GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

(Applause)

THE PRESIDENT: Congratulations to everybody. Congratulations, Ronnie and

Oshor, and I wish you the very best of luck. Now it is a great pleasure to

introduce Cat Smith, MP, and I am going to ask Doug to say a few words first.

THE GENERAL SECRETARY: Just before I introduce Cat, can I just introduce one

of the friends of the GFTU and a personal friend of mine who came through the

Youth service and we are going to be talking about the Youth service in this

debate this afternoon. Dara Farrell over there I first met when he was Chair of

the British Youth Council and he made some great contributions to the GFTU

and to the struggles around the country to keep services for young people

going. He benefitted so much from his contact with us that he has become the

youngest leader of a Labour group in the country. He is a Kent county

councillor and leader of the Labour group in Kent County Council, so welcome

to Dara Farrell. (Applause)

It is a great pleasure to introduce our first speaker in this debate, Cat Smith,

the MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood, who has got the most important job, the

most important job in the shadow ministerial team, because she is the Shadow

Minister for Voter Engagement and Youth Affairs. There is a book by an

American youth work specialist called Youth in a Suspect Society which has

identified the way in which in Britain and America society has become so

suspect that it has disengaged and destroyed the lives of its young people in so

many serious ways. There are the most terrible statistics everyone in this room

will know, but the state of disengagement, the state of alienation amongst our

young people now is worse than it has ever been in the post-War period and I

say that someone who has been working with youth workers and the Youth

service all my life. The scale of the stabbings, young people so alienated that

all they can do is harm each other, the endemic of mental health problems and

the worst one for me, the most tragic of it all is the scale of the suicides of

young people who are dying of loneliness. Loneliness. That is the

consequence of 40 years of social and economic policies based on the idea

that there is no such thing as society. When society becomes as suspect as

this, young people retreat into themselves and they disappear from our social

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