Wow. Where to begin? Its been such a whirlwind few weeks for the BtB team!

I guess I’ll start with my TV appearance on The Politics show! Got to say, the absolute most terrifying moment of my life!

I was so scared! The team at the BBC made us feel welcomed I must say, which calmed my nerves a little! Nothing better than a good cup of tea to settle you! Haha. I was told what question I would answer before our appearance, but as soon as the camera was on, the old mind went completely blank! I knew i had so much to say, I just hope it didn’t all sound like garble! It was totally nerve-wracking, every time I answered a question, the presenter, Natalie Graham, just kept firing them back at me. I’ve got to be honest, it was the longest two and a half minutes of my life!! But it was all over so soon, seemed like such a short time to get such a huge message across to so many people! I hope we did ourselves proud!

The next big news is that we finally achieved one of our short term ambitions! It was something that we had been planning for such a long time, the debate between politicians and young people in the House of Lords. We had some amazingly influential people there to support us, Lord Roberts and Lord Shippley represented Parliament and Alastair Stuart was there to present and be the chairman, so to speak. The Lord’s Speaker, Baroness Hayman made an appearance to introduce the proceedings for us, which was a great honour! If people say that there aren’t many influential women in politics, then they just need to take one look at this lady! The things she’s achieved in her life time are mind-boggling! There were around 70 young people who attended and they all brought their own opinions and questions that they wanted answers to.

It began with questions being fired around the room by the young people, with answers and reasoning given by the Lords and Alastair himself. One of the main things I felt strongly about was the whole ‘political education’ idea, so I was glad to see that some of the other young people felt the same. It was great to see so many young people with their own views on politics and they way they think things should be. It was like we were disproving the long-thought mass opinion that young people didn’t care about things like politics. With more events like this, it won’t be long until we really can permanently change this view on young people! Politics may not be high up on many peoples agenda, but it does matter and we do care about it!

All in all, I feel it went hugely successfully, it really whet peoples appetite for our campaign and we showed some of the biggest names in Westminster what young people are really made of these days! I really enjoyed myself, I don’t know one single person who doesn’t love a good old rant on the things they care about. I hope to see you all at the next one!!

Always let us know your opinion on anything the team has done, the Facebook wall is there for you to do just that.

Abbie Cooper