DID a network of young trade unionists help secure Jeremy Corbyn’s victory? It’s a big claim, I know, and clearly there are many influences and actors that helped Corbyn win the Labour leadership, but let’s pay tribute to young trade unionism for a moment.

Over the last few years there has been a concerted effort within trade unions to initiate or rejuvenate young people’s structures.

These new or strengthened spaces have provided opportunities for new thinkers to flourish, to network together and build power and influence the labour movement as whole.

There used to be only two organisations for young people who wanted to take part and influence the Labour Party outside of its own local structures — Labour Students and Young Labour.

Young Labour had its problems. When Owen Jones and I were actually young we felt, as did many, that Young Labour was so weak there was no point in trying to be involved nor influence it, because it had no policy-making mechanisms.

With Unison activist Marsha Jane Thompson, Jones founded the Socialist Youth Network as an alternative — but it was clunky and mainly built to support John McDonnell’s challenge to win the Labour leadership in the Blair-Brown handover period.

But the National Organisation of Labour Students (NOLS) was incredibly powerful, with its network of university Labour clubs and three dedicated staff members.

The organisation itself was incredibly New Labour, with a culture that used to foster the idea that if you weren’t a Blairite, you were a Trot.

For young people coming into the labour movement via this route, your ideas would be shaped by the existing NOLS consensus — that we should pay for education, that free markets would sort problems out and that capitalism was all right as long as the Labour Party could tinker with it. Things, comrades, can only get marginally better.

Meanwhile, the trade union movement had pretty damn empty young members’ structures, if it had them at all, with those that were functioning trying to save the trade union movement from decline, having committee meeting after committee meeting or going to Cuba.

But a whole new agenda, however grossly misunderstood and applied, called “organising” was taking hold of unions.

Unions were beginning to open up to new ways of working and what they could use their resources to achieve.

In 2006, the TUC signed a protocol agreement with the National Union of Students which triggered a restart to the TUC’s own Young Workers’ Forum and hired a student organiser for its Northern region, who went on to organise young people for Unite in London and Eastern region.

At the same time Amicus, one of Unite’s predecessor unions, hired a national youth and student organiser.

A year later the TUC recruited a North West student organiser. The projects are very close to Labour Students and, in the case of Amicus, were almost steered by them, but they started opening up new spaces on campuses and in unions for young people seeking to change the world and challenge the Blarite consensus and the Labour Party.

Zip forward and Unite is founded with brand new young members’ structures. Its London and Eastern contingent catapulted forward with a new cadre of activists, including Gavin Sibthorpe, Shelly Asquith (now president of Students’ Union University of the Arts London), Lucille Harvey and many brilliant others.

These activists rejected the Blairite consensus and had a brilliant time building a new network of young trade unionists. At the same time Sertuc’s young workers’ network offers a space to young activists like Hazel Nolan (now a GMB organiser), Keir Greenaway (now running the GMB pensions department) and others with no or limited young members’ structures in their own unions.

Together they start to cook up new ways of building young trade union spaces across the movement. From Save HMV Staff to the founding of TUC Young Workers’ Month?—?these new young trade unionists begin to expand young trade unionism across Britain.

Many of these activists are key to the democratisation of Young Labour, which can now debate motions with GMB activist Sam Tarry as chair (now TSSA political director) and take positions on key issues including Ed Miliband’s reforming the trade union link in the Labour Party (reforms that Young Labour rejected?—?a lot later down the line).

A new organisation is formed by many of these activists: the Labour Young Trade Unionist Network and from creating spaces that question Blairite consensus to a common systems-change agenda, we now have a movement of young people properly networked by unions to open thought in the Labour Party with fringe events at Labour Party conference.

All these networks, their achievement and passion for systemic change creates the right environment for a left candidate to get nominated by unions and MPs.?Things have become more plural.

The unions themselves, totally (bar a few small unions) against John McDonnell’s candidacy in 2008, are now queuing up behind Corbyn. Even Corbyn’s campaign team has many of these young trade unionists in key positions. The network activated for a Corbyn leadership victory with many of those packed-out meetings organised by young trade unionists attracting thousands of young people.

These people are not a clique — nor are they a covert operation. They are simply good leaders who seek to make more leaders who no longer tolerate being told that their politics is stupid, outdated or the result of a mental health issue.

Admirably, unions were able to offer young people the time and development needed for them to develop their skills; analysing world problems, policy-making skills, influencing decision-making and winning consensus for a real alternative.
This might not be hardcore industrial organising but it is a truly transformational type of organising. It’s transformed the labour movement, it’s transformed the unions themselves and most importantly, it’s transformed young people’s participation in the labour movement.

So with all this transformation happening and a clear contribution to Corbyn’s win, will trade unions further invest in young trade unionism to win the general election in 2020?

• David Braniff-Herbert sits on the Sertuc young members’ network and TUC LGBT committees. He founded Young Workers’ Month and is currently a senior organiser at National Union of Teachers.