Celebrating Parliament Week

Remember, remember the 5th of November will be a familiar refrain over the next week, commemorating the attempt by Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. This year, November 5th will also coincide with a new initiative that aims to increase understanding of parliamentary democracy in the UK. Parliament Week, running from 31st October to November 6th seeks to demonstrate how parliamentary democracy works, how it affects people and most importantly how they can participate in it.

In recent years, for many people Parliament has perhaps become distant or at worst irrelevant, its work and history unfamiliar. And yet, it has an impact on all of us. This year’s theme is ‘Stories of Democracy’, which seeks to highlight the stories of people who have participated in or contributed to democracy in the UK, both in the past and today. From the abolition of the slave trade to the campaign for women’s votes, Parliament has been at the centre of every major development of democracy in the UK. It has also hosted events and debates of high drama.

This has taken me into schools as often as my crowded diary will allow to talk to young people about Parliament and the way we work. In Cornelly Primary the morning assembly divided down the middle turned into the centre and held a Parliamentary debate on a school rule.

In Maes yr Haul I met with the school council to discuss their role as a conduit between their class mates and teachers debating rules, desires, plans for change, accountability and responsibility. The election of the school council is for many pupils the first lesson in democracy.

Defence was discussed in Tremains. Here we looked at the lessons learned from our armed forces. We looked at how they find the energy and commitment to carry on doing their jobs through the most adverse of conditions because of their desire to be the best they can possibly be and to support their comrades.

This desire to achieve full potential, whatever that may be, needs to driver of each of us and especially every young person. Governments have responsibility to fund education, school buildings, books, teachers, set standards and targets. Pupils (hopefully with parental encouragement and support) have responsibility for reaching their full potential, so they can feel the energy that comes from knowing you are learning all you can rather than coasting. Teachers can teach but only those who want to can learn.

Next week I will be visiting more local schools along with a quiz to get pupils thinking about what Parliament and democracy means to them. The aim is to have some fun, but also to get the message across to children and young people that they have a stake in parliamentary democracy, both now and in the future. Parliament itself has an excellent Education Service who organise visits for schools where children can spend a day in Parliament, including a tour and classroom activities. I aim to encourage as many local schools as possible to visit Westminster.

I am also visiting Bridgend College in conjunction with the Parliamentary Outreach Service, who regularly visit community groups and organisations to give presentations about Parliament and how it works. Bridgend college is then to send a group of students to Westminster to see it working first hand.

If you would like more information about any of these services or to arrange a tour, please get in touch with me. More information about events and activities for Parliament Week can be found at www.parliamentweek.org.

As part of Parliament Week, a national photography project called 'Picturing Democracy' has been launched. The project encourages people to take a picture that commemorates an historical event or person that contributed to the development of democracy, or an image that represents a modern story of democracy in UK. More details can be found at www.flickr.com/groups/picturingdemocracy.

In a week where we have watched Libyans’ fight for freedom we need to look again at what democracy means to us. Harold Wilson was in Number 10 and Richard Nixon in the White House when Gaddafi took control of Libya. Democracy is not static; it is a changing evolving entity. Since the Wilson government we have moved forward democratically in many different ways, some good, some bad. We have greater transparency, greater communication, and devolution. Libyans have suffered repression, fear and torture for voicing opinions or seeking change. Democracy makes it easy to be cynical, to opt out of engagement, to decry politics, politicians and its institutions. Parliament week seeks to rekindle awareness of how democracy works how citizens can and must engage with it and tells the stories of the many brave people who fought and died to defend it.

A quote comes to mind, from Churchill “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”