Today’s front-page story: 19 year-old hates job, rejects capitalism! That was indeed the big feature on the front of Monday’s New York Times: “Growing Up in U.K. and Giving Up on Capitalism.”
It’s part of the paper’s left-wing “Britain’s Big Squeeze” series against so-called austerity measures in England. The online deck of headlines signals the paper making a purposeful shove to the left: “‘Austerity, That’s What I Know’: The Making of a U.K. Millennial Socialist -- Alex McIntyre, 19, was brought up in a Britain being reshaped by government cuts. He gave up on capitalism after a year in college.”
Sounds like every liberal arts major, to be honest.
International correspondent Ellen Barry reported from the seaside town of Brighton and talked to McIntyre, who “was raised on budget cuts. “Austerity” is all he knows.
Now 19 and old enough to vote, Mr. McIntyre is making up for lost time. Over the last six months, he was drawn into the center of the Momentum movement, an ideological marketplace buzzing with rebranded socialism and trade unionism. His parents may have gotten their news from The Sun and The Daily Mail, but he listens to reports on the “crisis of capitalism” from Novara Media, a left-wing independent media group. Over Christmas he started reading Marx.
Marx gets several flattering name-checks throughout the piece, as does Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. Perhaps a mention of the anti-Semitic controversies that mar the reputations of both men could have gotten a mention, given the prevalence of that particular poison in the Socialist-Communist circles?
Mr. McIntyre is the first in his family to attend college, part of a vast cohort of young Britons that was meant to embody upward social mobility. It is a paradox that so many in this bulge, like their counterparts in the United States, are giving up on free-market capitalism, convinced it cannot provide their families with a decent life.
In the Times’ slanted anti-Brexit view, the passionate young saw their dreams of...a tight European Union?....crushed by old fogies who were actually eligible to vote.
The young also saw their views on exiting the European Union -- three-quarters of them voted to Remain -- bulldozed by Leavers their grandparents’ age. Mr. McIntyre is still angry that he was too young, by a year, to vote in that 2016 referendum. He is pale and lanky, discreetly tattooed, caustically funny and so well-mannered that he would rather miss his train than cut into a line. (“Being British can be limiting,” he observed.)
One can sympathize with McIntyre’s job plight (the night shift as a kitchen assistant at a U.K. pub chain) while acknowledging his challenges are far from unique. Extra points for a gratuitous Walmart reference, a cheap shot against American capitalism.
The panic eased when he found a job as Wetherspoons is Britain’s ubiquitous low-cost restaurant chain, like Applebee’s, but with pints of ale. Its founder, a bluff self-made millionaire named Tim Martin, is an American-style celebrity entrepreneur who counts Walmart’s Sam Walton among his heroes.
But he seethed over the pay and working conditions. Five days a week he worked midnight-to-8 a.m. shifts, which left him shaky and ill. Was this adult life, this relentless precariousness? His co-workers did not offer much comfort: A lot of them already had university degrees.
40 hours a week on the night shift? Again, hardly slave labor.
He had passed into the world of the young left that has coalesced in Brighton, a bohemian university town. It is a world of anticapitalist workshops, anarchist retreats, “red gyms” and rent strikes, and it is embodied by Mr. Corbyn, 69, a grandfatherly socialist who was dismissed as an anachronism during the centrist era of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
Barry couldn’t contain her excitement, rejoicing in an actual confessed Communist.
One of them, the 26-year-old Ash Sarkar, thrilled left-wing Twitter in a televised debate this summer by eye-rolling Piers Morgan, one of Britain’s most famous journalists, who had mistaken her for a garden-variety Labour activist. “I’m a communist, you idiot!” she told him, throwing him a withering look reserved for the young who disdain the old. “I’m literally a communist!” (Novara now charges £15 for T-shirts with this quote.)
The Communists don’t just give the T-shirts away? But seriously, how bizarre is Barry’s enthusiasm for a proud supporter of a murderous ideology? Barry promotes their plank of “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” the notion of a “post-work society” in which labor is largely automated and workers live off a “massively increased minimum wage.”
A related article by Benjamin Mueller, “What Is Austerity? A Guide to the U.K.’s Budget Squeeze” underlined the intent of the article series: To inspire a left-wing youth movement in England:
The New York Times has been reporting for the last year on how nearly a decade of government austerity has refashioned British society, slashing away at budgets for policing, housing and welfare.
