I don’t know how many times in the last few years I have heard people complaining about “apathy” – but this is certainly something one hears so often that it is in danger of becoming a cliché.
And yet, I frequently find that, when there is a topic of real importance to people locally, the locals turn out to be anything but apathetic.
I will never forget the huge congregation that gathered in the church at Bradpole when there was a threat to the local sub post office, or the meeting on the Sustainable Communities Bill that had to be moved from the Bridport Town Hall to the United Reform church down the road because the numbers exceeded health and safety limits, or the numbers of people who came to talk about the Three Cups Hotel in Lyme Regis, the biodigester in the Piddle Valley and the village shop in Thorncombe.
When people feel that their quality of life is really affected by something that they think they might be able to do something about, they turn up in large numbers and they display anything but apathy.
I had the same experience a few days ago when I chaired a public meeting about youth facilities in Lyme.
Any suggestion that the grown-ups in the west of West Dorset don’t care about providing more things for young people to do is, I can testify, completely false. The hall at the primary school was packed with adults who very clearly cared a lot about this problem. They had strong views, and they weren’t shy about expressing them. Any dispassionate observer would also have been bound to admit that the many people who spoke were articulate, polite, rational and well-informed. This was definitively not a screaming crowd: it was a group of mature people trying to solve a real issue.
What’s more, as the meeting progressed, it became clear that the solution which I had at first imagined might find favour was not going to achieve anything like a consensus – and a different solution gradually emerged. By the end, a show of many hands indicated that there was a way forward which was at least worth trying.
Of course, a public meeting of this kind is no substitute for the hard work that will now need to be done by professionals in the County’s youth services and others to put together a workable plan. And then there are all sorts of other hoops that will need to be gone through – consulting young people themselves, and working with Woodroffe School, Trustees of the Club for Young People, the Town Council, the Development Trust and others besides.
But there is all the difference in the world between a proposal which starts its life in a meeting of many locals whose views are based on genuine, personal understanding, and a scheme that merely descends from on high.
When local people are engaged in a process of collaborative democracy, there is at least a real chance of arriving at solutions that will stand the test of time. This surely has to be the shape of things to come.