Open Forum

WITH the political scene hotting up in Scotland for our new Parliament, we have to face the reality that for too long we have been lulled into being a pretty apathetic, non-politically active crowd of bar-room politicians; good at sorting out the world over a few drinks, only to forget it all in the peaceful slumber of the night.

Nearly two decades of Thatcherism have lulled us into a state of political naivete and inaction that is not a good example to pass on to our children.

Most young people have very little belief in the democratic process. The Thatcher years brought with it the poll tax, which disenfranchised thousands of young people who were caught in a situation where if they signed up to vote, they would have to pay that totally unfair tax. So we have lost a generation of young voters. None of the political parties saw that as a vote winner at the General Election, but will they now? Are any of the political parties prepared to stick their neck out to right that wrong for the youth of Scotland?

Many youth workers have worked long and hard to create opportunities for young people to be more involved in the running of their own services. Through this process the young become more empowered and start to have some belief in the democratic decision-making.

However, all is not lost, because we now have 32 new councils, and I have been surprised and delighted to discover that the majority of them have realised that if they are to move from the point of seeing young people as a problem, to one of seeing them as part of the solution, then we may be able to turn things around. There is a new atmosphere of collaboration between officers and members to consult with young people to solve things together. Youth participation is back on the agenda, after years of inaction.

I would like to make a few suggestions to those in power in our new councils which might help us to get it right this time round.

The first is that we have to start to take them more seriously. We need to accept that young people have not been trained to participate in our democratic system so we have a lot of work to do in educating them for that role.

We also need to understand that for young people to be even a little bit more empowered, adults must give up some of their power.

Youth participation initiatives like youth councils that recruit those in the 12-25 age range are not effective. This is an age span that includes children, adolescents, young adults, and fully-grown adults - too diverse a group with little in common. We should concentrate on the 16-plus age group, while schools and other organisations develop ways of involving their pupils in understanding how democracy works. We will reap the benefit 10 years from now.

There is good evidence to suggest that where new councils have a well thought-out strategy which challenges every department of the council to work together with young people, to deliver services, their scarce resources can be maximised.

There are examples of good practice. I believe that the best practice can be found in our universities, where for decades students as young as 16 have been empowered through the activities of their representative councils and their students' unions. These institutions not only offer a voice for young people, they also give them the opportunity to run their own services, the students unions. In some cases these are multi-million pound youth businesses, with the capacity to earn their own income, to top up the state funding they get through the block grant system.

SO Why do we happily empower the student population but deny the non-student youth population the same opportunity? This is the very group that so concerns us because of their anti-social behaviour. If we invest more money in this group then we would start to see some results. We will happily pay #27,000 a year to keep children and young people in care or in penal institutions when two or three times that amount of money could be better spent in providing mini student-type union facilities, to engage young people in healthier activities, especially in the areas that have the least youth provision.

It is clearly going to take a long time for the voice of children and young people to be adequately heard in the corridors of power, but while that is being nurtured I would suggest that the new Scottish Parliament should seriously consider having shadow youth parliaments and its own Minister for children and young people, as in the case in many of our European partners.

I have tried to lay out in this article just a few of the positive things that could be done to re-franchise our young.

I challenge the new breed of young politicians to engage with the youth of

our land to revitalise the political life

of Scotland.

n Max Cruickshank is a youth consultant and trainer.