2 weeks Ago By Alex Cole-Hamilton
Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. But these words were actually written by the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero more than two millennia ago. Finding fault with the "youth of today” is nothing new, it’s something society has done since time immemorial and it’s easy to understand why.
Advertisement Advertisement Last week’s pitched battle in Niddrie involving the antisocial use of fireworks and other projectiles, which saw transportation and emergency workers injured and several bus services cancelled, feeds into the narrative about young people being out of control. Now, I have written before about the need for us to get serious about firework use. I’m not calling for an outright ban, but it’s clear the current measures, restricting the dates around which they can be bought and used in hotspot areas, will be tested.
For now, I want to focus on what’s going on with those young people. While the scenes from Niddrie are a repetition of a particular problem we have with the antisocial use of fireworks in and around the capital, it’s important to look under the hood of what’s causing this behaviour in the first place. Advertisement Advertisement Firstly, it’s important to say that statistically, the number of miscreants is small and young people are far more likely to be victims of antisocial behaviour than perpetrators of it.
They are also part of the solution. Before politics I was a youth worker for much of my adult life. I understand that antisocial behaviour manifests in young people when they don’t feel they are included in society, when they aren’t invested in what’s going on around them.
The public health requirements of our pandemic response meant that young people were forcibly cut off from physical interaction with their peers and non-family adult role models for months at a time. The effects of that are still being felt and it turbocharged the sense of estrangement some young people feel. Advertisement Advertisement Even now, a small number of young people are still toiling under the long shadow of the pandemic lockdowns.
There is a connection between this and the noticeable uptick in violence in our schools, attacks against retail workers in our shops and antisocial behaviour on our streets. This situation is not irredeemable and with the right investment and focus we can turn things around. Over the 17 years it has held the reigns of power, the SNP has presided over the quiet erosion of youth work in our country.
Their squeeze on council budgets has restricted the choices young people have and authorities’ efforts to engage them. I started my career working in Scotland’s inner cities with young people who were not included in their community in any meaningful way. By meeting them where they were, offering them role models and the chance to build skills through informal education we could reinvigorate that sense of having a stake in the society around them.
But due to lack of investment, so much of that has fallen away. Advertisement Advertisement Young people are like aeroplanes – you only hear about the ones that crash, but with the right opportunity every young person can be helped to reconnect with society and discover their own potential to flourish. Alex Cole-Hamilton is MSP for Edinburgh Western and leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats.
