Dai Havard

Labour Party | Merthyr Tydfil & Rhymney

Youth in Parliament

Earlier this year some of the 6th form students from Afon Taf High School came to Westminster to take part in the Student Parliament Debate.  Afon Taf students were selected from Wales along with 3 schools from England to take part in a debate following the procedure of the House of Commons on the subject of Stem Cells, a highly controversial area of research.
 
Dai Havard our local MP met them and said I was very impressed by all the young people who took part. They had obviously done their homework on the issues and the peculiarities of Commons procedure. The following week I visited the schools senior assembly where those who took part in the debate reported back to the rest of the senior school and staged a shortened version of the debate for them to vote on. They had done themselves and the school proud but also done Wales proud in the debate in Parliament.

I have to sit through a lot of debates in Parliament and one of the things that make the difference is not just whether the individuals taking part really know the issues but whether they seem to care about them. The thing that struck me about the Afon Taf students is they did both these things and it made the difference. The students from the three other schools from England had also done their homework but they did not have the passion and the ‘hwyl’ of the Valleys.  I must pay tribute to those students who spoke so passionately about their own experience and that of their families and friends who had suffered illnesses and bereavement. It is never easy to discuss difficult personal experiences but to do that in a positive way in a very forbidding and strange and very public stage takes courage and ability and it shone through.

There is a saying that - politics is the personal and the personal is politics - and it is that which allows us to understand place our individual problems into a collective perspective, the essence of progressive politics. Some of the students from England gradually began to catch on to Afon Taf‘s lead but our team showed the way.