“Young people have been overlooked,” declares 21-year-old prospective Labour councillor for Hackney Downs Ward, Sudenaz Top.
The local elections, coming up in May, will be a close race between her and the Green candidate Laura-Louise Fairley, but, even at her young age, Top has a lot of experience to draw on for the campaign.
Top is currently doing a masters in Law at Queen Mary University of London and works as a Communications & Policy Officer for Labour MP Deirdre Costigan.
Top first showed an interest in politics at age 11, impressing her local MP, Meg Hillier, with questions about Brexit during a visit to parliament after winning an inter-school arts competition.
In the 2019 general election, aged 15, she campaigned for Hillier and got a feel for politics “on the doorstep”.
But it was in 2020, in the middle of a Covid lockdown, that Top got more involved in political organisation, spearheading a protest against the cancelling of GCSE exams with a couple of other students, fearing they would be unfairly penalised come results day.
“I was very angry because my family were talking about how we were going to pay for rent and how we were going to put food on the table, and then my GCSEs get cancelled and my grades get decided by an algorithm.”
Top also became a member of the ‘Youth Parliament’ in 2021, representing young people in Hackney Council meetings and organising projects in the area, such as a scheme that had young people do work experience with a council department of their choice. She also later became Young Mayor of Hackney for a year from 2022.
“Citizenship isn’t a party-political thing; it’s about teaching young people what politics is and why it matters.”
“Young people have been overlooked: they haven’t been thought about because, let’s be real, they vote less than any other age group,” she says.
The current government is doing better in her view, mainly due to the voting age being lowered to 16 and the push to create youth opportunities.
Alongside these changes, Top wants civics lessons to become part of the national curriculum. “Citizenship isn’t a party-political thing; it’s about teaching young people what politics is and why it matters.”
Her more recent experience, as a policy caseworker for Labour MP Deirdre Costigan, has proven educational: “I never thought that it would be this hard to pass things and take this long to make policy,” she said, adding: “It’s very nitty gritty.”
Whatever the result of the local election, Top intends to continue working with the Hackney council and being “a champion for getting more young people getting involved in politics.”
Munro Waller is a Newspaper Journalism masters student at City St Georges University.