Firstly, it’s important that we look at the political range of the speakers who visited Cambridge this week, from just one half of the spectrum, in the context of the turbulent landscape of the left since the General Election.

May’s shock result, in which the Conservatives achieved a majority and Cambridge kicked out the popular incumbent MP Julian Huppert, marked a sea-change in British politics. David Cameron secured a win which even most of his top supporters had not been expecting, winning the first Conservative majority in 23 years and being the first sitting Prime Minister to increase their vote share since 1900. Meanwhile, Cambridge elected its first Labour MP in a decade. These events mark just how dramatically politics is changing.

Locally, and elsewhere, left wing students punished the Liberal Democrats, instead putting their trust in the hands of Labour or the Greens. Nationally, however, Labour frequently went backwards against the Tories, and were nearly wiped out by the SNP north of the border.

If some commentators had viewed this as evidence of a new period of polarisation and division, virtually none anticipated the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the unassuming veteran left winger who had run for leadership simply to “broaden the debate”.

In Europe, increasing polarisation towards the eurosceptic left and right seems to continue unabated, with the Polish far right winning a majority, and with Syriza and the EU having spent the summer at loggerheads. In both cases, the centre-left parties that used to dominate have vanished.

It is in this context of right wing consolidation and left wing division that Cambridge hosted four figures from across generations in the British and European left: ex-Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt MP, representing the flailing Labour right that dominated British politics in the nineties and noughties; the shrewd and divisive campaigner George Galloway, a vocal opponent of interventionist foreign policy; the World War II veteran and staunch “Old Labour” man Harry Leslie Smith, whose personal story from before the welfare state left the Labour Conference in tears; and the Greek Marxist and academic Yanis Varoufakis, who found himself on the front line of a war against the European economic consensus.

The left still appears to be overwhelmingly male-dominated, but beyond this, the extent to which these divisions, generations, and backgrounds are overshadowed by a common place and purpose is striking.

They may have presented relatively different levels of comfort and confidence in the face of the future, but talking here in Cambridge they were all aware of their movement’s place in history and the heavy burden they carry as bearers of its legacy.

Tristram Hunt, perhaps the most uneasy of the quartet, was keen to drive home upon his sympathetic audience just how much was at stake in politics, inviting the Labour Club to consider their party’s successes and imagine the prospect of a future without it. It was not a eulogy but an appeal to history and to the future, one that could only be given by a man very aware of both its constants and capacity to deliver sea-changes.

Harry Leslie Smith, the self described “man of history”, instead exuded a kind of hope that only someone who has spent a lifetime waiting for it could lay claim to. Despite the event in which he took part seeing Labour supporters fiercely debate the virtues and even existence of his beloved “Old Labour”, Harry carried the same optimism as the young left, but paired it with an appreciation that that sense of hope may not last, as forces within Labour begin to organise against them.

The insecurity of their two positions stood in marked contrast to George Galloway’s ebullient address to the Union, which perhaps surprisingly passed without controversy. Despite also celebrating Corbyn’s win, he is a man defined by his grievances, about the party he loved and against those who kicked him out of it. Due to stand against Labour’s London Mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan, and still having not been readmitted despite his demands, Galloway remains a figure apart from the mainstream, and yet oddly symbolic of it, his previous victories being testament and perhaps an early signal of the shifting political landscape.

If these three figures represent the deep-seated divisions and bubbling grievances on the British left, then Yanis Varoufakis represents the political repercussions when these battles are fought both domestically and on the wider world stage. Though in Britain, this is being fought on firmly Labour ground, in Greece it was fought between parties, with Syriza supplanting all others in response to the Greek economic crisis, apparently leaving the centre-left PASOK for dead.

Ultimately failing to see his economic vision fully realised in Greece after clashing with the EU, Varoufakis perhaps completed the cycle that the other three find themselves caught up in, resigning at the moment that his party split in two in reaction to the bailout deal.

It is as yet unclear whether Syriza will become the new PASOK, or whether a Corbyn-led Labour Party can defy history and unseat the Conservatives on a strongly leftist platform, or rather wilt and be replaced by a renewed Labour right. But whatever happens, it is very firmly with history and legacy in mind that today’s politics is being fought.

But however grandiose this context makes contemporary left-wing politics seem, it would be wrong to allow this to mask everyday realities, and the people for whom these arguments are held. However dramatic politics seems, it is remarkably consistent.

Few get involved in politics with malice in mind, and divisions seem to be often stronger between those who actually aspire towards the same goals. At its most basic level, all politics is about is people, their principles, their ambitions, their disagreements, and their history.

Cambridge has been a brief host to the turbulent and seemingly distant world of modern politics, but it is likely that it will be those of us at Cambridge now who will be among the leaders of tomorrow. It will be our generation, not those of Hunt’s, Varoufakis’s, Leslie Smith’s, or Galloway’s, who will resolve today’s challenges and carry on a cause... or be the ones left to pick up the pieces.