Young UK and Ireland Programme

The final: Stranraer, Scotland, 29 March 2008

The results

UK and Ireland Young Thinker of the Year 2008
Mairi Clare Rodgers

Runner-up: Heidi Brooks-Yung
Highly Commended: Russell Collins
Commended: Tim Borrett and Keith Withers

Esther Roy Medal for outstanding promise: Rebecca Clark

The adjudication

We have been privileged. It's been the strongest field assembled for any of our five finals. There has been strength in depth and, at the higher reaches, thinking and writing of extraordinary quality. We've heard papers of wonderful diversity, in subject, treatment and style. We've heard papers on social issues such as sexual consent, care of the elderly, organ donations, autism, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence (affecting pets as well as people); we've heard papers – an encouraging number – looking out from our own relatively comfortable society to take a wider view, papers dealing with world poverty, Aids in Africa, nuclear weapons, human rights specifically in China as well as more generally; we've heard papers on the afflictions of bureaucracy – management speak, local government ethics, the security of personal records kept by the state; we've heard philosophical papers on the changing face of comedy, the meaning of the word Zionism, the nature of patriotism, and what the hell we do when the oil runs out. We've heard papers passionate, papers analytical, papers descriptive. We've heard hot papers and cool papers. We've heard deeply personal testimonies as well as more objective papers, both approaches equally valid. We've heard the human voices of what we are still allowed to call the United Kingdom, and the single cherished voice of the Republic of Ireland. These voices in all their miscellaneous richness – what do they tell us? They speak of vitality, idealism and nobility. They do not speak of cynicism or despair or defeatism. They speak of concepts of community, common purpose and shared vision. As we listen to these voices, we ought to get some sense of the future. And, if we have listened carefully, we ought to be encouraged, humbled, stimulated and inspired.

Adjudicator's notes on each paper (in alphabetical order)

Tim Borrett
Teignbridge District Council
A salutary reminder of the relative failure of the Make Poverty History campaign and the difficulties of maintaining media hype. A gutsy paper, vivid in its use of language, trenchant in its convictions, and building to a terrific ending. He did, however, spend too long analysing the shortcomings of the campaign. I wanted to hear more from Tim about how the intrinsic altruism of ordinary people around the world can be harnessed in a more sustained and imaginative way. The adjudicator's questions were admirably handled.

Heidi Brooks-Yung
Home Office
The Aids pandemic in Africa was perhaps the toughest self-assignment of the day, yet it produced a powerhouse of a paper, an exceptionally lucid analysis clearly born of first-class research and deep understanding. Heidi exposed with painful, non-judgmental clarity the limitations of sex education strategies, describing the lives of prostitutes to illustrate a more general cultural problem, and did so in an accessible way using plain, direct language free of adornment and platitude. An intellectually impressive paper which enlarged our knowledge of the greatest tragedy of the modern world and avoided the temptation to offer glib solutions.

Rebecca Clark
Surrey County Council
In a well-informed paper drawing on her working life, Becky examined ethics in local government, vigorously attacking the biased nature of official council communications which put more emphasis on spin than on genuine information and the absurdities of preparing for external assessments. Might she have used stronger examples to make her case than these relatively trivial ones? It would have been interesting to learn how such assessments fail to address the needs of the public.

Russell Collins
Barking and Dagenham Primary Care Trust
The powerful theme of this paper was the assertion of individual identity through the reclaiming of a word. In its defence of Zionism, the paper had a lyrical quality. The great unanswered question – implicit in a quote at the end – is how the Jewish people can protect their homeland and at the same time reconcile with the Arab world. While admiring the paper's rhetorical style, I was uneasy that this question, with all its contemporary resonances, was not addressed. A troubling reservation: yet this was a haunting piece of writing.

Vicki Craighill
PDSA
An impeccably researched paper on an unusual theme: the association between abuse of people and abuse of pets. It was written and presented in a punchy journalistic style, although some of the statistics were repetitious and there were too many of them. Vicki pointed out that, while current legislation protects children and animals separately, there is no framework for recognising the link that often exists. This was a valuable point to make and she made it in an authoritative way.

Adenike George
Barking and Dagenham Primary Care Trust
An informative paper setting out both the advantages and the risks of greater access to medical records. Adenike gave a good example of an NHS patient, taken ill on holiday, whose chances of survival would be greater if health professionals were linked into a central database; and then an equally good example of how such a system could be abused. The paper ended positively, but was hampered by a slightly flat introduction and the somewhat even-handed approach. A graceful presenter.

Ann Griffiths
Surrey County Council
A timely paper about patriotism. The difficulties of successsfully establishing dual identities in a fragmenting UK, with people of many different ethnic backgrounds expressing their primary loyalties in a non-British context, needed to be more fully explored. I wasn't convinced that we would easily unite behind such symbols as Pride of Britain awards or athletes draped in the Union Flag. But one of Ann's main points struck home – that politicians, by cynically harping on about patriotism, are alienating us even more.

Lynsey Harris
Wokingham Borough Council
Not the most challenging choice of subject, but an amusing paper on management speak nonetheless. Lynsey invoked Orwell – who better? – to help make her essential point that lazy language makes it easier for us to have lazy thoughts. Some of the images she evoked were delightful – 'language more prefabricated than an Ikea showroom...we just select the same phrases as everyone else and happily pay the price'. Such vivid phrase-making is always a joy. Her presentation was full of youthful energy.

Shireen Khattak
National Audit Office
The dangers of alcohol abuse were clearly spelled out in a paper drawing on Shireen's personal experience of a false medical diagnosis (she was not, in fact, suffering from alcohol abuse). The paper was at its most interesting in the telling of her own story. She went on to call for a change in public attitudes to alcohol, and there was an enjoyable exchange during questions about whether compulsory teaching of the subject should be introduced.

Maria Kicinski
Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service
An eloquent defence of endangered human rights, oratorical in style, and conveying the sense of a personal journey encompassing the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal and the street children of Vietnam as well as asylum seekers and homeless people. How fascinating it would have been if Maria had used one of these personal experiences as a way of illustrating her argument. The scope of the paper was perhaps too wide; a more concentrated focus would have made it more effective. A gifted communicator.

Peter Lamb
AEA Group
A topical paper, examining the dilemmas facing the free countries of the world as we approach the Beijing Olympics, and finding us morally confused. It avoided getting too bogged down in examples of China's human rights abuses, giving Peter an opportunity to explore how we might express our opposition. The weakness of an otherwise fine paper was that it rejected the idea of a principled boycott of the Games without explaining why such a boycott would be unhelpful. Strong presentational style.

Elaine McGhee
Strathclyde Police
A familiar argument – that nuclear weapons, far from making the world a more dangerous place, have helped to keep the peace. Elaine neatly exposed the racist element in the discussion: the assumption that only the West can be trusted to be responsible. At the start, she raised a question that was never satisfactorily answered: doesn't the rise of fanatical terrorist organisations, who are prepared to use suicide as a weapon, introduce an entirely new dimension to the nuclear threat?

Grainne Mc Kenna
BT
A heartfelt paper on world poverty began with a distillation of what Grainne called 'a few ugly facts'. There were too many ugly facts, although she did try to humanise them and one in particular, about the relative wealth of the world's richest individuals and the world's poorest countries, was staggering. So vast was the canvass of the rest of the paper that it could only dabble in possible answers – and I wasn't wholly convinced by her conclusion that the inspiration of a single individual could reverse the tide of human suffering.

Linda Memery
Personal Injuries Assessment Board, Ireland
Terse, evocative writing drew us into the private world of the autistic child. Linda then went on to discuss a particular case in Ireland and the parents' campaign to have their child given an alternative form of tuition known as Applied Behavioural Analysis. I would have liked to know more about how this works and how it benefits autistic children, with rather less emphasis on the detailed politics and law of the case.

Michael Mitton
Findhorn Foundation
If we are to survive, we must learn to be poorer – this was the uncomfortable message of a radical paper which looked at the consequences of our rampant consumption of natural resources. The paper argued that living in self-supporting communities could make us happier. But then I thought of the dispossessed of Glasgow and Liverpool and began to doubt how widely Michael's Utopian vision could be translated into our disconnected urban society. It was good to get a paper of ideas.

Carleen Protain
Ministry of Justice
A shocking paper in its graphic description of the particular case of an abused woman and going on to consider the psychological roots of such relationships. It worked best as a piece of reportage, horrifying in its detail. It worked less well as an argument, with a couple of recommendations tagged on at the end in a slightly perfunctory fashion. The essence of Carleen's paper was the story itself: a story that needed to be told. We should leave here affected by the human being at the centre of it. Excellent presentation.

Mairi Clare Rodgers
Liberty
Incomparably the best introduction to any paper: a piece of one-woman role play which gripped the audience from the start and set up her subtle exploration of sexual consent. The paper discussed the weakness of the law, the ambiguities of public attitudes, and the ethical minefield of sexual interaction. She said that the Sexual Offences Act, in defining consent, hadn't gone far enough though failed to explain how much further it should go. But then the paper broadened out into a remarkable short essay on the sacredness of the human body and the need for its integrity to be respected in a society where sexual casualness has gone too far. Beautifully written, it was also intellectually challenging.

James Steel
Scottish Government
A wide-ranging paper about society's attitudes to the elderly. So wide-ranging in its many references that James was left with too little time to develop his main argument – that care homes are not the answer and that homes for life, adaptable as our needs change, represent a practical and more humane solution to the problem of an ageing population. An engaging presentation.

Sean Wattegedera
Moredun Research Institute
A novel approach to the shortage of organ donations – allow people to sell their organs to the state. This was a delightfully provocative argument, but I didn't feel the sources used to support it were credible. Did we really set up the National Health Service in order, 60 years later, to take lessons in health care from Iran? The potential issues of trade in poverty and exploitation of human weakness required to be more fully dealt with than Sean's general assurance that regulation would attend to them.

Keith Withers
Wokingham Borough Council
An insightful, highly intelligent paper, exploring how the crudeness in society as a whole is reflected in comedy. He suggested that the world is at its wit's end – a striking metaphor – to which one possible answer is: not so long as there are people like Keith around. How cleverly he took us across that 'metaphorical canyon' and compelled us to think about something we take for granted – the 'involuntary act of laughter'. This was a paper notable for the maturity of its thinking, although his handling of the questions was unexpectedly weak.