UN: International Year of Youth

Lord Puttnam Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Puttnam]

My Lords, first, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, for making it possible for us to have this debate. What she just said about this being the first debate of its type that the Library can find says everything, yet, to look at it the other way, the notion that we should address this problem and solve it is also utterly self-evident. I declare an interest as the former president of UNICEF UK and as chancellor of the Open University, which I will come on to in a moment. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, did not mention that she is an utterly invaluable trustee of UNICEF. As someone who I would like to think helped to persuade her to take up the role, I say that it was one of the best day’s work I ever did.

I will not add to any of the horrifying statistics, which are all utterly self-evident. When I was young, there was a charismatic civil rights leader called Eldridge Cleaver who famously said that you are either part of the solution or simply part of the problem. My judgment, certainly from my work at UNICEF, is that young people around the world want to be part of the solution. The truth is that we cannot afford the luxury of not allowing them to be.

If I had a wish list, it would be to take Members of the Committee on just two visits. One would be to get all of your Lordships to a graduation ceremony at the Open University, because there you would see what hope is. These are not graduation ceremonies in the normal sense but triumphs of individual ambition and commitment. I have always believed that, if I could get sufficient parliamentarians to graduation ceremonies, all of my other problems at the OU would be solved immediately. The other, a lot less celebratory, would be to take parliamentarians on a number of the trips that I made to a dozen countries during my year and a half with UNICEF—it was almost two years—looking into the effects and issues surrounding sex trafficking, which is at the other end of the emotional universe.

A million young people a year get sold into either abusive under age labour situations or sex trafficking. It is a global scandal. The UN has taken it seriously and the police in this country have certainly begun to take it seriously, yet it goes on and on. The figures and the apparent appetite do not diminish. It is the only time in my life when I was truly ashamed to be a man. These problems have to be addressed by men and solved by men once and for all. I find it very difficult to deal with the idea that we should live with these problems.

Every now and then, I am helped by dipping my toes back into the world of cinema. Last November, I chaired the jury at the annual Asia Pacific film awards in Australia where, in a period of just nine days, I watched 31 of the most remarkable movies to have emerged from that large and increasingly significant region in just the past year. Rightly or wrongly, I would argue that film makers are particularly good at sniffing out the social and cultural zeitgeist, resulting in what we then refer to as trends. One overwhelming trend that emerged from watching those movies, from 15 different countries, was what I can only describe as intergenerational alienation. The young no longer trust us to do right by them. As a result, they have a serious problem believing many things that we say. Whether we say them in Parliament, in the media or wherever, they are simply ceasing to believe us because, as they increasingly see it, we have stolen their pensions, their food and water security, their future job prospects and their environment.

Precisely the same intergenerational alienation is largely driving the uprisings we have been watching in the Arab world in recent months. That is little wonder, when you look at the mind-numbing numbers of unemployed young people in that region. It is a form of alienation that is given a voice by technology but whose roots run far deeper. When you add to that Wikileaks, it seems to prove that this new and increasingly sceptical generation is right in the suspicion that the dominant players in the political and commercial world have forgotten how to play with a straight bat.

There are those who claim that the intergenerational world has always been typified by suspicion and mutual misunderstanding, to which my response is that never before in history have we been living in each other’s pockets to the same degree—both metaphorically and in reality—aware that a crisis in one part of the world has the capacity to utterly overwhelm those living elsewhere. We are asking young people around the world to switch on their television sets, no matter where they are, to see how the first world lives. They watch programmes about the lives of the rich and famous, so it is little wonder that they look at us and wonder whether we are mad or have lost all sense of imagination about what injustice might mean. The realities and challenges facing today's young people are not those of the 19th or even the late 20th century; the truth is that we may not yet have woken up to the fact but literally millions of young people have, and they do not much like what they see. I find it impossible to blame them.

[Baroness Northover]

Perhaps I may remind noble Lords—I am very sorry to have to do this in such a key debate with so many speakers—that the debate is strictly time-limited and when the clock reaches four minutes, you have had your four minutes. We want the Minister to have an opportunity to reply to everyone.