but which will engage in “civil resistance” in relation to socioeconomic challenges, possibly relating to food poverty or rents; and Youth Demand.
A spokesperson for Youth Demand, Chiara Sarti, 24, a PhD student at King’s College, Cambridge, who moved from Rome more than seven years ago, said its immediate demand was “an end to all new licences and consents for exploration of fossil fuels in the North Sea”.
She said: “We are calling on both the Conservatives and Labour to commit to this –particularly Labour because so far they have accepted that we’re going to be ending new oil and gas but they’re not committed to revoking those licences that have been granted by the authorities.”
She added: “Our second demand is to impose a two-way arms embargo on the state of Israel, so that means we stop selling them weapons and we stop buying their weapons. We sever all the links between the UK and the Israeli war machine.”
How does it intend to achieve its goals?
The group claims to have between 5,000 and 10,000 people on a mailing list, and it is said to be represented at 17 universities. More protests, similar to those seen in recent days, can be expected, but the way forward will be forged at a meeting on Thursday evening at the Off the Cuff bar in Brixton, south London.
“Obviously there will be a party there afterwards,” Sarti said. “We’ve seen just the massive influence, that massive amount of power, that we can exercise when we put our bodies on the gears of the machine, when we step in to subvert systems, dominating the political narrative. From zero to being in the media conversations. We are just getting started. We are going to be mobilising when we go back to our cities.”
Why have two out of the three demonstrations been directed at Labour when the UK has a Conservative government?
Sarti said the group believed the current government had no legitimacy and was on the way out.
“The job that the Labour party has is to be the opposition – they have a responsibility to set the political agenda but they don’t seem interested in doing that,” she said. “They are the failed opposition, they are the failed government in waiting. We have to put up resistance because we are not going to put up with this.”
Does Youth Demand expect to be successful?
The group believes a major change in British politics will come. Sarti said: “The way we see it is that revolutions are basically coming down the road, whether we like it or not, because the current political system is broken beyond repair.
“The question now is not whether Labour or the Tories are going to be the next government. The question is: are we going to get a fascist type of revolution or are we going to get something better, get a democratic revolution based on nonviolence? We believe we’ve seen a glimmer of what’s coming down the road.”
