Never tell a young person that anything cannot be done
The Youth Parliament met in the House of Commons this week, and the Twitterati are not universally supportive
I need to start this with a disclaimer, or an apology, or an explanation. When I worked in the House of Commons, the Youth Parliament began to meet once a year in the chamber of the House of Commons (having previously used the Lords up the corridor). Expressions of interest would go out to Commons staff to help out in various roles, from acting as helpful hosts to sitting at the Table of the House and clerking the proceedings. Dear readers, I could not run quickly enough in the opposite direction. I was not at all averse to volunteering for extra duties—I took on a whole range of tasks outwith my ‘day job’ in my 11 years there—but I had no interest in the Youth Parliament, knowing (or thinking) that I would find it pompous, or dull, or insufferable. I don’t find young people easy to talk to, I can be stiff and reserved, and Fridays were a day when, if possible, I liked to keep my duties light.
It was not that I disagreed with the fundamental purpose (of which more later). At their age (they range from 11 to 18) I would have disdained age mates who put themselves forward, as a shy but politics-obsessed young man who had yet to discover the joys of public speaking. Overwhelmingly, I would have envied them, envied their gumption, their apparent social ease, their confidence, but I would also have looked on with not just envy but scorn, thinking how much better I could have done it (if my personality were wholly different). But it fitted my reputation as a rather conservative clerk, sceptical of change and innovation and a champion of the traditions of the House, to steer very clear.
As I say, it was not a matter of scorning young people per se. When I was at university in St Andrews, our debating society cooperated with The Dundee Courier to help organise a competition for schoolchildren from junior schools in Fife, Angus and Perthshire to participate in British Parliamentary-style debates. The competition, a knock-out format, started with 72 teams which were narrowed down to six who would slug it out in a final in Lower Parliament Hall, a venerable space which was the meeting place of the debating society, followed by (for the adults!) a lavish dinner to reward those students who had volunteered to assist during the course of the competition.
I enjoyed the Schools Debating Competition. A representative of The Courier, often a former student, would take three or four volunteers to a school one Monday or Tuesday evening (if I recall correctly), and they would act as chair, judge(s) and serjeant at arms for the debate, after which they would be treated to dinner by the newspaper. The quality of argument and oratory varied, but one always had to remember that the young competitors were generally between 11 and 14, and so were achieving a lot by being able to stand up and speak cogently for five minutes. When I was slightly older, as a postgraduate student assumed (often wrongly) to be wise, I often ended up as the judge, and had not only to rank the teams but also provide feedback. I will say, as I always have, that the children tended to take criticism on the chin; teachers and parents were a different matter.
Partly because I could not in a million years have done it myself, I admire children (up to 18) who have the confidence or determination to put themselves forward for public speaking. Of course it is easy to criticise. Young people lack life experience, by definition, and can be much more dogmatic and absolute than adults, even than students. Some simply absorb the lessons of their coaches or teachers, and I shudder to think how many speeches in Scottish junior schools I heard which began “The Oxford English Dictionary defines [subject of debate] as…” (It was not all hard yards: I guffawed awkwardly when one young man referred to prisoners as “criminals, miscreants and other players of the pink oboe”. Inappropriate, yes, inaccurate, certainly, and not a little offensive, but in the circumstances it was fabulously amusing. He went far.)
So I pay tribute to the Members of the Youth Parliament (yes, I do cringe at the initialism “MYP”, but there we are) who are sufficiently committed and determined to spend time and intellectual effort in the process. Of course they have many different motivations, and some will go from being insufferable youngsters to equally (or more) insufferable adults, but it is a fairly wholesome pastime, compared to the potential alternatives, and it encourages, I hope and believe, two essential qualities in them: critical thinking, and persuasion. If you can’t perform either of those, you will never have any influence, whether on the national stage or just within your group of friends, or you will end up another Twitter user screaming into an echo chamber and losing your temper when you are contradicted or challenged.
The Youth Parliament was championed and created in the 1990s by Andrew Rowe, the Conservative MP for Faversham and Mid-Kent. He left the House of Commons in 2001, so I never encountered him, but I gather he was a personable, slightly donnish figure who, as a soaking Wet, was never favoured with ministerial office. Originally a civil servant, at the old Scottish Office, of all places, he took a very dusty view of the administrative abilities of government and parliament. That was one of the reasons why he campaigned so fiercely to create the Youth Parliament, to help young people engage in politics at an impressionable age and make them into thoughtful, active, public-spirited citizens. (For people of my vintage, he was also the father of actor Nicholas Rowe, who took the eponymous role in the fabulous 1985 adventure tale Young Sherlock Holmes. I once saw him in a pub in Stratford-on-Avon.)
Eventually, Rowe persuaded his colleagues of the virtues of his proposal. At the end of the 1990s, the House of Commons endorsed the creation of the Youth Parliament, which quickly grew. By 2004, nine out of 10 local authorities had signed up to the organisation, and a push began to expand around the globe. The Youth Parliament had its members elected, and Gordon Brown, during his premiership, approved the idea of the body sitting in the House of Commons chamber. Traditionalists were appalled: it was unthinkable to have young people, from around the country, putting their bottoms (quite apart from anything else) on the supposedly sacred green leather benches, let alone standing at the despatch boxes from which Churchill, Lloyd George, Gladstone and Disraeli had addressed the House.
(Actually, that isn’t true: those despatch boxes had been destroyed when the chamber was ruinously bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1941, and the current items were a gift from the New Zealand Parliament. These were modelled on the boxes in the Australian Parliament which had been a gift from George V in 1927 and were in turn modelled on the original items which Augustus Pugin had designed for the rebuilt Palace of Westminster in the 19th century. So we should perhaps just calm down a little.)
Traditionalists had their way initially, and in 2008 the Youth Parliament met instead in the chamber of the House of Lords. The administration of the upper house, at that point headed by a good friend of mine, the fantastically able and genial but sometimes absent-minded Sir Michael Pownall, clerk of the Parliaments, saw a chance to outflank their colleagues in the other place and seemed much more relaxed about opening their accommodation to these earnest young people. The issue arose again the following year. The same fussy arguments about the sanctity of the Commons chamber were made, and I found them as unpersuasive as ever. I told any colleagues who would listen, and problem some who would rather not, that the House ran a huge reputational risk in looking more stuffy, old-fashioned and close-minded than the unelected chamber. I claim no credit for the outcome, but at last the Commons agreed, and in 2009 the Youth Parliament met in our chamber, assisted, undoubtedly, by the appointment of a new and reformist speaker, John Bercow, earlier in the year. The meeting was staffed as if it was a parliamentary proceeding, with clerks at the Table and a full transcript provided by the Official Report (Hansard in colloquial language).
(I make no bones about the fact that I came to loathe Speaker Bercow. Elected on a mission to reform, open up and improve the House, badly needed after the battering it had taken during the expenses scandal, he had good points, but also a monstrous ego and a growing suspicion of officials. I have written a lengthy denunciation of his term in office. He worsened with time, bullying members of staff who displeased him, and insulting and hectoring officials who could not answer back, an especially loathsome trait. I was delighted when, earlier this year, the Independent Expert Panel concluded that many accusations levelled against him were fair and accurate; he remains disgracefully unrepentant, but has at least been denied the peerage which speakers are generally granted on retirement and his reputation has taken a hail of blows. I will not apologise for the severity of my judgement of him, as several of the victims of his conduct are good friends, and I saw the effect of his bullying at close quarters, though I will admit clearly that he never bullied me.)
The Youth Parliament has therefore been meeting once a year in the Commons chamber since 2009 (except for 2010, when it met in Northern Ireland, to agree a series of policies and causes on which it will campaign for the forthcoming year. I have no idea how effective or widespread this campaigning is, and it really isn’t central to my argument. However over-confident, spoddish, dogmatic and arrogant some of these young people are (and I am sure many are not), they are putting themselves forward to participate in a process of debate, decision and promotion which can only make them better and more engaged citizens when they acquire the right to vote at 18 and move from the child’s world into that of the adult. (I do not support the proposal often bruited recently to lower the age of suffrage, but I will argue that another day.)
Back to this week. The Youth Parliament met in the Commons chamber on Friday 4 November. Those with an unquenchable interest can watch the morning and afternoon proceedings, and there is a full Official Report here. It discussed weighty topics: the impact of discrimination on health; environment and health; education and health; the cost of living and health; and mental health services. The speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, was in the chair. These are subjects clearly close to the hearts of young people, and it is good that they are discussing and debating them, and the criticism that the MYPs lean strongly to the left is neither hither nor yon. Young people tend to be more left-wing than adults, perhaps still fuelled by idealism which has yet to be mugged by reality, to use Irving Kristol’s phrase, but the process of selection is fair and these are the chosen representatives of the young people who participate. It is also a peculiar argument, by implication, that the Youth Parliament’s meeting in the House of Commons would be more acceptable if the young people had opinions more in line with those of its critics.
What were the criticisms? Let us wade into the murky waters of Twitter to scoop out a sample. A straightforward argument is that the Youth Parliament is all very well but it is some kind of outrage that the young representatives sit in the House of Commons chamber. I confess that I find this proposition pompous, precious and difficult to support. I am, as friends and former colleagues will (wearily) attest, a passionate defender of the traditions of parliament. I acted as one of the serjeants at arms for a few years, resplendent in swallow-tail coat, knee breeches, stockings and buckled shoes, a sword strapped to my waistband, and I adored the formality of the role as much as the actual responsibilities of maintaining order, acting as a curiously dressed help point for Members and occasionally carrying the Mace in the daily Speaker’s Procession. I love the State Opening, and hate the recent trend for slimmed-down ceremonies. And I have written in defence of many of the small rituals which are woven through the life of the House of Commons.
And yet, and yet, and yet. We can talk, and MPs often do, of the great age of the House as a deliberative body, and they are quite right: a recognisable parliament met in 1265, and the two houses began meeting separately in 1341. The office of speaker of the House of Commons has been held continuously since Sir Peter de la Mare took the chair in 1376, and we can date a clerk of the House, the chief administrative officer, from Robert de Melton’s appointment in 1363 (the current incumbent, Dr John Benger, a witty and intelligent English literature specialist before he joined the House, is numbered as the 51st clerk).
So there is no doubt that the institution of the House of Commons is almost unimaginably old. For example, in 1265, the year in which de Montfort’s Parliament met, a peace treaty was agreed between the Byzantine Empire and the Venetian Republic, the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri was born, the last independent king of the Isle of Man, Magnús Óláfsson, was killed, and Mamluk armies from Egypt swept through many of the Christian Crusader state of the Holy Land. This was a different world.
It is also true that parts of the Palace of Westminster are dizzyingly ancient. Westminster Hall, the largest space on the Parliamentary Estate and the scene of countless ceremonial events including, most recently, the lying-in-state of the late queen Elizabeth II, was erected in 1097 by the ill-fated William II, the second Norman king of England. To put that in context, the creation of the United States of America was still nearly 700 years away. Even the more modern hammerbeam roof, a triumph of mediaeval carpentry, was commissioned in 1393. But, as most people know, the vast majority of the collection of buildings which made up the old palace burned to the ground in 1834, with Westminster Hall and a few fragments of masonry and cloister being all that survived.
The iconic building that we instantly call to mind now was the creation, famously, of Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, a strange but hugely effective pairing, and the bulk of the palace had been completed by 1860 (though finishing works went on for another decade). That means that the Palace of Westminster, while an absolute triumph of mid-Victorian neo-Gothic architecture, is about 150 years old, younger by a few decades than the United States Capitol and the White House.
That is not all. The chamber of the House of Commons is a cramped, if tall, space, with seats for only about 430 Members of Parliament, while the House comprises 650 MPs. It is a cockpit, dramatic when full, which has benches set opposing each other because it mimics the layout of St Stephen’s Chapel, where the Commons met in the old, pre-fire palace. Its interior, while less lavish than that of the House of Lords, is awash with Puginesque detail, elaborate carvings and mouldings which preserve much of the air of Victoriana with which Disraeli and Gladstone, Palmerston and Russell would have been familiar. But it is a recreation, a replica, a tribute act.
The chamber of the House of Commons was gutted on the evening of 10 May 1941 by incendiaries and high-explosive bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe. The damage was severe, the fire spreading to Members’ Lobby, and by the morning, almost nothing was left except the bare walls. The Commons relocated for the remainder of the Second World War to the Lords chamber (the Lords retreating to the Robing Room), but, at Winston Churchill’s insistence, the chamber of the Commons was “restored in all essentials to its old form, convenience and dignity”, the task being given to architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, grandson of that titan of the Victorian Gothic Revival, Sir George Gilbert Scott. The new chamber was unveiled in 1950 by George VI, an occasion captured by a BBC documentary The Debate Continues, which is very much worth a watch.
So let us not stand too much on venerable tradition. The green benches on which the Youth Parliament sits are not much more than 70 years old; my parents were both born before the rebuilding was complete. With all of these qualifications, I cannot accept the argument that there is an inviolable sanctity about the chamber which is being despoiled by the presence of the young debaters. However important, it is just a room, and we should be relatively relaxed about its use. Of course one would not want it to be used as a place of temporary rest by visitors, but I do not see that the Youth Parliament infringes on its dignity (any more than do some egregious Members of Parliament).
Another criticism is the left-wing bias and lack of achievement of the Youth Parliament. This seems to me a paper-thin argument. If one infers the opposite, presumably critics would accept the presence of MYPs if they produced solidly conservative views and policies. That is the ultimate in partiality: I don’t like these people being here because I don’t agree with them. Enough of that absurdity; we need not detain ourselves.
The objection which might appear to have most gravity is that the presence of the Youth Parliament in the Commons chamber, and indeed the existence of the body at all, is a waste of money. Clearly we are living in straitened times, and we could expect the public to react frostily to largesse used for something which is not essential for the general progress of political life. Is this fair? Frankly, no, and for all but the most Scroogian and parsimonious, the proposition falls apart at the first touch. The parliament is funded by a grant from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and in 2021/22 the maximum amount was £233,300. That’s right, a quarter of a million pounds. Some might think that a lot of money, and on a personal level so it is (but I know people for whom it is somewhat less than a year’s salary). But let us have a little context. DCMS is a minnow in Whitehall terms, considering both resources and manpower, but its annual budget amounts to something of the order of £2.5 billion. The expenditure on the Youth Parliament is barely even a speck.
This reduces, in essence, to how much one thinks the government should spend on encouraging young people to engage with the democratic process. In a time when voters feel increasingly excluded, disenfranchised and apathetic about politics and the political process, £250,000 seems a tiny amount of money to attempt to stem those instincts in the next generation of voters. It is, to look through another lens, not much more than the salary of a permanent secretary. And what do they get for that? There are 369 MYPs, elected from some 1,600 candidates by about 500,000 young people across 90 per cent of parliamentary constituencies. That is not an enormous number, given a population under 18 of perhaps 15 million, but it seems good value for money.
I come back to the fact that I find myself an unlikely defender of the Youth Parliament. But the Sturm und Drang expressed over a single day’s events costing less than a quarter of a million pounds, on a day when the House of Commons was not scheduled to sit anyway, seems to me utterly extravagant and excessive. The arguments of tradition are flimsy and windy, those of political bias hard to justify and those of cost rather footling. I may not like what happens in the Youth Parliament, or be very interested in its proceedings, but I care a great deal about a well-informed and active electorate, and am willing to countenance all sorts of initiatives to encourage that. If you don’t like it, perhaps look away, or use the mute function on Twitter. But let us not set up our democratic legislature as an exclusive, rarified and hidebound institution, closed to outsiders, for the sake of supposed dignity and a small amount of money.