Hansard

I thank Colin Beattie for bringing this debate to the chamber. I will begin by declaring an interest as a member of the SSC, which is one of the oldest youth organisations in Scotland, with camps up the A9 just off from the House of Bruar. To those with secondary school-age children, I recommend that they send their children there—they will have the most incredible week. Indeed, without that field in the sun and the midges, I doubt very much that I would be in this chamber today. Of course, some might well believe that that would have been a good thing and that I should not have gone there. I do not know which path I would have taken had I not.

I am also—and here I declare another interest—a youth worker; that is my professional background, and it is the second degree that I took. It has been my privilege to have done community and youth work in many different places and countries in the world.

I begin my speech—or begin it a second time—with a quote:

“Young people when not guided well can be ruled by strong passions and tend to gratify them indiscriminately with anger and impulse rather than reason.”

That quote, which comes from over 2,000 years ago, is attributed to Aristotle.

Indeed, if we come to more modern times, Colin Beattie might remember the youth culture conflict of the 1960s, when the mods and rockers also ran around on mopeds causing carnage. My point is that young people have always done this—finding themselves, expressing themselves and being judged. Yes, they cross the line. If there is an issue, the police come knocking, as my colleague Andrew Baxter was saying. If there is a parent there, more often than not, the dad—and it is normally the dad or the mum if she is the strong parental figure in that household—will say, “We’ll sort this out. Thank you very much.” However, what if there is no parent at home or no stability?

What we saw in Glasgow and across Scotland last night was not antisocial behaviour, because it crossed into criminality. However, young people who are caught up in the fever of what is happening do not know where that line is. They are not there because they are, at the heart of it, racist. They are caught up in the adrenaline, and nobody is helping them to think through what they are about to do and the consequences of that. Antisocial behaviour, if it is not addressed, can spiral. Without positive role models, that is what happens. As some members have rightly said, when we see fairly unpleasant, if not criminal, behaviour within the adult population, that is often what has happened.

Politically, we can see that this has been an issue through history. We have had the Blackshirts and Brownshirts of Mussolini and Hitler. We have also, more recently, in Russia, had the Nashi movement, which has now become the Movement of the First, where strong men—it might be more appropriate to call them nationalist populist politicians peddling a different rhetoric—see the power and influence of young people, who hold strong opinions. However, from my knowledge of working with young people, they move quite quickly if given an alternative.

In my first speech, I talked about Tony McDonald. He did not have the 50p to enter the youth club. Instead, he was offered his first joint. He went on to cause 10 years of mayhem and disruption, at huge cost to society, to himself and to the police. In 2012, on one of my first visits to Polmont, the governor, Derek McGill, told me that 80 per cent of the young people in there came from the care system. They had not had that positive role model or intervention, and their situation had spiralled.

Last night, YouthLink Scotland ran a very good event, and a worker from its Castlemilk youth project reminded me that, in one of the most deprived communities in Scotland, when young people were asked what they wanted to change, they said, “Nothing.” Why? Because that is all they had seen in the lives that they had lived. How do we open their minds and allow them to live and be in spaces and places where they can see the potential for what can happen? If we do not, they will get into a narrative led by social media and spiral into other behaviours.

My time is limited, but I will mention the SSC. For six years, when I took care-experienced people to the SSC camp, their masks would lift. They would see that they were not just unlovable kids, but a community of people who had real value, and could contribute and make a difference.

The stark reality is that, in the past eight years, this SNP Government has cut the budget for youth work by 50 per cent. That is intolerable if we want to make change.

YouthLink has three asks: that we should not judge young people but give them a right to youth work, so that they can find their true selves; give them the youth work spaces in which they can do that; and to achieve that, give the sector the funding that it needs over the long term. That will be one of the biggest changes in how we address antisocial behaviour through a preventative agenda.