Who’s Listening To Our Youth?

By Mike Field and Lesley Fraser

We've all heard the saying 'children should be seen and not heard', but the UK Youth Parliament says different. Founded in 1996, the organisation was officially launched at the House of Commons in July 1999, and aims to give young people "a chance to express their views and concerns at the highest levels".

The parliament has four hundred elected members, representing the hundreds of thousands of young people across England aged between eleven and eighteen. The members are said to be independent of political parties and they have the ear of the government, despite having no official powers.

William Moss from Gloucestershire typifies the attitude of the young parliamentarians: "I would like a real not tokenistic voice. I hope the youth parliament makes up for the lack of a vote by having an input in issues that affect me". Melanie, MYP for Walsall describes how "some people here are complaining, saying its being run by adults, but I disagree totally. If there hadn't been an agenda there wouldn't have been a UKYP. It's up to us to set the next agenda and take responsibility for what we've been elected to do." Advocates of the UKYP argue it is an exciting initiative that will bring the views of young people closer to the government and provide a powerful influence that will modernise democracy itself.

Changes on the local level, some argue, echo those views. At the Door on Hanover Street, Liverpool's Youth Engagement Team has high hopes for 2004 as they aim to encourage the participation of young people in democratising our city. We talked with Paul Murphy, who has worked with Liverpool's evolving young generation throughout the ups and downs of the 1980s and 1990s. He is now working alongside Paddy Logan and a team of young workers at the Door and told us that their work is focusing on the development of the Liverpool Youth Council, with all areas of the city having forums and representatives. In October of last year they held a 'Question Time' at the Town Hall exploring the state of the city. Paul was keen to emphasize how young people getting involved is more important as a measure of success than whether the politicians are choosing to listen. He also felt that the UKYP was a good idea but too London-based.

Here in Liverpool a healthy scepticism abounds. Steve Waterhouse is a staff member at Interchill - Speke and Garston's internet drop-in centre for young people - and he commented, "even our own parliament is not paid much attention". The parliament, he says, is a "top down organisation…the problem is that the young people the Youth Parliament are trying to target are not even on the board of their own youth organisations". He added that "the Interchill line is that until young people are involved, developing and working in their own communities and until you have given young people a say in the part of the community that they have control over…they shouldn't be going to parliament". Interchill was formed four years ago by a group of young people who organised themselves to set up the centre. Since then, the group has become a beacon of good practice within the youth service, both here and abroad. In contrast, the language and format used in the Youth Parliament's manifesto - Agenda for Action - is sleep-inducing, reading like any other governmental document. The Interchill line might be a good one to follow then, since young people experienced in organising themselves in their own communities are likely to be more effective when they get to parliament.

Likewise, George and Gosia McCain of the Yellow House strongly uphold young people's ability to organise themselves. With decades of experience working directly with both young people and the institutions that claim to help them, George told us that "if I was eighteen and was asked about the Youth Parliament I'd laugh". He sees it as "another middle class idea to suck ideas off us and not give us any credit for it, to contain us, and to underline the democratic system that is already failing the vast majority of working class people". George denied he was cynical, as "cynical means miserable, can't be bothered etc…I work with young people seven days a week".

The need for a local impact and sustained publicity for the UKYP is something everyone alluded to. Steve Waterhouse observed that "three young people got elected in October for Merseyside but there is no way of letting the whole of Merseyside youth know they are actually represented". George McCane agreed: "The idea is good, for young people to see how democracy works or fails, but the powers will say they are acting on behalf of the young and they are not they are acting on behalf of a selective young". He continued, "at Yellow House, young people would not go near a youth centre in a thousand years and many don't go to school and have bitter and sad experiences of youth organisations, so who represents them? Nobody".

The UKYP could be a national forum for young people to truly represent the interests of their electorate and democratise this country. If young people have no vote, nowhere to meet, debate and socialise and if they are not listened to respectfully, then a confident voice has been silenced and the resultant disorder is evident for all to see. At Nerve we want to be a medium for young people and those who work with them, to inspire a better democracy than we've inherited. The values and ideas of Liverpool's next generation are absolutely vital to Liverpool's future.