Year 12 Politics students are encouraged to join Think Tanks which are active in London (unlike that which donated so much money to Peter Hain’s campaign!) Many students develop clear opinions on certain policy areas and social skills while attending these events. Below is an account of a recent meeting written by Year 12 Politics student Edward Patton.
 
The Adam Smith Institute (ASI)
 
On Tuesday 4 th February, Matt Clark, Christy Moen and I attended a talk at the Adam Smith institute. The Speaker was Nigel Evans MP, a Conservative whose constituency was Ribble Valley, an area close to Wales. He has been an MP since the Conservative election victory in 1992 an election he claims the Tories “Should never have won.” He is a long standing friend of the ASI and seemed only too pleased to come and talk at one of their Next Generation Conferences. Before he spoke on what he felt the Conservatives should be doing between now and the next general election, whenever that might be, he circulated around the room talking to those who were there and discussing various issues with them.
On arriving we were greeted by Dr Madsen Pirie, the President of the Adam Smith Institute. He talked to us about his degrees from Edinburgh, St Andrews and Cambridge and the time he spent teaching Logic and Philosophy in America. He also told of the books he has written and I was pleased to discover them all on Amazon the next day. We also discussed what AS levels we were taking and he was keen to know what DT stood for as well as telling Matt that media studies “did not count” as an A Level.
Before the lecture started Dr Pirie introduced us to various people of varying ages. We talked to Upper Sixth Form students from City of London who had been coming to The Next Generation for over a year and talked about University choices.
Despite Dr. Pirie’s attempts we were unable to speak to Nigel Evans MP before he gave his talk. When he made his speech he was limited by ASI rules to only speak for a maximum of ten minutes. This was unfortunate as some of his most interesting opinions on what the Conservatives should be doing where rushed in the last few minutes. He felt that the one thing that they could not afford to do was to sit back on the gains they had recently made in the polls, comparing it to the England v Wales match the previous weekend. He told of how when the Conservatives had been going to their annual conference in Blackpool just a few months earlier the mood within the party had been at its lowest point in a long time and Brown seemed untouchable. He said how much things had improved since the conference and especially the botched election. With the Conservatives now several points ahead in the polls his main message was simply that they should not sit back and expect victory and try to make further gains but he did not have time to go into detail on what exactly this meant.
Straight after he had finished his talk Dr Pirie called him over and we spoke for about ten minutes with him about our A levels and Conservative policy. He was very interested in what we had to say as was Dr. Pirie.
We left after talking to a few more people and went home having felt very much welcomed by everyone involved with the ASI and will definitely be going back in the near future.