On Thursday 18th May IGNITE facilitated a Parliamentary Outreach Workshop ran by UK Parliament’s Community Outreach team\u00a0for the North East, Yorkshire and Humber, at Grimsby University Centre. The workshop aimed to encourage young people aged 18 and over to register to vote in next month’s General Election.<\/p>\n
The workshop attracted nearly a dozen young people, both from the University\u00a0 Centre and VANEL Member organisation, the YMCA. Running the Parliamentary Outreach Workshop was Lynn Hobson and Sky Yarlett, both of whom work for UK Parliament as Outreach workers. Also in attendance was BBC Look North presenter, Matt Bone. Statistics from previous elections reveal that there is a significant lack of engagement from young people aged between 18 and 24 when it comes to exercising their right to vote. As a result, there is a very real possibility that the political opinions and concerns are being overlooked during Local and General Elections. In an order to try combat this Lynn and Scarlett delivered an informative talk on how Parliament Works and gave attendees the opportunity to discuss what laws, taxes and attitudes they would bring in or challenge, in order to make the country a better place. GIFHE student Fraser MacDonald said: “I would look at reducing the cost of car insurance for young drivers. I work hard both at college and as part of my job and all my wages go on paying for my car insurance because I am a young driver”.\u00a0 Kyle Charlton from the YMCA said: “I would look at the retirement age. The age at which a person is eligible to retire is going up and up which I think is wrong. Typically, older people have more health problems than younger people. When we get old we will be expected to work for longer and retire later”. Meanwhile, Big Local’s Youth Development Worker Jasmin Flint said: “I would look at getting rid of, or reducing, university tuition fees. I don’t think that someone should have to get themselves in tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt in order to make a better life for themselves”.<\/p>\n
In closing, Lynn stressed how important it is for young people to utilise their voting privilege – even if they entered a spoiled or blank voting card. She said: “Every vote gets counted, even those which are submitted blank or have been spoilt. If you really didn’t like or agree with any of the political parties running in an election, you could enter a blank or spoilt vote. If enough people were to do this, it could be seen as a form of political protest”.<\/p>\n
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VANEL’s IGNITE team facilitated a Parliamentary Outreach Workshop at Grimsby University Centre last week to encourage young people to register to vote in light of next month’s General Election. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"xn-wppe-expiration":[],"xn-wppe-expiration-action":[],"xn-wppe-expiration-prefix":[],"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[10,369,36,9],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3cThd-3M9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14517"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14517"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14543,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14517\/revisions\/14543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/vanel.org.uk\/va\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}