Get A Life. No Seriously.

On the news yesterday I saw footage of a young man, Rory Weals who at the age of 16 was making his first speech to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool.
He spoke passionately about issues pertinent to his generation – the loss of the Education Maintenance Allowance, the rising cost of tuition fees and youth unemployment. Having a 14-year-old daughter who wishes to stay on at school for 5th and 6th year to gain Highers then go onto college to take a course before applying to university, these issues, even with our living in Scotland are pertinent. I admired his guts and heart in highlighting these.
What concerns me is that speaking afterwards to the BBC Rory stated that he wanted perhaps to become an MP. Standing there in his wee suit and his red tie, being congratulated by Ed Willieband (it sounds better than cockring) my heart sank.
Please Rory, don’t become an MP. Well, at least not yet.
As the title says, get a life. Go out there into the world; get your education not only in the halls of learning but also in the real world. Fall in love, break some hearts, get yours broken. Have some mind-blowing sex, have some mediocre sex that leaves you frustrated, and have some dangerous sex that leaves you bruised but elated. Travel – discover this island we live in from its mountains to its cliffs to its rolling meadows. Meet people – talk to the great and the good, the desperate, the poor, the outcast and the reviled. Get to know lots of young people of your own age, look after kids and speak to the elders of our tribe. Work wherever you can get it. Experience unemployment. Be healthy and happy. I don’t wish you ill health but be around people who aren’t well. Find the love of your life or don’t. Have a family or don’t.
Live life to it’s fullest. By all means stay in touch with politics – join a youth parliament, be active in the NUS, agitate for change in a trade union, volunteer for a charity.
But please, please DO NOT become an MP until you have experienced life a little.
To my mind that’s what’s wrong with government today. For the past 14 years our party leaders and prime ministers along with a large number of cabinet and shadow cabinet members have been too young. It shocks me at age 44 that I am of age with Dishface Dave and Ed 1. What life experience do these men have? Yes, they have lived the same length of years but have they lived the same depth? I know for certain they have not. Having a degree, working for a few years then going into parliament is not a foundation for then being able to make the decisions that affect us all.
As an anarchist, I don’t hold with centralised “big” government from the top down. As we can see everyday, this is where people get lost, fall through the cracks and suffer. The woman and man in the street become so far removed from you that they seem as ants on the ground. You only ever come into contact with people like yourself.
Of course as a libertarian anarchist, I believe that you should never make a career out of politics, that civil responsibility is something that you do from the base up – from involvement in your grassroots community to a maybe city or county level, to regional perhaps but no bigger. Most importantly this activity should be undertaken by everyone and only for a little while so that people can get back to the more important stuff that makes up our lives and at the same time not become jaded or convinced that you, above all others are special.
We can see this in our politicians everyday. They are mostly lawyers or political science graduates – there are very few people at Westminster or Holyrood who have worked in industry, the health service or in a supermarket and fewer if any at all who have been homeless, long-term unemployed or have had to raise children as a single parent.
This is where you get the likes of Tony Blair – a man that history will look back on as a war maker who sacrificed the lives of teenagers to be friends with a Texan imbecile and who of late has had the audacity not only to be BFF with a media mogul who on the face had his press and TV vilify this man’s government while at the same time made him the godfather of his child who was baptised on a site that some religions find holy. How removed from our everyday reality is that?
So Rory, I beg of you, get out there and have adventures. Make the world your university. Then maybe come back and be an MP, where maybe you might do a half-decent job.