Thanks to Isle of Wight Youth MP Robert Selby for his latest report. Ed
1st June 2013
Today I attended the British Youth Council convention. The BYC is an organisation that officially runs other youth democracy organisations, not just UK Youth Parliament but also Young Mayors as well. Since the convention was held at Pimlico Academy in London, I got the 6:45 Red Jet and then connected at Southampton on the 7:30 train to Waterloo.
I arrived in London at 8:50, and then went to Pimlico quite early. The convention started at 10:30 but first of all we were given the choice of which workshops we would like to attend.
Talk by Peter Tactchell
All Members of Youth Parliament had a workshop in the morning and a separate one in the afternoon. But firstly, we had a talk by Peter Tatchell about how to campaign.
Personally, I find his confrontational nature of demonstrating to be very effective and I greatly admire him for fighting for marginalised groups in our society.
He drew upon his own experience, principally when he attempted a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe over Human Rights crimes in 1999.
He also said,
“Be organised, find out who will be likely to support you, and who will get in your way.”
UK Youth Parliament workshop
Unfortunately, there was not time for questions and answers, but then we had our UK Youth Parliament workshop.
We mainly talked about this year’s Annual Sitting at Leeds University on the 26-28th of July, where all the MYPs across the UK will decide on what we will debate on in the House of Commons in November of this year.
I am very excited about the weekend residential, it will be another chance to network with other people and draw on their opinions and experiences of representing young people.
Lunch followed and afterwards there were the afternoon workshops. I went to one about representing young people and it was very helpful, if albeit the same as the one on the training weekend in Swindon.
Young people in public areas
Perhaps most importantly, we were divided into groups of around 15 to give our views on ‘young people in public areas’, our views then were to be used in a government consultation.
We were firstly asked how we felt about being with people in public areas; the general feeling was uncomfortable, due to fear of other people’s (particularly older) perception of them.
Young people to not want to be seen in these places because they themselves would be linked to the anti-social stereotype, many anecdotes were told about being confronted by the police on the last day of school term and that sort of thing.
My contributions welcomed
Overall, it was extremely interesting and we all learned a lot through this open discussion format. I was approached by one of the people in charge of the consultation saying that my contributions were very good, so I felt today was very useful.
I then helped clean up all the classrooms we had used for the workshops, it was then I met Hugo Brookes, the policy and campaigns officer for BYC, who later on, I would contact about the possibility of myself having a place on the Votes at 16 Steering Group meeting on 5 July.
Thankfully, I was invited on to it and on that date in London we will plan an event to lobby Parliament about the campaign.
The convention ended at 4:30pm and we all had a group photo afterwards. Then I went back home eventually at 11pm.
