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Who is in charge matters
At the end of a week in which one member of the UK Parliament went to the Australian jungle and the people of the USA and Bahrain elected their representatives, democracy - and taking part in it - has been inescapable on our television screens and in our news.
I wanted to take this opportunity to emphasise how voting isn’t just how we select which celebrity ingests parts of a sheep for our amusement – voting is something that can impact every part of our lives, including rights and freedoms we take for granted.
In the USA, the elections to the US Congress (their version of our Parliament) have shown how politics can be emotional, divisive and even dangerous. In 2020, President Donald Trump lost the election (and his job) to Joe Biden. He then questioned the legitimacy and fairness of this election, saying that it had been ‘stolen’. There was no evidence of this, but on 6th January 2021, the day these election results were to be officially announced, Trump addressed his supporters, saying: ‘if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country any more’. Later that day, more than 2,000 Trump supporters attacked the Capitol building, where Congress meets, in Washington D.C. Some participants in this mob chanted ‘hang Mike Pence’ – the vice president of the USA at the time – and politicians had to be evacuated. This was an attempt to overturn the result of the election and resulted in 5 deaths, 138 injured police officers, and nearly 1,000 people charged with criminal offences. This shows us the importance of politics and the strength of the emotions it creates. Political violence is not limited to the other side of the world, as the murder of two of the UK’s elected representatives in the last six years sadly shows. People who speak of those who disagree with them politically as enemies are contributing to an increasingly hostile atmosphere, so it is more important than ever that we all question where we get our news, that we carefully consider the language we use, and that we participate – not leaving something as important as democracy to others.
Who is in charge matters. In the USA, a woman’s right to choose an abortion had been protected in law since 1973, until a Supreme Court decision in June of this year overturned it. Abortion has been legal in the UK since 1967, but now in the USA whether it is legal or not depends on which state people live in, as states are now permitted to decide abortion law for themselves. There has been a surge in the number of American women registering to vote in recent months, and the people of the states of Michigan, California and Vermont this week voted to protect the right to an abortion. In 13 out of the country’s 50 states, the procedure is illegal in almost all cases. This illustrates how rights and freedoms that we might take for granted have come to us because of democracy, because of what ordinary people have voted for.
Politics is for everyone. This week, Sarah Huckabee Sanders became the first woman to be voted as governor of the American state of Arkansas. Becca Balint became the first woman and first openly gay person to represent the state of Vermont in Congress. John Fetterman suffered a stroke in May of this year that has impacted his ability to speak and process the sound of other people’s speech, and he was this week elected as a senator for Pennsylvania. The more diverse our representatives are, the more representative they will be of what we all think, feel and believe – and the only way to make this happen is to vote. In the UK, the first female prime minister (Margaret Thatcher) was elected in 1979. In this election, only 19 MPs elected were women. Now, there are 225 women in our House of Commons. In 2015, Mhairi Black was elected to Parliament at the age of just 20, the youngest MP ever elected. Too often, young people see politics as something that isn’t for them. Only around half of people aged 18-24 vote in elections in this country, whereas over 80% of those aged 65 and above do so. This blog has tried to show the importance of politics to our lives and our rights; issues that young people care about will only be the priority if young people take part. We can take heart from another story in this eventful past week, as the UK Youth Parliament met in the House of Commons. More than 200 young people aged 11-18 debated issues – including the climate emergency and the cost-of-living crisis – that matter to them and the schools they represent.
A recent survey of young people, conducted on behalf of the BBC, found that only 17% of young people feel positive about the UK’s political future, and only 12% of young people say that they trust politicians to tell the truth. As events in elections across the world have made me reflect on the importance of participation, I’ll close with a statement from Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons of the UK Parliament:
I always say to young people, I want you to be the next generation of politicians. I want you to take over, I want you to champion democracy. If things matter to you, or things are bothering you, and you’ve got concerns, don’t stand on the sidelines, say something. Get involved, make a change, you can be part of it… And that’s said to everybody around the world, if young people aren’t involved in politics, we haven’t got a future.
