Back in November the Battle of Ideas Festival staged a lively debate on the question ‘Will youth engagement save democracy?‘. The panel comprised LibDem MP Lynne Featherstone, politics teacher Kevin Rooney, and Citizenship Foundation CEO Tony Breslin. This video contains the opening remarks from the three of them.
Lynne Featherstone claims that voters are lazy and the idea of having to walk to a polling booth is antiquated. (Personally I don’t think the system should be changed simply to pander to people’s apathy.)
Kevin Rooney dismisses the issue of youth dis-engagement out of hand, citing Tiananmen Square and Irish political history as examples of how youth are deeply engaged. Quite extreme examples I think: such emotive subjects are, I would suggest, always likely to impassion large numbers of people. He also suggests that schools have no part to play in helping young people understand politics. But surely aspects of civic society are not mutually exclusive? How can we expect people to suddenly understand and engage in their society when those responsible for their formative education tried to distance them from it?
Tony Breslin says that although youth engagement won’t save democracy, without it “the future of democracy is - by definition - doomed”. He goes on to argue that schools have a duty to support the civic education of young people. Of course I broadly agree with that, or I wouldn’t be working here.
Obviously these are only some of their remarks, and the comments I’ve made are my own. Please watch the video to make your own mind up about the roles of citizenship education and youth engagement in the democratic process.
I sacrificed my lie-in on Saturday to attend the Convention on Modern Liberty, which was co-directed by opendemocracy’s Anthony Barnett and the Guardian’s Henry Porter. I went on behalf of the Citizenship Foundation as a few of our projects are concerned with ‘rights and responsibilities’, but also because I’m personally interested in these debates and would like to take CF’s thinking on them further.
In any case, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Last week I got an email saying that I needed to get there early to make sure I could get a seat in the main hall. I, of course, disregarded this advice and showed up bang-on 9.30. And it was PACKED. Luckily a friend had been kind enough to save me a seat so I was able to hear the opening keynote, given by Shami Chakrabarti.
As per usual, Shami gave a speech that was impassioned and forceful, principled and…funny? She was throwing around jokes like nobody’s business and how we laughed. We didn’t, however, rise to her incitement to cry out ‘hell no’ in response to several instances of Government infringement on civil liberties. This reluctance to speak in unison represented, to me, the main problem with this convention: what exactly did it stand for? While most of those attending seemed to (angrily) agree that ID cards pose a serious threat to civil liberties, the political coalition between Right, Left and Liberal didn’t extend to agreement in regards to the security of the Human Rights Act. And so, at least in the sessions I attended, the Human Rights Act was largely ignored.
How much does that matter? Well, probably not much if the purpose of the day was merely to encourage debate and shine a light on a growing feeling amongst the chattering classes that this Government is committing a series of grave breaches of trust. But, if it was, as Henry Porter triumphantly declared in yesterday’s Observer, the birth of a movement, I think this lack of consensus on deeply contentious issues matters a great deal.
