Mal Fletcher comments on the resurgence in popularity of Marxist thought on Britain's university campuses.

Recent studies have shown that a much reported youth swing toward Labour in last year's general election was a myth. Yet there is good reason to believe that, on the face of it, the Conservative government faces more of a struggle to engage the young than their Opposition. The Conservatives actually saw an increase in their over-60s vote in the last election.

For many young adults, the battle is no longer between the centre-right Tories and a centre-left Labour, both of whom offer slightly different forms of capitalism.

The accession of the hard-left ideologue Mr Corbyn, combined with Tory uncertainty in the face of Brexit, has changed the battle to one between socialism and capitalism.

If recent research is to believed, university campuses offer clear evidence of this.

Yet a narrative painting capitalism as the great Satan, the source of all human woes, and radical socialism as its only antidote, must be challenged and vigorously so. All economies are planned, by someone or other.

At least under capitalism - married to liberal democracy - markets have power to change things, markets which are driven in part by the consumer tastes and behaviours of individuals.

For all their utopian rhetoric, marxist governments time and again morph quickly into introverted, self-serving cultures sustaining the interests of their senior cadres.

Following the path to Marxism will only ever lead an at times rightly frustrated and disappointed generation, a cohort of passionate innovators and reformers into disappointment, disillusionment and in some cases despair. Just as it did many students in the late 1950s and 60s.

Students, that is, who lived in capitalist democracies which, for all their failures, still allowed people to express their views and, for the most part, to live according to their consciences.