There has been a forgotten voice in this election.
It belongs to the school students who have been walking out of classes to protest about global warming.
They don’t have votes, and the sound of their protest has been lost in the noise of battle between big beasts vying for government.
True, the major parties have, with varying degrees of credibility, offered an environment agenda to win support from people for whom climate change is a big issue.
But they failed to convince the voters.
Brexit beat the big heat.
And young people themselves don’t always get it right.
Supergluing yourself to the Lib Dem battle bus while shouting “there’s no point in talking to politicians!” at Jo Swinson is counter-productive.
Post poll-debacle, the question has to be: what will happen to this extra-parliamentary surge of passionate activity? Will it just fizzle out, like so many previous protest movements? Or will it grow, and become powerful enough to force real change on a reluctant Westminster?
Mirror readers are divided 50-50 on school strikes, maybe because of the parenting chaos they can cause. The issue is contentious.
Extinction Rebellion presents itself as the correct vehicle for this protest. It is not. Too much like the big business it claims to oppose and arrogant in its behaviour, it is sowing the seeds of its own extinction.
Jeremy Corbyn offered votes for over 16s, as is now the case in Scotland. Initially hostile, I have changed my mind about this. It strikes me as the right place to go.
Young people can’t choose who runs the country, so they should campaign like the suffragettes until they have the vote.
If they can’t change the global climate, at least they could change the political climate here.
