Young Fabians need you – member wanted to lead special project

An exciting opportunity awaits a Young Fabian member in the next few weeks.

There is currently a vacancy on the Young Fabian Executive Committee, and so we are looking to enthusiastic members who would like to get involved in the running of the organisation. Because we are halfway through the year, we’re looking for a shorter commitment than normal – around 5 months. Though of course, the successful candidate would be well-placed to stand for election to the committee for 2012.

We need a new website officer to take responsibility for managing and updating the YF website. But we also think it’s in need of a refresh so would want you to lead a new project with executive committee colleagues to reimagine our web presence and redesign the YF site. It’s a great chance for someone to quickly stamp their mark on the Young Fabians – we are confident the talent is in the membership so we’re hoping you will step forward.

We’ll be running a small-scale co-option for this single place on the executive committee. To put yourself forward, you’ll need to either attend the special co-option meeting on Sunday June 5th, submit a written statement, or – for the first time ever – submit a video presentation of your ideas. For details of what the committee is looking for from a new website officer, see here. And for more information on how the process works click here.

If you have further questions, or want to express your interest, please contact me via email: aprandle[at]youngfabians.org.uk.

Adrian Prandle is Chair of the Young Fabians.

Is Maurice Glasman more radical than the nation’s youth?

God knows if the House of Lords is ready for Dr Maurice Glasman. The newly-ennobled community organiser/academic/guru left the Fabian Conference on Saturday entertained by his brilliance and agitated by his bluntness in equal measure. None more so than the Young Fabians who had invited him to be part of the lunchtime panel discussion looking at the “Squeezed Youth”.

The clunkiness of the term mirrors the fact that 11 million-plus 15-30 year olds in the UK don’t fit into any neat political box. So whilst the left’s political narrative focuses on the vague, yet compelling idea of the “squeezed middle”, it is the ‘lost generation’ being squeezed the hardest and left with the long-term bill for the future.

Take youth unemployment. According to the Centre of Economic and Social Inclusion, long-term youth unemployment grew by 22,000 last month and now stands 4.5 per cent. That is more than the adult figure.

Yet the Future Jobs Fund has been cut with no substitute being proposed. In housing, too, the Government will cut housing benefit for single young people under 35 by an extra £215 million each year, entitling them to only shared accommodation – because young people are expected to live in shared accommodation.

The idea was simple: ask young people to what they they feel ‘squeezed’ about and let them use their own voice. Lo-fi video-editing aside, the voices in the video were honest and real:

YouTube Direkt

Jobs, housing, transport, workplace representation – the video responses show young people care deeply about more things than they get credit for. Young people like 19-year-old Richard Serunjogi are not interested in just being limited to talking about ‘youth issues’. On Saturday, his emphasis was that young people have a stake in all the decisions being taken to shape Britain’s future, since that future is the one young people will eventually be responsible for.

So the lunchtime session at the conference was billed as exploring how Labour can reconnect with the young people behind these voices.

That was until Dr Glasman turned up. The largest round of applause during the session followed Glasman’s appeal against the “dispiriting, meaningless, interminable atmosphere” that follows many Labour party meetings, like the one he was currently sitting in. He remarked that the panel discussion managed to invoke old memories of a young Maurice-the-academic attending a conference in the Soviet Union. Brutally this was exactly the kind of meeting that community organising tells you not to have.

The worst thing: Maurice has a point.

As Jessica Studdert, who wrote a chapter on Labour party reform in last year’s Young Fabian pamphlet ‘The New Generation’, acknowledged engagement in Labour was often “in spite of, not because of” the way many local Labour parties involve young people. Yet new MPs, like Rushanara Ali, already know the importance of a more open engagement with young people. She emphasised that Labour MPs and the party as a whole needs to change the way it tries to interact with young people.

So young people leaving that session were left pondering: how did we allow ourselves to become less radical than Maurice?

This post was originally posted at Leftfootforward.

Anything you can do, we can do… (better?)

The Debate Watch parties we’ve been organising with partners across the Left in London have enabled young supporters from around the capital and across the movement a chance to get together and celebrate, analyse and pick at these historic debates.  This week sees the last debate and the pressure is on! Should only Young Fabians in London be having all the fun? We thought not, so we put a call out to to some of our members up north to put on their own Debate Watch party – here Sam Bacon, Kevin Peel and Grace Fletcher-Hackwood from Manchester answer that call:

So the Leaders debates.  Finally we catch up with our American cousins and subject out leaders to the scrutiny of the TV debate, and what a remarkable effect it has had on this election.  And with two down, one to go, in this rollercoaster ride that is the 2010, I’ve no doubt that the third leaders debate next Thursday will be just as exciting, unpredictable and influential as the first two have been.

If you’ve been in London on the past two Thursdays, there’s been some exciting events you could have attended to watch these great matches of oratory skill.  And as the first leaders debate was here in Manchester, we did have a little shindig, with the Prime Minister popping by to party, as well as Sarah Brown, Lord Mandelson, Douglas Alexander and Ben Bradshaw.

Now, those big hitters were great and all, but it did mean we couldn’t have an open guest list.  So for the third and final debate, as we’ll be short a Prime Minister (and cabinet colleagues), we want to invite you all to make up for it!

Manchester has never been known as a shy and retiring place, and we never knowingly turn down a party (remember: Manchester was the birthplace of the modern DJ, and clubbing in the UK!).  So, on Thursday the 29^th of April, Manchester Young Labour, the Young Fabians, LGBT Labour NW, Co-Op Youth NW, Progress , Labourlist  and Compass are holding a Final Debate Party and Campaign event.

The plans will be similar to the London event:

6:30 – 8pm Phone banking at the Labour offices in the Express Networks building on Anacoats Road, Manchester - This will be the last Manchester Young Labour phone banking of the 2010 Election campaign, so it’s absolutely vital we get as many people as possible along!

8 – 10pm Watching the debate in Bar 38: Bar 38 Pavillion, Great Northern Warehouse, Peter Street, Manchester, M2 5GP

10pm Onwards – celebrating Gordon Brown’s magnificent performance late into the night…

As per the London events there will be food available, drinks, Leaders Debate Bingo and people will be blogging and tweeting as the debate happens live.  And just to make things a little interesting, we’re challenging the London event to a little friendly competition – who can make the most contacts that night (per person!). So for the sake of Northern Pride, come out and help us secure a little one up on our comrades down south!

Sing up via our Facebook Event and for more information email us at mancyounglabour@googlemail.com -  help us show that anything London can do, we can do…(better?!)

Healey says Young Fabians ‘Labour’s future’

Our new members’ reception last night followed some work at Labour HQ ringing first time voters ahead of the – now very near – general election.

Guest speaker was Rt Hon John Healey MP, Cabinet minister for housing and planning. After taking his turn trying to sell fundraising raffle tickets, Healey highlighted the Young Fabians’ span of appeal and the ‘fresh energy’ we bring with our ‘combination of organisation and ideology’.

His view that it’s not what Labour has done but ‘why we’ve done it’ that matters is sound. So we’re about more than just managing Britain through global recession: we’re about a focus on people – their lives, their jobs, their homes, and their families. Which is how, despite a deeper recession, we’ve seen half the business failures experienced in the previous recession during the last Tory government.

He ended with a question, perhaps a challenge. It came from a constituent of his in a supermarket in his south Yorkshire seat: “Mr Healey, Mr Healey – what are you doing to keep the Tories out?”

This is about taking responsibility and doing something. We win the trust, respect and support of people by – as Healey said – combining our ideas and our action. Labour can play to the strengths of its leadership here. It’s not polished presentation that is craved but it is principled action that people see missing elsewhere. As one first time voter, a 20-year-old female studying an FE course, told me on the phone tonight, “Get off my telly, Cameron – why as an MP aren’t you doing something for the country?”

Listen to a podcast of John Healey’s speech plus comments from Young Fabian members at tonight’s reception here.