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Being a member of the Votes at 16 Youth Action Group: A future investment and a seat at the political table

As my votes at 16 term comes to an end, I would like to share the impact the campaign has had on me and some of the key messages that I have learned.   Your passion is your qualification After being accepted as a Votes at 16 Youth Action Group member I was excited, very excited but also very nervous and anxious. It was the first time I had been part of anything like this. I quickly saw during our first meeting that several of my fellow action group members were very actively political: Members of Youth Parliament (MYPs), taking part in council work, canvassing with political parties, members of other British Youth Council programmes, part of extensive volunteering and charity work and so on. I was not an expert on votes at 16 or anything remotely political for that matter. The only thing I had was the passion. But this is where the British Youth Council perfectly embodies the quote “your passion is your qualification”. Something that is very true for political and social chan...
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Israel-Hamas war: The importance of high-quality journalism and preventing the spreading of fake news on social media

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On 7 th October 2023 Hamas, the group ruling the Gaza strip however known to Israel, the UK, the US, the European Union and others as a terrorist organization, attacked Israel. In response to Hamas’ killing of more than 1,400 people in Israel and taking more than 200 hostages, Israel declared war on Hamas. Since then, more than 10,300 people have been killed, including more than 4,100 children, in Gaza. BBC News have shared the following map of Israel which helps to geographically explain the war. Since the attack, social media has been flooded with misinformation. Misinformation is when inaccurate information is mistakenly spread. This differs to disinformation, which is defined as deliberately spreading fake news. At best, misinformation leaves people uninformed and at worst it can cost people their lives. X, formerly known as Twitter, arguably the home of social media’s politics, has long been known for its spreading of misinformation and disinformation. Therefore, it’s no surprise...
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Local elections in May required Voter ID: Was it worth it?

For the first time ever, voters were required to present an accepted form of photographic identification before being issued with their ballot paper in local elections in England on 4 th May 2023. The new law was first proposed to Parliament by Boris Johnson in 2021. Downing street said that voter ID was intended to prevent potential election fraud, specifically personation. Personation is where someone pretends to be someone else in order to exercise that person’s right to vote. This deprives the true elector of their vote and allows the fraudulent elector to (in effect) vote more than once. However, many have said that the problem it is designed to solve isn’t really a problem. For example, in the last 7 years only 3 people have been convicted for personation in polling stations in the UK. This is supported by the report conducted by the APPG on Democracy and the Constitution (a cross party group which aims to improve parliamentary and public understanding of democratic and c...
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