On the morning after the referendum I was sitting with two no voting colleagues and the subject of the referendum was being discussed. One woman said that if devo max had been on the ballot paper she would have voted for it. As I was nodding in semi-agreement it became clear that she thought that it had been the SNP who had refused to have it as an option. When I told her that it was the Westminster government who had kept it off the ballot, she seemed a bit surprised but then the conversation moved on to something else. It was obvious by this and the rest of the conversation that neither of them had been paying much attention to the debate or taken any real interest. Later that same day, my life model, a young woman of about nineteen or twenty, told me she was gutted by the result. I had previously never been able to coax more than two words at a time out of this girl, but she spoke at length on the subject of independence and what it meant to her, and I was impressed by her well-informed and passionate engagement with the subject. It stood in marked contrast to the complacent indifference of my two fifty-something colleagues from earlier. If the referendum has shown one thing it is that the young people want and need change. They are not afraid of it and we need to get behind them in this before their energy and enthusiasm is crushed under the weight of austerity cuts and their idealism turns to cynicism and lack of faith in democracy. This is not the post-war generation that benefitted from consensus politics and the welfare state, this is the zero hours contract generation, for whom the safety nets are unravelling. In the words of David Bowie; ‘And these children that you spit on As they try to change their world Are immune to your consultations They’re quite aware what they’re going through Don’t tell them to grow up and out of it Where’s your shame you’ve left us up to our necks in it’
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 20:55:25 +0000
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