Never underestimate Generational change in Politics
September 4, 2010
I overhead a conversation in our local petrol station the other day. Three visiting Welsh girls, in their early thirties, revealed they had never heard of Neil or Glenys Kinnock. This struck a bell because only a month previously a friend in Northern Ireland who is deeply into politics, told me he had come across two twenty year olds who had never heard of Martin McGuiness. Given he is currently a Minister in the Northern Ireland Government and the devil incarnate for half the population for years in the past, his must be a worse case than the Kinnocks disappearance from folk memory. It reminds me too that between the two referendums on the Scottish Parliament, 1979 and 1997, a generation passed on leaving a more pro-devolution electorate behind. Never underestimate this slow change in our politics.
