Good morning, and welcome to the Scottish Parliament and to this session of our festival of politics programme. I'm Jackson Carlaw MSP, I'm the Conservative MSP for Eastwood and also more oppositely the convener of the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee here in the Scottish Parliament. I very proudly believe that the public petitions recess that we have here is probably one of the best of any parliament anywhere. Moreover, we are just about to publish our own report on participative democracy, deliberative democracy and public participation in politics, which we'll be doing on the other side of the summer recess. This is the 19th year of the festival of politics. I'm told here that it's been provoking, inspiring and informing, which I hope we'll be able to do today. People of all ages and from everywhere, so I hope you're all truly representative of Scotland and views. You'll be getting an opportunity a little later on in our session to contribute your thoughts, either those that you have on the issue generally or things that have been stimulated by anything our panellists have had to say or questions that you would like to put as a result. We're delighted that you're participating in this activism vote for me panel, which is in partnership with the Scottish Youth Parliament. If you're keen and are following this either in the room or are following it where we are live streaming at the moment on the Parliament's SPTV channel, if there are any thoughts that you want to contribute in the meantime before we move to questions later on, then please do using at visit Scott Parle or on Instagram. I'm really pleased to be able to introduce our panel now to you. We have got Erin Waldy, Dr Yan Icon and Molly McGoran, MSYP. Erin is a member of the Young Women's Movements advisory panel and a recent graduate from the University of Dundee with an MA in international relations and politics. She's also a volunteering girl-guider and as a speak-out champion and spokesman, as well as taking part in the Young Women's Movement, Young Women Lead Dundee and Empower Projects Empower Trustees programme. Erin, welcome. Howner, did you get involved in all of that? When I was 17, I got involved with Girl Guiding Scotland, which gave me the opportunity to go to the House of Lords. I got to go to the House of Lords and Shadow at Baroness for a day. Which Baroness were you? Well of Benjamin. Well, that would be quite interesting. It just stemmed from there and that kind of inspired me to apply for politics at the University of Dundee and then I got involved with Young Women's Movement in Dundee with Young Women Lead. I think that I was trying to establish how many people are involved in all of that. What is the structure in which you operate? The advisory panel essentially advises staff on what we want to see in the movement. Recently I advised them on how the rebrand would go, essentially what text, what if the rebrand is suitable for what we want and help advice on what we want to see in reports. Great. We'll sit back and relax and we'll come to you. Next to you we've got Dr Jan Eichhorn, who is a senior lecturer in social policy at the University of Edinburgh. The main area of his work is the political engagement of young people. He's conducted research on this in the UK and Germany and led several projects investigating the impact of the lowering of the voting age to 16 in Scotland. Jan also co-ordinates work in this field internationally and often contributes to policy and media debates too. Jan, I was intrigued to ask you, because I'm all you academic types, as support on earth is actually social policy. I keep hearing about these and charge of social policy at the University of Edinburgh. What on earth is that? I have to admit that my parents keep asking me that too. Social policy is quite an old discipline in the UK and it emerged basically as the study of the UK welfare state but has expanded since and far as it really means basically applied politics. What we're interested in is how decisions are made in the political process, including people who influence the process from outside the institutions and then how it affects society, the economy and so on. So it's for me was always really attractive because it's very interdisciplinary and I used to be a student activist in Germany and became really interested in studying these things and realised you need multiple perspectives to understand them. So that's why I feel very much at home in social policy. I'm none the wiser, but fear up. Next to you we have Molly McGoran MSYP who is the chair currently of the Scottish Youth Parliament. Is that a two year thing you do that for? One year. Is it just a one year term? Or is it a two year term and you get one year as chair? Yeah. And you are the MSYP for Inverness and Nairn and has obviously been an advocate because it's the biggest shot there for rural connectivity and women's rights where their social media campaign girls just want to be safe. As a former convener of the Transport Environment Rural Affairs Committee she campaign passionately for climate justice and concessionary transport and she's also a full-time Scots law student at the University of Dundee. I've had MSYPs have come through my office as interns and have some gone on to abandon politics, some gone on to be researchers, some gone on to be elected politicians themselves. So what motivated you to get involved and which of those three do you fancy yourself? I couldn't say that. I need to finish the last year at uni first and then we'll figure that out. But yeah, I got involved. I was really lucky to come from such a beautiful village in the Highlands where youth work is a fundamental part of our education system as well. It's really ingrained. So from the time that I was in second year I was able to volunteer in my local community and be the change that I wanted to see there. And then someone mentioned the Highland Youth Parliament to me. So I got involved in that and then someone mentioned the Scottish Youth Parliament to me and I got involved in that and I've been here for four years now. So it's been quite a journey. I've managed to do every single role within SYP and I've worked my way up. So very happy to be taken on time this year. And did the pandemic undermine the ability to engage in the way that we would normally see? Because we are used for example to there being a session of the Scottish Youth Parliament here in the Scottish Parliament. And all of that I know was completely undermined by the pandemic. Did it disrupt your ability to operate as you would have hoped? I wouldn't say it undermined. I would say that we had to adapt. We had to become a different version of the youth parliament to be able to engage our members and to make change but just in a different way. I don't know if it was as successful or maybe it might have been, who knows. But we definitely changed and were able to kind of keep engagement and get more members through the door. So I'm very happy. If some of those innovations become embedded into standard because I mean I know some of the changes that we had to implement here in the Scottish Parliament have become part of the permanent way in which we operate. Yeah so we've taken on having online settings, more online events, kind of hybrid working as well as little pop-ups in different areas rather than bring all of our members to one space. We can have them in different places across the country so there's less travel but they're still kind of doing the same things and getting involved in a big kind of community field. Great. Well ladies, Jen MacGnasky to welcome our three guests. So research from the University of Cambridge looking at faith and democracy found that millennials are the most disillusioned generation in living memory. Do you think that's right? Relevant to what and if so why? Who wants to? Start with easy questions. All right, okay, all right. Is this your field of expertise that we'll let you get? It is to some extent. Being the oldest I'll let you start. Well except for me that is fine. We definitely see this is not unique to the UK, this is internationally that a lot of young people do have a degree of disillusionment but this is not and this is how sometimes this gets reported. It's not the same as apathy and this brings us actually back to a point that actually dissatisfaction with the political apparatus and how democracy works. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Some of the highest satisfaction ratings with democracy are in authoritarian regimes because people report it as it's wanted. It's an American political scientist once turned to basically the dissatisfied democrat is actually the best democrat because they constantly want to evolve. Now the problem is what you don't want is a total breakdown of trust. We haven't seen that yet but what we have seen amongst younger generations in a lot of Europe including the UK is again not apathy but dissatisfaction with the institutions of representative democracy which is a problem but a lot of young people have actually become engaged in mechanism outside representative democracy. So it's really important. It is true that we have a decline in some of that institutionalized trust but actually other forms of engagement come in. So if we can bring it back together there's actually an opportunity as well. I completely agree. I think that another thing that's kind of a contributor to that is maybe the introduction of media as well. It's become a lot more divisive to be involved in politics. It's become increasingly more difficult for younger people to understand and further to be kind of cohesive information around getting involved in democracy in any sort of shape and we're seeing a lot more kind of different things that are emerging that nobody really understands to an extent. The divisiveness is something that we've seen quite a lot and it's making young people more passionate about pursuing the other forms of campaigning activism that are outside the traditional kind of scope of democracy exactly as Jan was saying. They want to campaign. They want to be out on the streets fighting for it. Also kind of gives it doesn't mean that people have to vote for a specific party. They can just campaign on the issues that mean the most to them. They don't have to research all of this stuff about a different party to be well informed. They can just campaign on the things that matter to them to kind of make it take it back to their kind of simple roots. So it's less kind of it's exactly what you said it's less disillusion of democracy and more with the kind of current system that's in place. Well these are themes we can explore but I'm interested I get the impression and I'm interested to know your view that whereas my generation was much more willing to look at the basket of policies within a particular party's political platform and join and embrace that. There is much more now of a view that well I don't actually like that that and that so why would I join that? I would much rather campaign on these issues which are the ones that I am most concerned with and so it's become for a lot of young people issues that appeal to them that they campaign for and then they decide how they're going to vote or campaign an election but maybe less tribal than I think generations previously would have been. Does that seem to reflect your views as how people are operating? Yeah that seems kind of fair I think that young people don't have time we don't have time we have things to do we have a world to kind of we've inherited a world that's on fire we need to focus on the bigger issues first than kind of these politics these party politics that are really kind of disrupting what we want to achieve we want to look at the individual issues that focus on that kind of underpin all of these world issues that kind of come into the scope of party politics but we need to focus on the bigger picture first because we don't have time we're running out of time. Erin, what's your perspective? As a young woman and also inheriting democracy from millennials as a GenC as well I see my biggest issues like with representation a lot of young women don't see themselves represented in politics and that can throw people off a lot so not seeing yourself represented in politics is like why should I essentially vote if I'm not going to be represented and even if it's representing an area constituency it's like well it's actually in the bigger picture you're making issues for in the Scottish Parliament for Scotland and not just my area so as well as that it's like as Molly said we have bigger issues and a lot of people look at those bigger issues rather than the smaller issues because in my head it's like the smaller issues are irrelevant when our world is on fire or these big issues that we need to focus on now. It's really interesting that a lot of young people who start more through that side that activist side often that is a route into formal politics however very often and quite a lot because there is the point where it's kind of okay we need to legislate and then some you know not as you know an elected but working with someone else for example running the campaign for them and so so you see a lot of that transition the problem is often the other side that's political parties not having adapted so we've worked with a lot of young people who were really active and two things keep coming up one is that issue of representation Europe brought out in Germany again it's that a lot of young people with migration biographies which in Germany is nearly 30% of young people but only 5% of elected politicians from the local to the federal level represent people with migration biographies and people who try to become involved actually become rejected the second thing is the operation of the policy as you said it was really good example that there's been adaptation so you know you can do things in hybrid settings and young people move around a lot because they have volatile jobs might have to go to different locations take a semester abroad now if you look at a lot not all but a lot of political party structures they are built on the local meeting in a particular physical location at a certain time which becomes difficult if you're a young parent becomes difficult if you don't have the transport means and so on so it's kind of it's it's that the willingness to engage is there the question is do the structures allow so it's often kind of those structural hurdles that that prevent I think from using some of those opportunities I mean when I came into politics for about 50 years ago I mean the major political parties all of memberships of over a million people they were mass movements and we'll maybe come to that because it does make me wonder at times when I see much smaller national party memberships now if that's made everything a bit policy light and lazy in that the parties are coming to policy positions that aren't really rooted in a very very much wider base of activist support but from a much narrower base of activist support which leads to a degree of disengagement too but when you talked about representation Aaron were you meaning that people looking physically don't see themselves or don't hear the issues they want to hear discussed or was it both those things I think it's a mix of both so if you're looking say at msp and you don't see yourself you're like well and they don't cover the issues you want especially in like a smaller area so for me for example I lived in a deprived area and it's like well am I going to vote for an MP or MSP who's actually going to represent that deprived area and represent me or do I vote for which probably doesn't exist and then or do I vote for an MSP or MP who covers the area as a whole and focuses on doesn't essentially focus on that I mean interestingly this this is a proportionally elected parliament but part of the inquiry we've been doing into delivery of democracy we went to Dublin they have citizens panels parliament of a hundred people and they refer that as Ireland in one room because they have every characteristic of the irish republic reflected in the the citizens panel that works and they themselves say but the parliament doesn't and and I look at our parliament even though it's proportionally elected it probably isn't really doesn't you don't you could describe our parliament as Scotland in one room I think I'd certainly say that there are very few disabled very few diverse you know there's more of a balance in gender now than there was before but in so many other ways it still is very removed I think from the Scotland you then walk out onto the streets and sea and I wonder just in terms of that face of politics there are various parliaments we've now got in the UK have any of them actually managed to look and become and seem more representative of of the country or do they all have failings and flaws and you talked about the whole adaptability I think of the infrastructure of democracy which is just lagging behind perhaps the kind of move of people and their willingness to participate the Scottish parliament is definitely better than it was in the most recent election it was the most women that have ever been voted in obviously the first wheelchair user in the parliament as well I did some personal research a couple years ago about women in the UK parliament and I think at one point there was only eight women of colour so it's like eight women of colour of course 600 constituencies you don't see it's like and then sometimes you don't see them in the 600 faces so yeah you don't really feel represented even if they are not your constituency yeah and I think that really throws off young people from voting or even participating in politics as a whole because they're like well I can't see me I can't do that and that's one reason I go into politics because I want more women in politics for young girls to see oh I can do that because I didn't know I could do it until late high school yeah yeah it's a real problem because how do most people get into parliament through a political party so it's the it's it's something where the political party apparatus matters and most parliaments have significant levels of of non-representation so to speak but you sometimes see improvements so recently the German parliament the federal parliament for example the average age went down massively mostly because the social democrats got basically a quarter of their new members are under the age of 35 but why was that is because they made a very concerted effort to recruit young people they one of their leading figures now the general secretary was the leader of the youth movement who was featured very prominently and they organized themselves the youth movement to get young people in who were interested in party politics but you know were engaging also if they went abroad for study abroad or so they could still continue to engage so they were very successful now in terms of migration biographies the german parliament is terrible however because no party has made the effort to reduce the structural barriers so one of the really really important things is how parties deal with it and we actually see that when political parties reach out to constituencies especially younger ones young people pick it up we saw this in scotland then the voting age was lower to 16 after the independence referendum a lot of young people joined political parties including not just independent support the conservatives gained members amongst young people no no no i'm saying it as a and that is that is a good thing because one thing we need to remember young people are diverse in their views there is the entire political spectrum find support amongst young people but what political parties need to do and a lot of not all of the parties but several parties after the referendum did that outreach to this new constituency of young voters and those parties that did really really saw an increase in their membership amongst young people those parties who didn't won't name them right but it's some of them did much less and so it's i think there's a lot on that supply side we sometimes say of politics kind of how how much do you adapt yeah well i mean certainly true i mean my own party did get quite a lot of young people coming which was just as well our membership stayed flat because we've got so many old members and they were all just dying so it kind of kept it kind of kept the membership level level but i found in that 2014 campaign that was when i was persuaded to accept the idea of lowering voting age and we've tried to argue for this with our own party at Westminster because i did that because young people were in my experience in the referendum in 2014 the most actively engaged with the issue when we went round schools they were really engaged and asking detailed questions whereas i found regrettably many older people in the referendum were still asking me basic questions as we got towards the point where they had to vote because they hadn't really done any of that they were kind of still pretty much the tram line of whatever they thought before the thing began whereas young people had gone away and done a lot of research on the actual issues and had ended up in different sides of the argument so it was quite fascinating to see though how that actually changed Erin. I definitely think with that as well it's like no offense to older people but you're not going to see the change that's actually happening and young people are going to have to live for it so i guess that's why they did more research they're going to have to like live with all the different policies that have come with all the different issues so that's why there was obviously more research done with younger people but with older people it was more basic questions because they might not live as well every young person will become an older person let me tell you i can testify to that but i mean this parliament was interesting because you were talking about and i'll come to you again in just a second Molly but you were talking about how younger members had come into the parliament and i came into this parliament in 2007 and i tabled a question and it was how many of the msps were over the age of 60 when the parliament was first elected in 1999 and it was eight and how many of the msps were over 60 when i was elected in 2007 and it was 48 and of course that is a reflection of the fact that if you have a fairly non politically changing environment politicians are re-elected and get older and the average age invariably creeps up now the 2016 parliament here saw 50 new members out of 129 and i think we had something like 43 new members in 2021 so again i think the age of this parliament has has declined but but it's a factor of political cycles rather so it's by accident rather than by design i think i would say in terms of the way in which young people are able to come into it molly yeah well my immediate answer to your um is there any parliament that's done that successfully is us um the youth parliament yeah no i completely agree with what um jan was saying is because we are a completely party a political organisation it's so much easier for us to focus on the things that matter to us party politics does become so divisive especially when there's so many issues on the table and i completely see your point of like older people they just have they're voting for what they know they don't want too much change however young people were all about change we all want change because we're not seeing the stuff that we need out of this world and the parliament is giving it to us i think is what um but we're definitely on the right track though we have done so much amazing work with politicians msp's in uk and scotland um abroad in geneva um and with like at home in the parliament the engagement team they reach out and they do such amazing work with the all variety of people that have encouraged engagement in parliamentary systems in public petitions committee in um the assemblies just reaching out to people that's how you engage with them and even if down the line you or even if initially you don't see yourself represented down the line if we continue on with these kind of engagement strategies then we will see it because it is really deflating not seeing yourself represented that's almost a disrespect they why should i represent a parliament that doesn't respect my views if they're not championing championing the person that i am it's quite difficult to not see yourself especially as a young woman in that political sphere but anytime you do it's terrifying it's it's absolutely terrifying to be a woman in politics and we have spoken about this so much because it doesn't get any easier we'll keep talking about it when it does until it does get easier but it's quite difficult and making the this change diverse is just kind of the first step well let's touch then on a point that you've just raised as one that Jan raised i want to come back to as well but you touched there on how difficult and corrosive and divisive it is uh i sit in the Scottish Parliament's corporate body and since the murder of Sir David Amos we've obviously had to look at the security of all of our all of our colleagues and some of the things you know that not a matter of public record but some of the things we've had to do to protect the domestic addresses of some of my female colleagues here in the parliament are quite shocking yeah and it's not something i've personally experienced but i can see that it seems to be very much something that is focused heavily on female participants and the political process and it's incredibly ugly and i think for those of us who don't necessarily be male colleagues of mine who won't have seen what i've seen i mean who would be deeply shocked i think if they actually saw how far that has gone what has stimulated that i mean i the last 10 i mean the ipad only came into being in 2010 the whole social media kind of uh political sort of cyber war if you want to call it what what has led to that do you feel erin and molly molly do you want to kick off for some time yes um i feel like it's quite a well it's a huge question that you just posed but no it's it is terrifying some of the stuff that the female politicians have to go through myself and soffy the previous chair we did an interview off the back of allegations that came in about angela reiner i've spoken to other female politicians who have to wear an alarm around their neck there's only three of them and they're all women just in case someone breaks into their home or starts attacking them it's so scary the social media definitely hasn't helped it's not it's not to blame at all um it's not entirely to blame it's the people that use it that are kind of making it as divisive and as horrible as it is um but it has been used as a tool to kind of spread that rhetoric against women we've seen so many people become popularised because they're reinstating all these masculine beliefs but they're actually just kind of finding a way to channel their kind of underlying hate it's quite it's really difficult issue to kind of summarise into a cohesive thing because if you wanted to talk about feminist issues i could be here for years um we would never shut up but have you found people are determined to defy that pressure that they find them under or have have you experienced of of those who said look this is more than this is just more than i'm prepared to put up um yeah well myself i love like i love being a young woman in this at this time in this period and like all of the campaigning stuff that i do like girls just want to be safe it's about making life just in general more safe for young women as they go about their business um just going about their daily life i am very proud to have started the um syp's woman empowerment programme um which was we allowed our members to kind of speak to their experiences of being young women in politics engaging with decision makers and we found that um even though like internally we were doing an amazing job at uplifting young women it was when they went out into the world and were engaging with decision makers that they felt unwelcomed and uncomfortable kind of in those areas so we've been kind of looking into why and delving in a bit deeper as well as making some recommendations for ourselves in the future and to the people that we work with parliament and other partners to make young women feel more welcome in those spaces. Erin? As Molly said it is absolutely terrifying to be a young woman in politics or a woman in politics in general um because it put essentially when that happens they also put young women off going into politics because you're like i do not want that to happen to me um and then when i definitely agree that social media isn't the cause but it's definitely a platform that amplifies it because you could i've experienced this you post something and then there's a mass of like people just replying to you saying that you're wrong they all of the time they comment on your physical body um and then in parliament if you're women in parliament stuff like assault and all that can be amplified because someone just thinks your opinion's wrong and like Molly said people wear an alarm so people don't come into your house that's amplified because you're representing people and if people don't agree of that they're going to resort to extreme measures.  I mean from a social policy point of view what your experience of this i mean obviously you've got students who are coming through and where do you see all of this sitting? Absolutely it's a really really fundamental issue because what in the past i mean so as the millennial kind of it's the in the past i remember when i started in student activism and some of those issues came up this was kind of the early 2000s basically and the focus was very much on saying as an individual this is what you can do better basically and we're now fortunately shifting to that other side and look no actually it's the structures we need to make sure the structures that are in place engage with this and provide this because if we don't then certain groups will not be represented as much not because they're not interested motivated but simply because there are those barriers in Germany we did a very extensive project led by my colleague Jan Jaeger which looked at the participation of people with migration biographies which is a very big group in Germany massively underrepresented and one of the key findings that came through was not that the motivation to engage was lower which was usually what it said we need to kind of have campaigns that motivate people that's nonsense that's that's not the problem it was a concern it was representation the other thing was a concern for real safety and people concerned about their families so people who started engaging there was a really large proportion of people who had tried to get engaged in politics and experienced racism in that case and therefore withdrew sometimes not even out of fear for themselves but for their families and we see this this is a major issue in germany at the moment we see this massively amplified right now in certain constituencies where the far right i ffd in germany is is gaining where you know offices of MPs are being smashed in in particular of non-white members of the german parliament and it's a massive problem because unless we engage with the structurally we you know will not enable basically people who want to engage to engage so that shift that i think it's a really important shift over the last 15 years when we talk about the participation of women people with migration biographies other groups that are under represented but i think we've kind of only gotten there more recently that it's been taking seriously on that structural side but without that structural response um yeah we are not i mean i just to touch on germany i was in muni class summer and we visited the bavarian state parliament and i a very engaging young green act elected florian somebody like i actually remember second name but a very nice young guy very very different the greens in germany to the greens here actually because they're very pro entrepreneurial economy and they're very pro nuclear defence i mean and defense quite different but i felt so sorry for florian because he looked as if he was in early 20s and the rest of the bavarian parliament looked to be very old white men and i cannot my god how earth do you get through the day in this sort of an environment i mean do i mean is it often let's say we get women elected into parliaments they get there and then they look around and they feel quite isolated in the parliament itself because they're kind of the only one of their age or anything or interest and i does that also have a kind of negative effect on the of the ability of people to sort of participate in the activism that they've been keen enough to do it they then get themselves elected and unfortunately what they then find when they get there is not what they were hoping it would be not necessarily representing their it doesn't necessarily hinder their ability it represents it hinders the opportunities that they could be getting like connecting with other people and socialising and being active and engaging is all a part of the job of a politician if you find it hard to engage with someone while you're in that door it's just going to limit the opportunities that you have i think a lot of the sense of shared camaraderie around women in politics is because often they're the only other women in the room and that's not necessarily a good enough reason to talk to someone but it's sometimes the only reason that you have um so yeah it just kind of hinders the connections that people could possibly make but also if people are reaching out they could be doing it under a false guise of inclusion or diversity where it's really a check box exercise rather than wanting to get to know you or your policies they're seeing you as a diverse individual or as this person that's here to kind of tick that box rather than for your own the value that you're going to add to that area that you're in because they've obviously been represented they've obviously been picked to represent an area in their own right they they have kind of the ability to do so and they're just not getting the kind of opportunities to show it okay just i think this is one it's such an important point i think because it's you know whatever characteristics people have and represent they also have other characteristics and interests right same with young you said earlier also young people one change that is true it's one of the reasons why young people are less partisan because they look well if a different party changes their program you know maybe i go for this and have impact on their parents quite often it's always one thing why i say political parties should think about young people it's where you have much more opportunity to actually engage discourse and so on but what change young people want varies right there are young people so i'll use the german example just again in the not the last but the the federal election before the most popular party amongst young people was Angela Merkel's christian democrats had a plurality this time the two top number ones were the greens and the the neoliberals in the german parliament so there is a lot more fluidity for that reason and young people are as diverse right young people are not only young people women are not only women and you know people with migration biographies also so the person i've talked earlier about one of the german MPs a young MP who's joined whose office was smashed is a construction engineer and it's like it's one of his big focus points you know sustainable concern he says i'll talk about all these other issues too but you know i don't just want to be seen for this so so it's it is kind of a base to have others but you have to be an advocate for your identity without like it's not your sole purpose so it's completely right honestly so it's really difficult something else i certainly feel sometimes the political system doesn't help because we appoint people to speak on a particular subject and then nobody ever asks them ever to express a few and anything other than the particular subject that they've been asked to represent and so they become pigeonholed and the public mind is being completely polarised on an issue when in fact they've got a far broader range of interests and you said something quite a while ago that struck me just as before we come to questions from the audience and it was this you know that everybody says oh young people have lost faith in politics and they're skeptical about it and i think you quite interestingly said well actually why is that a bad thing is is being skeptical and not having faith in all the current arrangements not actually as it should be and is it maybe not as it's always been to a degree and that the agent for changes in fact that skepticism it's it is i think a healthy degree of skepticism is a good thing because otherwise if we're happy why would i engage right it's a um so but there's one thing that we need to be careful about and we do see this in some countries tipping over the edge and i think this isn't issue in the uk not not solely and that is you still need to have the the acceptance for the institutions even if they're run by people who don't agree we call it a political science losers consent right if you lose the election if you're campaigning for something but it's not there you still accept that there are people you know who are governing for example at the moment but i have the right to challenge them and i have the right to challenge them in whichever way i see fit that is healthy what we're seeing now however is that sometimes that legitimacy itself gets questioned that's the point where it tips over the edge i don't think we're there in the uk yet but we do have a minority in the uk that have distant that have so much just but across all ages we it's higher than it was 20 years ago the number of people who genuinely think the political system is is done for me is not as bad as in the us in the us we are in a position where people genuinely do not accept the legitimacy of political outcomes in big masses and we see what that results in in germany it's a minority view but one that in certain regions is very strong quite a few of the voters of the ift do not accept the democratic system in the first place so i think overall skepticism is a good thing but it needs to still be within that confines now and i think at the moment i think overall we're still there in the uk but i do think it's something we need to work very hard to maintain well i mean let me just ask you before we finally move to the audience in the 2014 referendum we had here we had the highest turnout on voting day in any poll ever held anywhere in the whole of the united kingdom and i took that to be because people thought the issue mattered and therefore the outcome wasn't determined and therefore how they vote mattered my eastwood constituency typically has one of the highest turnouts in elections of any seat anywhere in the united kingdom not because they want to get rid of me or sport me particularly but because it's a genuine three-way marginal and in the last 15 years labor the snp and the conservatives have all won my seat and therefore people think i need to go out and vote because the outcome in this election is not one anybody yet knows whereas there are other parliamentary seats where i think maybe people think there's nothing i'm going to do on polling day that's going to affect the outcome so i won't vote so is there a is there a kind of and then people think that is representative generally of people's level of activism is there a is there a definite need because i'm not sure there is activism and people actually voting voting is terribly important but i can see there will be people who are very much participative in active democracy but who don't necessarily think that the outcome of the vote in their own area is going to make much difference the i agree with nearly everything you said it's the the what we do see is um you're absolutely so two key factors for whether people turn out in elections referenda and so on is a do they think the issue is important and b do they think the election matters in terms of determining the outcome is their feeling of efficacy so absolutely this we know closely contested elections have higher turnout and so on absolutely when we come out but there is another dimension to it and that's that activism side the kind of civic society the engagement the sort of thing that you know you've groups do and so on and you're right the two things are not perfectly aligned but actually what we know is it's kind of nearly the other way around from how you described it people who become more active outside representative democracy and voting are much more likely to vote because ultimately it's like they see that voting isn't enough for them they do the other thing but very few people who do that activism then say and I won't also cast my vote it's kind of the other way around one of the things where sometimes skepticism about activism because it usually challenges the status quo but those are the people who are engaged already in many regards and it's one of the reasons one of the other reasons why turnout was so high in the Scottish independence referendum of course people thought it was very important and they saw it was contested but actually when you look throughout the two years of the campaign when you ask people how likely are you to participate it gradually increased that wasn't a given from the very beginning and it is overall because those two years from a kind of broader civic point of view but I'm not making a judgment here on which side is right but overall I would describe the Scottish independence referendum campaign with some exceptions but overall as a positive civic process because the engagement we saw I mean people were interested in academics like me we work asked constantly to go into town halls to go into schools to engage politicians engage young people organizations organize so many things both sides could speak in the campaign as well there were exceptions where something told but not but overall compared to what normal election campaigns look like now it wasn't incredibly civically engaged process and that is the other factor that's often ignored when there is healthy civic debate that stretches beyond what's happening in parliament people also become more engaged usually with representative democracy and that that is again that challenge I think that I would put in particular to political parties and people in power is it is totally fine to say things happen through the representative mechanism but don't see that activism outside as competition to you see it as an opportunity to engage with people who you might otherwise not be able to speak to that that is I think one of the the really important challenges and a word in this area from both of you Aaron I think with party politics as well if you have an MSP who is more likely to engage in that activism young people are more likely to vote for them because they're like I saw that person there they support my cause I'm more likely to vote for them I live in one of the only Labour constituencies in the UK parliament in Scotland so at the last general election it was one of I think and you live in Edinburgh so we can work it out so it was and how is he in Murray I'm not going to answer but the last election I think was one of the closest ever because a lot of yep it was my first general election so my year was like first general election oh because it's been a lot better in education learning that we have to vote is in pse curriculums but with the activism point and with young people are more likely to vote if they're involved in activism it's because it gives you an opportunity to learn more about politics how it works because if you're involved in it you're more likely to go in research and that involves in party politics so yeah and I think the reason that the very simple reason that the highest turnout was for the referendum is because it was a very simple question yes or no um you're not looking into all of these polls like that they're not voting for a party you're not voting for a person you're voting for an idea in a sense there is people behind the movements on both sides however it's very well obviously not very simple decision but it's boiled down to a simple phrasing of yes or no sometimes party politics tends to hide behind kind of confusing wording or difficult policies that are not designed to engage with everyone but I think that that was a very distilled conversation which allowed for more engagement in that way and as you were saying engagement from everyone across scotland everyone wanted to know everyone wanted to be involved in campaigning either yes or no it was quite a simple reason but um it kind of distilling that those decisions down to that kind of base level is an easy way to get people involved in politics activism it ties into that perfectly because it is the issue distilled down to the base level they're not campaigning for people to take it forward they're not looking for parties they're not looking for anything they're looking for a specific issue and they're campaigning on its behalf which is what I think it just makes it in my mind it's a lot more simpler than voting for a party when you have to understand all these different things and it exactly as Erin said activism allows you to become more educated about these different what parties support your issues what different people think like I wouldn't have known half the stuff about who to who I wanted to vote for who represents the things I believe in until I got involved in volunteering and activism and campaigning in the youth parliament I would have absolutely no idea so I've been quite lucky in that sense that I've had the the reach out to me and I have had the kind of reach out back to be able to be involved. Yes Erin please. Molly mentioning like the yes or no question I only got top how to vote in the additional member system which I completely agree with but it's very complicated for people who are in their first election I only got taught it in modern studies which is a subject you had to choose so a lot of young people don't understand it and their vote doesn't actually get counted because they'll do the same as the first pass to post to someone and put an X when you actually have to rank them it's not really taught in schools so that puts a lot of young people off voting or even if they do vote it's not counted. I mean interesting I mean the societal shift is that politics was banned as a as a topic for conversation in schools when I was there I mean it just wasn't allowed and now it is very much an active base and I was I mean two things in my own constituency recent I mean the turnout in eastwood in the referendum was I think 93% and I mean when I was younger we used to laugh when the Politburo in the Soviet Union talked about turnouts of 93% because we used to say I right but so I mean it was extraordinary to see that level of engagement but I was also struck speaking to St Ninian's high school in East Renfrewshire 250 senior pupils who asked me a series of questions at the end and I said is there a final question and at the end of it senior pupils stood up and said you're I'd like to ask why you're a conservative because you don't seem to agree with anything your party's actually doing and I think that that is often misunderstood that within political parties all of them we can have end up there but that doesn't mean that we have signed or that anybody has signed up to the whole agenda of a party which over decades can move quite sharply within the parameters of that one party to quite different positions on different things and you can find you're in fashion with a particular party who's not out of it but still actively involved in it but from outside it's not quite that simple young people they're more left while they're young and then they grow up and it's research have become more right winged or right on the political skills so it's like a lot of young people begin there and then they shift just like political parties across well I will live and hope because I taught my sons to be independent one of them is a vegan carbonite so I will hope that you're right now we're going to come to you on the other obviously I hope you've enjoyed the conversation and we're not restricted to that but with you know if you've got contributions you'd like to our questions you'd like to put or themes you'd like us to explore we'd be very happy to do that so if you can tell us who you are and a microphone will come to you so don't rush into it till the microphone does and when the microphone comes to tell us who you are and then put your point and forgive me I might occasionally take two or three points just at once if in order to ensure that we cover as many people in the 35 minutes or so that we've got to do this so this gentleman here I'll come to you first and you were fastest with the hand I think thank you my name is brice goodall I'm a pronouns of he him I'm a neurodivergent neurodiverse interim rainbow greens representative on the Scottish Greens membership committee um I just wanted to maybe go into two bits especially somebody's gottism and the statistic myself is accessibility into politics because basically we're seeing political parties and groups in the same websites and sign ups then moving to like app based membership systems or using like google google or using apple pay to try and be able to take collect membership dues and also looking at accessible actions on apps especially if we like a rural and highland activists who may not be able to travel into into real life in IRL like actions and basically I'm just wanting to find out more about that about what your opinions about that and do you think we should really be speaking plain English inside the parliament because the thing is this so we're talking I think that from what I've seen through politics is it's a people who have who because I take a lot of words to come to my point because I would say I'm not very well educated um I've only went to school and I think when you have people who can build to say some some words in shorter shorter words but use big language it can really be quite quite scary to see that they're getting more platformed than people who are disabled and neurodivergent and neurodivergent and moving on to like for example with my role in drembo greens and also trying and also as neurodivergent as well as we've seen that for example Lorna Slater being absolutely attacked on social media due to the due to the deposit return scheme and the trans siblings being absolutely attacked online through the gender recognition reform bill that's been going through going through the courts at the moment and the thing is this so do we think we need social media companies to really step up and really really be really be there for example like to do we need a verification body where basically we may make sure that we know who is actually interacting with people because we've seen for example an app which was which was about to become big in this country was called clubhouse and we've seen like the safety of women by um there were even a house called the safety of women on clubhouse where women are felt just so scared to take part in like social audio app stuff like that is that that could be how do we actually really fundamentally support and how and how can also young boys and men especially in politics how can we show up as allies how can we show up as accomplices how can we do things better in politics how can how can we navigate that because i mean i remember not i've been remember when i was removed from sex relationships education from school lawfully and because the thing is this was as was autistic how can we help to help how can we help to support people with that thank you very much okay thank you for that we're quite a basket of issues there and one of them that struck me and obviously there are the accessibility issues that were raised but of course the whole way in which we talked to this earlier social media interacts and how corrosive it is and i suppose that it's the two-part question in addition to the wider response in principle should there be some sort of regulation of social media content and in practice how on earth would that and i think that has been the difficulty for everyone how would that operate because who would decide what was regarded as being inappropriate and and corrosive yan have you got a view on that and the accessibility is because we've got there's quite an proactive focus on autism and the issues in relation to its impact on participation and generally in life within the parliament just now and we that there was a cross-party group meeting just recently with recommendations that went to the minister that are currently being considered but it's a really really important issue and actually the two issues are connected i would say the the first point is to me absolutely regulation the only way however how regulation works because we you won't be able to have a kind of a government oversight of every message that is posted is to put the responsibility onto the companies themselves it's actually through the sort of things you know we place very high burdens of safety standards in construction companies and so on you can place a similar burden on theoretically a social media company and they then have the responsibility to figure it out and if they don't could lose a license to operate type thing um so it would would not just become a default that they wouldn't allow anything to be posted because that was the safest thing to do because that would destroy their business model because then they can't target people with advertisements it's complicated but the most um promising suggestions that i have seen on this is genuinely to get those companies to basically think about they they can invest into certain types of technology they did it before when certain types of content uh needed to remolarate they hired people to do this and so on they it but the burden needs to be with them to come up with the solution ultimately but they need to be mandated otherwise they lose the revenue streams i think this is the thing and it best works obviously if multiple countries operate in a similar way and and generate that bigger burden should they allow people to participate on social media anonymously as so many absolutely do because it's the anonymous contributions that are very often the most vicious and you can't track down who they are where they're from or anything and then when you look to see how many followers they've got it's like 16 or something like that but they've been allowed to be really really pejoratively unpleasant i think the ability to operate anonymously is very important because it's a safe space as well for people for example with certain you know sexual identities and so on to operate not under their clear name for example so i think that's possible but should they have the ability to know who it is behind does there need to be a background verification for so there are complicated debates around this but i think we can do it but the responsibility needs to be in a space but there's a second dimension which comes back to what erin was saying earlier around education because this has become we've done research on this in germany the number one source through which young people see political information is through social media channels now some of that is from other outlets so young people find often through social media bbc content that's produced through social media so it's not all influencer stuff you know it's like this is broader but the channel is there it's happening so again there's that education thing it's one of the things that we've done in our research on votes at 16 in scotland the number one thing where we didn't a lot of good things happen there's a positive long-term effect on turnout but one thing hasn't been achieved and that is that all young people in scotland have the same opportunity to harness that opportunity of voting earlier because how political education is done varies massively by local authority in the referendum there were local authorities that allowed hustings in schools and all research says you can do this as long as it's balanced there's you know teaching do it go go engaged as long as it's balanced and neutral but there were local authorities where they said basically you're not allowed to talk about the referendum in school and that inequality still persists on scotland we do not have a uniform approach to civic education which is a big big problem the third final point that relates back to this and i think it has to do with this education knowledge side as well to the point on accessibility and plain English using plain English in political debates now sometimes yes in a committee something will be very very technical and technical that's fine but especially when we see the sort of bigger conversation the discussions in the chamber it really matters because political parties this was Molly you were talking about this earlier as well it's not just that they sometimes come across as you know a bit vague and kind of difficult to it's sometimes a strategy this was Angela Merkel was incredibly successful with a strategy of what they called asymmetric demobilisation in other words basically being so vague that the other side becomes bored effectively i mean this this is in a nutshell plain English that's every day here and it worked it worked it was not that they gained new voters but they basically got the other side to become totally disinterested and it's it's a really really important point that that sort of plain language clear engagement ability is something that we call out when it's not there and they're able to detect so i think those three issues are actually connected quite strongly just Molly yeah and i know what to lose a state of some of the specific points that no that's why i've been making some notes for me keeping keeping track yeah i completely agree with what all of what you've just touched on the last point really specifically about accessibility into politics it's something that we've really tried to improve in ourselves as an organisation and kind of challenge others to do the same we've kind of taken a listening learning and an adapting approach we're listening to people's lived experiences learning from what they had to say and what works best for them in kind of all of these different spheres of accessibility and neurodiversity just the way that different people engage with material and how what what we put out there what content we put out and how we engage with young people to change and then adapt to become the best versions of ourself going forward accessibility is a really big thing i touched on about being rural and something that's something that i'm very familiar with us being from just north of Inverness yeah it's it was quite difficult to become initially involved but again i was really lucky as i said at the start to um have that kind of youth work base that gave me the more fundamental like more fundamentals than my education system did like erin was saying that modern studies is a necessity we didn't have it we were in a really deprived rural area we didn't have modern studies teachers we hardly had history we did with what we had and i'm very lucky to have ended up where i actually am um but yeah the i think something that can kind of underpin all of this is just kind of a having an intersectionality to all of these issues is knowing that um one of these things doesn't mean you like what we were touching on earlier like one of these things doesn't mean that you are just one of these things the barriers to kind of engagement are intersectional there's a whole different host of things that go into people engaging with activism democracy and politics and more widely um yeah and then just kind of challenging others to be to make their spaces more accessible as well is something that we've tried to do and we've tried to bring into our activism as well erin i think i wanted to touch on the point of yan saying about background checks as well and if you put it to like an intersectional view it's a lot harder for especially trans youth if they're using a different name online for safety reasons or that's the name they go by and they have to provide id obviously it doesn't colorate and they might get banned for me personally a lot of abuse that i have received is off x is it twitter yeah that is a very the way it's going right now we don't know what's happening we don't know if it'll ever be background checked it's a very wishy washy way to go um with young men and boys i think the best thing to do is just listen to your peers and listen to young women who want to go into politics i think that's the thing i've always said to like my peers just just just listen and bring unfortunately in the society that we have a lot of young men are going to have a bigger voice than young women and if you raise those issues and be like well actually someone i know and then bring that someone you know up into it as well and giving the focus on the young women herself okay i'm good to ask this we'll take maybe a couple of questions so can i see hands up again just so i've got an idea so we take one here and then we'll take the gentleman here at the end of this row next you use the phrase we can say who you are again just remind us of you um my name is adela i'm 26 years old you use the phrase that we've inherited a world on fire could the panel discuss the how decades of climate change activism and an insufficiently urgent response from world governments will have affected people's disillusionment with general politics okay so interesting and we'll take this question at the same time hi everyone i'm jack i'm 21 i'm a student at the university of glasgow and i'm also a former member of the scottish youth parliament i wanted to ask about kind of the changing image of activism and tie into both what molly said about the media and yan what you've said about civic education for example in modern studies um when i was going through modern studies in high school the main image of activism that we got um for those who did take modern studies was uh it's a very dated example but the fathers for justice protests um i presume that example has now changed probably to just stop oil as those are the main group gaining traction right now and a lot of young people are kind of seeing activism as protest signs causing disruption and the media hating you effectively so do you think the presentation of activism is causing further disillusionment and what can be done to change that okay i think we better unpack those two issues because they were quite separate so we start off first with the whole way in which i think particularly younger people have embraced the whole international debate about climate and their focus on whether or not that uh that that whole debate and the resolutions required to take it forward are being properly addressed and are in themselves feeding activism or feeding disillusionment molly do you want to yeah well it's funny that they say that because i think these issues are very much interlinked what jack was saying it's very much ties into the fabulous question about climate change and the way that governments are going forward with it i've changed that that bio from the start of studying scots law and energy so i'm very passionate about climate change and i've done so much stuff on campaigning around it specifically one of the things that i've been lucky enough to do in my time at syp was attend coi 16 which is the youth version of cop 26 and i remember fundamentally like as a base um we had such an amazing time of speaking to other young activists from all across the world their journeys how they're working in their own country and different things that they were doing but um the thing that stuck with me the most about the conference was actually an interview that i did afterwards um because at the time the cop 26 was happening there was also so many protests in the street of young people going out and shouting for things that they believe in and i had an interview with a journalist who asked me do you think that these people are giving what you do and your form of activism a bad name it's like absolutely not they're very much interlinked the people from the inside the house would not have the voice that they do from the with it wasn't for the people outside the people outside are giving us a platform not even outside that's a terrible way to put it and i can't phrase it any better than that because i was physically in the building um i it was the people that are out there on the streets the grassroots activism that gives the people um like me the kind of representatives of the youth parliament or just any activist body the opportunity to kind of have our voices heard at these top levels they give us that base that foundation activism is changing the way that it's coming across is different for everyone but the way that it's becoming an unstoppable tidal wave is just so impressive it's sweeping up everyone that wants to be involved everyone that's never felt like they had a voice can come together and get behind especially climate change there's nobody that wants to live in a world this on fire there's no one on this planet and we see it as young people are such as it's such a simple issue to us as do all these different things but there's so many different policy strains that come into it it's such a difficult issue to navigate so it's about kind of taking those two strains of the way that activism is phrased to make it more palatable for the people that are making the these big decisions but also making the people that make these decisions kind of simplifying and taking it back to a baseline where people that do activism are happy with the results of a sense they're they're feeling a sense of accomplishment and i'm feeling a sense of accomplishment for being able to echo their voices at this high level that something is being done i don't know if i want to personally speak on whether enough is being done because then we'll just go into a whole different rabbit hole um but yeah okay era i think again those questions are definitely interlinked because it was the whole point of the fridays for change was seen as bad because children were missing education and that was bringing like a spotlight to climate change so it was painted as bad but the way it was actually taken it's done a lot more than i think anyone ever expected it to do um activism as a whole especially with like protests and all that i think it's a lot of traditional media who see it as bad and how it's especially like newspapers tvs a lot of people just pick out the bad bits of it as well and when it's actually a lot of good it's a community who wants something to change and it only really gets that bad when we aren't seeing that change we feel like we have to do something that bad for it to get attention and then that brings it to the point of especially with climate change it came that bad because people weren't doing anything and then that brought another spotlight to be like oh we have to actually change something it's a really important point because yes obviously the debate about the climate crisis is it's not new right it's like when i was in school in the 90s i learned about the greenhouse effect and so on i remember your people people are calling this out it's not it's not a new thing of course i think where the biggest frustration comes so i work one of my projects where i work on is where we're looking at the the kind of understandings also the economic understandings of the climate crisis in multiple countries and one of the things that struck me when we talked to um long-standing campaigners and kind of big international organizations like greenpeace and so on as well was that they were saying the biggest disillusionment and so on and i think that that does reverberate then with views on the political system was that effectively yes the issue is now on the agenda but it's sometimes still seen as another topic as if kind of it's not a topic that is actually connecting into pretty much nearly every realm of of our engagement so the a key frustration that that i think came out was that it's not become structural enough in view but individual i mean one of the things that often gets called out a few years ago greenpeace even changed their position on actually what we first need to talk is our political and economic system because i mean everyone knows the the personal carbon footprint which is a concept vp developed with other obviously fossil fuel companies because it shifts the focus on individual responsibility now we should all take individual responsibility but even if everyone lives more sustainable individually tomorrow we have not gained that much because of the bigger structural things of how do we produce our energy and so on i'm sure most people know that in the room but it's one of those really important things to bring us back to this question is politics able to engage with things at the level it needs to be engaged with at that point then people disagree on the solution some young people believe more in technology others think technology is kind of a thick leaf kind of thing and so on and we have different views that's why young people are in different political parties even if they care about the climate crisis but it's it's that question is it being looked at structurally so i i think that is how quite a bit of that frustration comes in is kind of that question can politics engage and it brings us back because it is a structural point that civic education point and so on by the way there's been really great empirical research last year that looks at if you have more extreme form of protests i'll use this as a neutral term extreme but like kind of if we use just our violence or now it doesn't actually affect public opinion overall negatively because what typically happened it legitimizes the the form of demonstration that's become more mainstream so fridays for future is now seen suddenly as the kind of nice part and so on so it's kind of it shifts things into the debate and it also allows different young people for example to participate in different forms of protest some young people would not like that form but would engage in a different way and so on but on the school point the final point i think it's really important i don't want to blame in particular the teachers in scotland because their modern studies teachers history they do a tremendous work and sometimes are really there's a great project at the university of Glasgow that was done at the stevens institute they show a lot of teachers are really they really want to do it but they're also worried of being criticized we've talked earlier right this kind of are you influenced all research says this is not a problem there's occasionally a tiny story but overall teachers are incredibly responsible and sometimes i say maybe even too responsible but um but overall it's a really really important thing to have those debates but because people are really careful it's how much do you engage with a variety of activisms is is a really big thing what sort of teaching materials are available if it's not mainstreamed that's the other thing and then there's a third thing and we've seen the best civic payoff from civic education is when schools themselves are places that allow for democratic engagement fantastic project by the city of vienna where young people in schools actually do a citizen's budget in their district so representatives from each school get together there's a certain budget set aside young people determine things they have to vote on it they don't get everything they want they have to go back into their schools convince people's proposals get voted on and those things get implemented with city planners so the key thing is it's not just what is taught but also that question do schools about because what you see when those things happen then also young some people like very much the formal process whereas others are going to protest their fellow students because they don't like how they do it so even within schools we can show that there are varieties of forms of political engagement and and when that happens it usually only has positive effects none of the negative things people are afraid of so I think it's really important but but there is this question of do we just teach us or do we also practice it in in the educational context I mean that's such a can I'll throw in us my observation as an aging politician was that I grew up in an era I think when there were far more in-depth interviews with senior politicians where what they meant by a slogan was teased out and understood and when political discussion programmes and television were issue based in detail whereas now they tend to be question time type formats where in Scotland it seems to me everything comes back to the constitution in response to almost a question about anything else and so that political parties it seems to me now embrace issues and march people up the hill say on the climate agenda or the green agenda and people fallen behind supporting them only for those politicians ever to actually have articulated specifically what they were planning to subsequently do so that I think some of the disillusionment that might have been expressed there is because once the politicians are in power they think well oh we didn't actually necessarily mean that but nor do they go back and properly explain to people why or why not they're then going to take something forward so there's a sense that well you sounded as if you were really engaged in this issue and wanted to take it forward you then get into power and well you haven't done anything about it and when we ask you why you've not done anything about it you answer by telling us the answer to our question we didn't ask at all and that whole kind of corruption of the debate seems to me to have helped fuel my disillusion to some extent at the other end of my political career to the one I came into where I felt there was much more of a testing of an argument than I see now despite the fact there is far more politics and politics on available to watch now than there was when I was younger but I learned more watching it when I was younger than I do know am I wrong I mean I think that two things from my perspective to one is I do think one thing that has gotten better but it's not there yet is that there's been improvement in the variety of voices that get to talk about politics so great thing that happened around the referendum was the BBC's generation 2014 panel 16 17 year olds all over Scotland selected to be diverse being brought into mainstream programming that's a good thing I agree with the second point though about a lot of also virtue signaling from certain politicians and so on and after the elections it goes empirically what it's no one likes to lose but if you lose an election for example or a vote or a campaign and it doesn't get implemented but you understand why it and it was realized you can regroup and so on especially if you get feedback and things that doesn't have to be negative it's much worse if you win and then you had massive hopes and nothing of that happens and this is sometimes of course your politics can be compromises in Germany we're used to coalitions all the time so compromise very difficult for parties to to deal with that but it's also parties that change their view it's it's I mean I take an example from the UK it's the same in Canada Liberals in Canada Labour in the UK in 1997 come into power saying we're going to change the electoral system and not doing it okay changed to the House of Lords but right the the administration said they would change the electoral system they didn't do it now those are some of the worst things you can do and it's particular point into to young people because if especially because young people are often recruited by parties as the campaigners as the ones who are willing to go out as willing to do stuff and if then there's no follow through that creates a much bigger disillusionment than a loss so it's so I share some of those points but I do think there's one positive side I would say is that we have seen a greater variety of voices than that in the past who could talk about things can I come back to you because if the microphone you asked the question how would you have answered your this lady how would you have answered your own question in terms of the disillusionment I think you saw between what's said and what's done I think what you said well what both of you said about politicians say oh we're going to do this but then it's just not done to the extent that people thought it was going to be done like they think it's been treated as the big priority world on fire that we think it's going to be and it hasn't been and you mentioned you learned about greenhouse gases when you were a child when I was a child we learned about how polar bears are going to get extinct and this generation of children are hearing about how people are going to lose their homes and entire islands will be lost so we've heard about it for a long time it's getting worse and you just don't see the level of urgency and response so I can understand someone thinking oh well like we've talked to move talked and they're not listening so there's no point which is obviously an over simplistic and defeatist way to view it but it is understandable why some people would feel that way yeah and can we come back to this gentleman as well just to what's your response to your own proposition um I think a lot of the responsibility comes down to the media um personally um I think it's very clear that um wanting to shut down kind of protest as and delegitimize it effectively is um a really big issue now and social media is absolutely not helping either um I think as um you mentioned Jan with um groups like Friday's for future gaining legitimacy as a result of arguably more extreme groups like Just Stop Oil like that can only be a positive and with events like uh COYE um in Glasgow for Cop as well giving young people that sort of platform and then you're seeing um young people take these take positions for example um with the UN and with SYP's recent um excursion to Geneva for the the UN Children's Rights Committee just kind of focusing on what I would say is more like insider activism or kind of like more palatable activism is probably the best way to kind of give it legitimacy I would say um even though it's absolutely important to report on the other side of the coin as well excellent okay well let's have one last round of questions so can I see those who would still like to ask a question we've got two at the front and we got a last encouragement around the room so that you haven't missed your chance so we've got one here and we've got cheers we'll start with the one there and we'll bring all three of you in at this point so just remind us again who you are and then ask make your point or ask your question. Hi I'm Bethany Iverson I'm a member of Scottish Youth Parliament for Clydesdale my pronouns are she there and I'd just like to ask like the panellists it's a really basic question but I think it's really important what kind of words of wisdom or advice do you have for young people who are wanting to enter politics but maybe don't have the confidence or the kind of courage to advocate for things that they care about okay and we'll take these two questions as well so that we can then pull all the contributions together. I'm Rachel I'm the member of the Scottish Youth Parliament for Edinburgh Northern Leith and I use she her pronouns I think one of the sort of key themes or trends that we notice when we're engaging with decision makers is that they will approach us with their agenda so they will approach us with issues that they've deemed a priority or that they've deemed important and this is even the case for sort of committees or groups that are designed to serve young people but we often find that we identify different priorities or that the priorities that they come to us with we haven't seen as a massive issue we don't find to be young people's priorities so how can we ensure that there are more opportunities for young people to direct engagement to set the agenda sort of to approach the decision makers themselves and say look these are our priorities now can you engage with us and finally thank you I'm Marcus Looker I'm also member of Scottish Youth Parliament I represent Angus South and I'm very proud to do so and I just want to pick up on some of the points that Molly was making but was also kind of touched upon around education and to talk a bit about like youth work and so Molly talked about the role of good youth work in getting her involved in politics and the area that I represent in Angus has seen significant cuts to our local authority youth work and so I'll give you an example so I recently did some outreach in Breakin which is a town in North Angus and I was talking about a ton of two girls I said to them so what do you do like what do you do at the weekend and they said nothing why is that because there's nothing to do no one ever tells us what's on offer no one gives us an opportunity to get involved in our community there's a town in North Angus as well Kiri Muir which has pride itself on its community activism it has this thing called Kiri Connections all the people in the town get involved except the young people because they're never invited in it's exactly what Rachel was talking about when young people then are are then looking to get involved with opportunities of activism or of community their issues are not really reflected when they bring up issues they're told but that's not what we're hearing or that's not my understanding of the situation we're told that our version of events is wrong or not you know not what the adults are talking about so my kind of question then is about about youth work what is the role of good youth work and good youth voice and participation in upskilling young people so that when they're in the room they can do exactly what Rachel was saying about getting their issues onto the agenda great thank you what we've got about a minute of peace for each of you in the time available so if you might like to pick an issue out of the basket of questions we got there Erin can I come to you so I originally got involved in politics through girl guiding so youth work is a lot I think a lot of people don't realise as well a lot of the adults are volunteers they don't get paid for their time but I think the good way to get younger people involved in youth work in politics for the adults themselves is to look at channels from broader spectrums I think my opportunity for the house of lords came from my leader looking on the girl guiding instagram saying oh everyone would be interested in that and then sending it to me so it's mostly just look at try ask your girl i mean girl guiding try ask your girls what they're interested in or try go around the community ask what they're interested in even if it is volunteering and it can't happen every week but I think it's just a good implement to start I obviously I don't have experience in more like rural rural places and more like widespread areas because I'm living a city um and I've always lived in cities so it's very much but I lived in a more deprived area of the city and it's obviously again people don't get paid for it but asking them to say I'm interested in this if you see anything on official channels can you let me know or can you let the community know thank you yeah um it's not word of words of wisdom I wouldn't claim that much but what I would say it's the flip side I kind of of what we said earlier I do think if you want to get engaged don't feel you have to start with the top level kind of big party politics necessarily find something that feels right to you and for some people by the way that is parties you know people love that sort of structured approach and so on find something that's right for you because if you find a community through which you can engage an organization through which you can engage then they will support you if and if that is through an activist route for example and you find you have a real passion but some of you have supporters who might you know support you in getting through this there are also now initiatives um I love the name of one in Germany called brand new Bundestag uh which basically champions young people who otherwise might not have said there are organizations now that try to coach and help and so on so there is actually support for that formal political role but but finding that is true I think just to say on the youth work one I absolutely agree I talked earlier about the importance of civic education we see this as one of the dominant gaps still in Scotland to harness even more of the opportunity we have but it's not only school based civic education it's also education outside of school especially for young people who might have difficulty in school aren't in school this much and so on it's it's one of those areas it actually doesn't cost that much money compared to other funding pots money is always scarce but it's incredibly important and I'm appalled at the moment in Germany that in a context where we see a far right party in parts of East Germany polling at 30% that the German government is cutting its democracy fund it's it's so I I can't just agree and in some cases there is so much good practice out there but it needs the money it is there is a financial resource question that absolutely comes into it. Thank you. I'm going to try and touch on all of the questions I'd be absolutely remiss if I didn't take this opportunity to mention our elections are happening in November and you can sign up to become an MSYP on our website please get involved but no this is one amazing way to get involved in activism for members all across the country we really pride ourselves on being able to upskill young people in a way that empowers them to be their best selves going forward but genuinely it can as exactly as Jan say find something you're interested in and follow it it doesn't need to be party politics it doesn't need to be this it can genuinely be anything university societies clubs after school in school there's so much stuff to get involved with and if there isn't make it that kind of entrepreneurial and like innovation is what we need to kind of have those voices heard all across the country. The decision makers that is a really something that we touched on earlier the only thing is that advocacy is currently tailored to decision makers they want us to come to them the only thing that we can do about this is persistency and consistency of passionate like campaigning on the issues that affect young people that's really the only thing until the system is changed in essence and youth work. My favourite topic of all time I think that it kind of really comes back to what we were saying about earlier about how people that represent one demographic are often told to talk about that one demographic. I feel like as the chair of the youth parliament I get wheeled out quite a lot to talk about youth work and its importance but it's something that I'm really passionate about so it does kind of feel as well. I've spoken a lot recently about youth work funding how it's integral to our education system about upskilling young people and making them the best version of themselves and to be able to contribute effectively to society but also as a barrier like that it engages so many young people when it's not there it allows young people to slip through the gaps and fall into poverty fall just become more disengaged with the overall political system. Youth work is underpinning a lot of the different things that we hold dear as a society and education poverty, housing a lot of things that people don't necessarily see the connections with but the funding is absolutely it's imperative. Fantastic thank you. Well can I say to you all that coming up at one o'clock in the festival of politics afternoon Michael Purtillo the former politician and broadcaster in conversation three o'clock there's a discussion on boys and men and gender-based violence and then at six o'clock a discussion about the future of Scotland's arts and culture immediately following this there will be a survey you'll be invited to complete about the session which would very much welcome you do so can I finally then thank all of you for your participation attendance and ask you to thank our three panellists again.


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So, today we will use the magic of autograt to build neural networks. Well, very simple neural networks that solve simple problems. And we will just work on linear functions. Nonlinear loss is okay, but in the first part of the definition of deep learning, the function that we are looking at is a linear function. And week three we will actually learn that a lot of nonlinear learning is just linear learning and the keyword there is neural tangent kernel. But let's see what we can learn about linear problems. Now you'll be like linear regression. Isn't that what we do in the first time that we're studying? Isn't linear regression just linear algebra? Can we step over this? Why is this even interesting? So the first one is it turns out that the dynamics of linear systems can be very interesting.  We can even have some that in a way go around circles. Now, deep learning systems that are nonlinear share a lot of properties with their linear breadth and understanding the dynamics of linear learning will really help you have intuition to see what's going right or wrong when you then train on linear systems. So from my perspective, thinking about the linear case is really the one thing that grounds me in intuition. So I'm very excited about today. But first let's look at some neurons. Now I'm a neuroscientist. I can't not talk about neurons. What do we have when we look at neurons? We have neurons have inputs. They're called dendrites. This is where the information comes in, comes in as spike trains. They have integration, which is seen as the body of the cell where everything gets to be integrated. Arguably dendrites do a lot of integration are very nonlinear and so forth. But that's the topic of current research. And neurons have an output, the axon. Now every neuron if you then look in, looks like in fast auto approximation, it's doing linear integration. So what I'm talking here, we have the change in voltage, the u over dt times the membrane time constant is minus the difference between the current voltage and the resting voltage. So they tend to go back to where they started plus r times i. So this last term r times i is where the information comes in. And look what do we have here? We have a linear integration. So in a sense everything looks to be linear. It's not entirely true. We'll see. So let's look at neural responses to inputs. What we do here is we take a cell that we have in a dish and we take an electrode and we stick it into the electrode. And what we do is for two seconds, we put voltage into that. And then what we get is we get responses out of the cell. It's what's called a spike train. So we can see how at first it spikes very quickly and then it spikes a little less quickly. That is what's called adaptation. And then we can see, well, what happens if we put more or less current into the cell? And here you see examples from two cell types. What you see on the x-axis is the current that we put in. The further we are to the right, the stronger we drive the cell. On the y-axis you have the spike frequency, which is how many spikes do I get per second. You see roughly the range here. When we stimulate cells, their activity might go up to 50 hertz or so. Keep in mind for a reference that what we usually have, say in cortex, is around one spike every second. So on average, neurons aren't very active. And what you see for both these cell types is in fast-order approximation, there's a linear dependency of the current that I put in, which is roughly the number of spikes that I put in and the firing rate that I get out on the y-axis. So in that sense, things look reasonably linear. And now I want you to think a little bit about neuroscience. I want you to think about one issue, how linear are neurons really, because I didn't tell you the whole story about neurons. And the second one is I want you to discuss a little bit how you think neuroscience can inform deep learning. Please discuss this with your part.