Young PPCs week 6: Nick Varley
One of the things I don’t like about politics is that it is standard practice for a politician to turn up somewhere, give a speech while the audience listens, and then move on to give another speech somewhere else. In other words, politicians talk at people, not with people.
Sometimes, giving a speech is appropriate, when announcing new policies for example. Luckily for me, though, I’m nowhere near important enough to have to make policy speeches, so a lot of the time, when it would be easy for me to just turn up with a stump speech, I have the freedom to mix things up a little bit. I do as many Question and Answer sessions as I possibly can; rather than deciding for the audience what they want me to talk about, I hand the power to them.
Unrelated to my dislike of having to talk at people is my interest in education and schools. Education is unquestionably the most useful tool in the arsenal of a party (or a government) that wants to increase social mobility. It’s therefore extremely important that we ensure schools are as good as they possibly can be, and one of the easiest ways of finding out how we make things better is by seeing things first hand and by talking to teachers.
Since I’ve been a PPC, I’ve visited as many schools as possible in City of Durham: colleges, state secondary and primary, as well as independent schools. When I go into a school I always offer to let the students grill me on whatever they like (with the exception of the primary schools - I think questioning someone about the NHS is something that passes most 10 year olds by).
I went into the constituency’s Catholic school on Friday and talked about education issues with their Assistant Head of VI Form, and then got thrown in a room with twenty-five 16-18 year olds and asked questions for an hour. Politicians always talk about how young people are only interested in certain issues (usually tuition fees and climate change) so I always find it interesting to talk to young people about the issues that they have decided for themselves that they care about.
We need to get rid of this idea that young people only have thoughts on specific issues. Of the 30 or so questions I was asked on Friday, one was about tuition fees, none were about climate change. That’s not to say that young people don’t care about either of those things, of course they do, but it’s interesting that these sixth form students asked me the same sorts of questions as people in their 40s, 50s, or 60s ask me. “How are you going to make schools better?”, “what do you think on the EU?”, “do you think immigration is too high?”, “why do we need to be in Afghanistan?” In my experience, first time voters are just as worried about the economy as everyone else - because they’re about to get a job. They’re just as worried about foreign policy - it is them and their friends dying on the dirt tracks of Afghanistan to protect our freedoms.
Once and for all I want this notion that young people only care about certain political issues put to bed. The only thing that’s noticeably different about ‘young people’ as a group, is that often they haven’t made the link between their views on issues and the political party that represents their views. Pleasingly, it’s my job to answer their questions and try and point them in the direction of the political party that I believe supports them - the Conservatives.
Nick Varley is 20. He is the Conservative Parliamentary candidate for the City of Durham.
(Photo courtesy Nick Varley)
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