Tonyc1

Answered by Jo Swinson

To be honest I see it as a double edged sword – there are advantages and opportunities you get as a result of happening to be the youngest MP (the media likes a label) but equally you can be typecast and people possibly think of me as much younger than some of my colleagues who might only be a couple of years older. The main thing is I’m 27 – I feel far too old to be the youngest MP and that is where the problem is. You talk about Tony Blair and David Cameron and you talk about youth, but only in politics are you really young at 40 and it’s great I don’t need to invest in all these expensive face creams to keep myself looking young because in the context of the house of commons I will be looking young for ages but that is part of the problem. When I go into schools in my constituency, Just yesterday morning I went to a primary school in my constituency and I said: “there are 646 mps in the country, how many do you think are under 30?” I had guesses ranging from 5 all the way up to 320. Most of the kids guessed that about 50 or 60 MPs were under 30. The answer is 2. 2 out of 646 and in fact, if you look at MPs under 40 its fewer than one on ten – if you look at the proportion of the population that is under 40 – it is vastly more than 10% – so there is a bit of a problem there with youth in politics and one of the reasons that it is something the media look at is because it is quite unusual. What we need to change is the fact that it is unusual – we need to make sure that our politics better represents society in all sorts of ways including the age profile.