Votes at 16 (Beth Walker's Speech)
I am proud to address this meeting today as a democratically elected representative of the five million students in further education, more than 600 thousand of whom are under 19. I am here with one message, give young people the space to really engage in politics and they will.
Young people care about politics, care about public services and care about the decisions the government makes about them.
Four years ago NUS succeed in convincing the government that students views had to be placed at the heart of the education system and that the government, college’s and students themselves had to work together to make this to happen. The result is an explosion in student representation in further education colleges, manifested in student-led students' unions across the UK.
NUS does all it can to support these unions but their development and success is ultimately down to the hard work and dedication of student activists. Many of these activists are not legally entitled to vote but the nevertheless organise to demand not just a say in how their education is delivered, but also a say in their local community, their country and the world in which they live in.
Dedicated
These are dedicated activists who are fighting on two fronts, fighting for access to the political decision-making and fighting to influence the agenda.
People often talk about young people not being party political but instead being engaged in campaigns on issues like the environment or poverty. But the time I spend in colleges tells me there is a third option and that is young people organising themselves to build political organisations that can make their voice heard loud and clear wherever the decisions are made that affect them.
We hear about schemes and campaigns allowing young people’s voices to be heard – ‘email the prime minister’, ‘youth focused policy consultations’. And we hear decision-makers talking about issues that ‘young people care about’ like ‘the environment’. Of course young people value youth consultations from government, and many do care about the environment. But mostly young people care about the same things as everyone else –the economy, the job market, their pay and working conditions, the NHS and…the price of fuel. People who work, people who are raising families, people who are joining the armed forces, deserve to have more political clout than the odd youth-consultation or web-chat.
Apathy
But rather than this leading to apathy amongst young people… I firmly believe that given the space, young people will construct their own politics, organising their own political structures and getting themselves heard.
This is why NUS launched the Citizen 16 campaign in October last year. We listened to our members about what issues frustrated them about their education and the wider world. We asked them, “what did they want NUS to help them take on?”
You know what they said? Being paid less that older workers in the same job as them; they said not being taken seriously by politicians and the media; and they said fixing the education system so they get to do the course they want, where they want, when they want.
So Citizen 16 has four core aims: to reduce the voting age to 16, to equalise the national minimum wage, to make the national minimum wage apply to apprentices and work-placements and for an education system that provides an appropriate high quality place for every young person.
Local organising
But we don’t dictate how our members run Citizen 16, we do the national bits, like getting engaged in the Votes at 16 Coalition and working with Unison around the 10th anniversary of the NMW, but we leave the local organising to those who know how to engage their members, student activists like Shane, Ross and James in the South West, who on Saturday organised a regional day of action on the votes at 16 and national minimum wage strands of the citizen 16 campaign. Their students unions, got out and engaged with the general public in their town centres, raising awareness of this private members bill, and got hundreds of signatures of support to push their MP’s to support this bill, and the 2 early day motions on the nmw and votes at 16.
I believe this is the spirit of the coalition and the spirit of the Bill being discussed today. This is about giving young people the space to build their own politics: so that they can organise themselves and speak for themselves and shape their own future.
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