S4M-12222 Young Voters and School Debates

The Deputy Presiding Officer (John Scott): The next item of business is a members’ business debate on motion S4M-12222, in the name of Patrick Harvie, on young voters and school debates. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.

Motion debated,

That the Parliament celebrates the many school debates that took place in Glasgow and across Scotland during the independence referendum campaign, allowing young voters to engage with the issues and hear the arguments from campaigners on both sides; welcomes the broad cross-party consensus that has built up for a reduction in the voting age to 16 for Scottish Parliament elections; believes that high quality voter education and participation events in schools have great potential for harnessing young people’s interest in politics and establishing patterns of high voter turnout at an early age; considers that lessons must be learned from the best examples of this work during the referendum to ensure that engaging, creative and politically balanced debates become the norm in schools during future elections; welcomes the work of the Devolution (Further Powers) Committee in examining this area, and notes calls for all relevant parties and agencies to work together to maximise the democratic participation of young people.

12:32
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12:40

Stewart Stevenson (Banffshire and Buchan Coast) (SNP):

I offer my hearty congratulations to Patrick Harvie on giving us the opportunity to discuss this important subject.

He said that he wants a bit of excitement and passion so let me start with some. I was a rather sickly young kid, so I read a lot of books because I was at home a lot of the time. One of the early books I read—the first political book I read—when I was about seven, was a biography of Lloyd George. I found it fascinating because it had excitement and passion. The passion was that his mistress was Frances Stevenson, although at the age of seven, I did not quite understand what that meant. It was certainly something to do with passion and it was interesting. In those days, of course, the press was less interested in the private lives of politicians; Lloyd George conducted an affair with Frances Stevenson that extended over 45 years. He eventually married her after his wife died and just before he died.

The first election that I participated in was in the 1961 East Fife by-election when Sir John Gilmour won the seat for the Tories. I was out campaigning for the Liberals and, as a result, a few months later I joined the Scottish National Party in the Duncan institute in Cupar. There, 25 of us 15, 16 and 17-year-olds joined our first political party.

Getting youngsters engaged is therefore not new. There is a bit of a cycle to it and hopefully we are in an upward cycle that will continue.

Getting involved in public life can happen at a very early age. Mary Queen of Scots was eight days old when she became Queen when James V, her father, died after she was born in Linlithgow palace. I think her engagement with politics at that time would have been pretty minimal.

The motion that is before us contains a lot of interesting things. There is a consensus around votes for 16 and 17-year-olds; an online survey of young people shows that only 8.5 per cent are opposed to it. We can now say without much risk of contradiction that giving our youngsters the vote is pretty much generally the settled will. The survey also showed that there were some special issues to consider around data protection and so on related to registration, because this was the very first time we had registered people of that age. According to the survey, 50 per cent of people got information at schools, so schools played an important part in the campaign by ensuring that people were informed.

There was variation in the engagement of schools and, to some extent, the national campaigns on both sides of the argument had shortcomings. In my constituency I was, and during the campaign remained, and still am friends with people who espoused and campaigned for a different viewpoint. Politics can be conducted in a gentlemanly way, at least in Banffshire and Buchan Coast. Neither side had realised the extent to which we would empower and activate people at the grass roots.

In many places, we found that schools were trying to work with national bodies when the real energy of the campaign was in the plethora of small locally-based bodies. Schools found it difficult to engage. The pattern of politics had changed but the old methods were still being applied. Schools played it safe. If they could not get someone from both sides of the argument, they cancelled debates, which was fairly disappointing.

Tam Baillie, Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People, points to what the Scottish Youth Parliament did through its aye naw mibbe campaign. It is important that young people themselves reach out to other young people. If we look at the survey we find that the overwhelming source of information for young people who voted was their peer group. That should be no surprise to us.

I return to Lloyd George—my great hero. As I approach my 70th birthday, I note that in 1908 he introduced the first national pension, which entitled 70-year olds to 5 shillings a week. Well done, Lloyd George, and well done, the Liberals, for encouraging me to get involved in politics. It is their loss that I chose to join the SNP because of their manifest shortcomings.

12:45