Last month, the Voice linked to the first part of a campaign diary by Jamie Saddler, the 23 year-old Lib Dem candidate for Wirral South, which has been commissioned by Catch21, an organisation trying to get more young people interested in politics.
The latest instalment has just gone online – here’s an excerpt:
Although it got somewhat lost last week in the fanfare of conference, and the continued media frenzy around hypothetical hung parliaments, the Lib Dems launched a manifesto for young people. Our central proposal is to introduce a guarantee that young people will be back into education, employment or training within three months of becoming unemployed. We’ll achieve this by creating more places at universities, and by introducing a new “Paid internship” scheme to allow 800,000 young people to receive a “Training Allowance” of £55 a week, and gain real experience that will help them into full employment later down the line.
We need to provide young people with the hope that they will have a positive future, and will at least have the opportunity to realise their potential. Anything else would be criminally letting down a generation that are already suffering enough. That’s the message I’m taking to youngsters in Wirral South, and what I will be fighting for if I’m elected to those green benches in May.
You can read Jamie’s diary in full here.