photo Lucy Nuttall

photo Lucy Nuttall   (Click to enlarge: opens in new window)

Alistair Tice, Yorkshire Socialist Party

They’d been queueing at the gates from 4pm, two hours early. They just kept coming. Wave after wave. So many young people, some still in school clothes.

Families with children. Nurses in uniform straight off shift. It was like a cross between a rock festival and a football match. Home-made placards and flags waving high.

5,000 came to hear Jeremy Corbyn speak in Hull on 22 May. This was the day that Theresa May made her “not a u-turn” on the ‘dementia tax’ and Corbyn announced he would scrap tuition fees from this September.

Not for 30 years has the dividing line been so clear in a general election, the real difference that a Corbyn-led government could make to ordinary people’s lives. With the polls narrowing, there was real hope in the air that Corbyn could actually win.

Socialist Party members were overjoyed and overwhelmed at the numbers. We sold 194 copies of the Socialist, showing the real thirst for socialist ideas that Corbyn’s campaign has inspired.