Electoral systems and voting
If young people determined the UK's political agenda, what would have been the top issues at the general election?
Newsround ran a special vote as part of the Y Vote mock elections, and now you can see the results.
- Some possible key issues
- How to structure an argument
- Meaning of active citizenship
1. Local to Global:
2. Vote on issues:
- Ask the group if there is anything about school life that they think needs changing (this should wake them up).
- What about their immediate local area, is there anything about the way that land is used or services and businesses organised that they would like to see changed?
- Widen the net to include a county, region, town, city, nation, continent and finally the planet.
- Young people are often accused of being apathetic about politics, why do they think this is?
- How many would not vote in a general election?
- What reasons do they give?
- If party politics is not important then what issues are?
Print off and hand out our issues worksheet. Get the group to vote on their top issues, if there's time they could rank the issues from most to least important.
Having picked out the issue they think is most important, they need to find a way of expressing how they feel about it and why.
This could be a written report, or a poster. It could take the form of a script for a news report or if time allows even a short film.
Which ever platform they choose the important thing to develop is some structure to their arguments. A good way to start with this is to pull out five points that support their choice, but also three obvious weaknesses in their arguments.
Identifying and countering the holes in their arguments works well if the students are in pairs. Here's an example:
Get some of the group to present their work. Can they persuade people to adopt a new top issue?
- At the last general election there were 659 seats, this has now dropped to 646 due to reorganisation of boundaries in Scotland. That means the Labour party would need 324 votes to get a Majority.
- At the last election the results were:
Lib Dem 52
Plaid Cymru 4
Sinn Fein 4
- Overall, many commentators felt that the 2001 election result was predictable and the campaign was dull. This was reflected in the very low turnout - just 59.4% of people bothered to vote, the lowest percentage since everyone had the right to vote.
The average turnout at the May 1997 General Election was 71.2%. There was, however, a great deal of variation in the turnout between constituencies: as high as 86.1% in Mid Ulster, it sunk to just 51.6% in Liverpool Riverside.