Round 6: For Argyll Political Challenge

This is the last round of the For Argyll Political Challenge. It asks each of the two talented challengers for the Argyll & Bute Westminster seat at the coming general election to address the issue of young people and Argyll.

This is an area with an ageing population and one of largely rural and small communities lacking resources for young people.

Do they stay or do they go? Do they go and come back? The critical thing is that Argyll must offer each individual a genuine choice and then respect what they do with it.

We are hoping that young people from across Argyll and the islands join the discussions around what each of these two candidates has to say.

They are the only audience capable of judging which ideas chime with what they feel would make their present more enjoyable and their future more rewarding.

This doesn’t mean that adult perspectives don’t have a lot to offer. Many adults have children and some even remember what it was once like to be young – and it was not all joy.

If you’ve missed some of the topics that have been discussed so far, the five previous challenge rounds have looked at:

1. Scotland and the UK financial crisis
2. The future for energy production in Scotland
3. Argyll and the defence establishment
4. Developing Argyll’s economy
5. Marketing Argyll

On 14th October, we will be publishing interviews with each of the candidates, designed to discover more about their political philosophies, why they hold them and what sort of people they are.

As we said at the start, they really want to work for you and you will have a decision to make when you vote sometime in the first half of 2010. The choice is an exciting one and the contest will be lively.

Each month we have alternated the batting order in which the candidates ideas are presented. We started on 14th April in alphabetical order with Gary Mulvaney on pole and we finish with Mike Mackenzie first on the grid.

• Mike Mackenzie: Young people and Argyll
• Gary Mulvaney: Young people and Argyll

The photograph above, of the Palace of Westminster, is by copyright holder David Iliff and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.