Handing out flyers about pigeon mess outside a railway station on a cold night in February is not exactly my idea of fun. However, as a Labour candidate in Wandsworth, south London, which the Tories still hail as their flagship council, I have no room for complacency. Dragging myself out of bed on a Sunday morning, I regularly question the sanity of my actions. I am 25 years old: do I really want to spend a day knocking on strangers' doors?
And yet I have found that so many people are genuinely concerned with local issues - safer streets, crime, local transport and improved schools (and the pigeon mess problem under Earlsfield Bridge).
Despite the variety of people who are interested in local issues, local politics is driven by the usual suspects. The latest census of councillors, published by the Improvement and Development Agency and the Employers' Organisation, showed that councils were still dominated by middle-aged or retired white men. In 2001, 71 per cent of councillors were male; the average age was 57; and the percentage of councillors from ethnic minorities had fallen to 2.5.
With such unrepresentative council chambers, was it any great surprise that the turnout for the local elections on 2 May was predicted to be the lowest ever?
Pop Idol and Big Brother have been cited as examples of how to get young people to vote. The political parties are desperate to imitate the success of these shows and apply them to their own campaigns. The Electoral Commission has recently jumped on the bandwagon with an ad campaign, text messages and "viral" e-mails asking: "Who controls who?" But young people's disaffection from politics goes deeper than a phone vote. It's not about celebrity endorsements attempting to make politics "relate" to them: it's about communicating with younger people on issues that they care about.
