UK Youth Parliament

The Institute for Social Inventions is working to help set up youth parliaments, to coincide with adult general elections, with MPs aged between 11 and 18. At best, such a parliament would debate and pass resolutions, rather like the House of Lords, on educational and youth issues, and on any other matters, such as environmental concerns, that it chose to consider. It might also have its own governing party and cabinet (and shadow cabinet) if it so decided.

'It would debate and pass resolutions, rather like the House of Lords, on educational and youth issues, and on any other matters, such as environmental concerns, that it chose to consider'

But its most important work would be at the school level, with secondary schools encouraged to form their own school parliaments, and with candidates following traditional or new or no party lines. These parliaments could get their teeth into real work in the sense of drawing up and carrying out plans for improving their schools.

If there were enough schools participating, there might be an intermediate level of parliament at the county level, as those elected at the school level could then be candidates for a county parliament, with county MPs able to stand as candidates for a national parliament.

The likely gains from such an exercise include:

- Giving young people, who are unrepresented in our democracies, a voice, in proportion to their backing from their peers;
- Giving young people a training in democracy and politics, and an interest in national issues;
- Giving young people and the public at large hands-on experience of possible improvements to our electoral systems, assuming that new forms of proportional representation were tried with the youth parliament elections;
- Encouraging school authorities to allow pupils more say in the improving of schools through the formation of councils or school parliaments;
- At the county level, helping coordination between schools, which is otherwise likely to suffer as opting-out continues;
- Giving the public advance warning of future voting trends.

The aim would be to announce the results of the youth national elections in advance of the adult national election results, to maximise the resulting publicity. Costs would be minimised by making the schools responsible for any local expense and for the travel costs of its MPs to county and national level meetings, which would be rare events.

If you know of a school that might like to take part, please encourage it to contact the Institute for Social Inventions, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA (tel 081 208 2853; fax 081 452 6434). A similar exercise for the European level took place in Lisbon, organised by a European Youth Parliament (President Bettina Carr-Allinson), 19 rue du Parc, 7730 Fontainebleau, France (tel 60 72 36 70; 64 23 44 83).

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