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Jolly good
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 29,242
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John interview...
Quote:
From The Sunday Times
May 4, 2008
John Loughton: after Big Brother
After Celebrity Hijack, the Scottish Youth Parliament chairman has joined a more mundane talking shop - on devolution
Allan Brown
If the Scottish chapter of the Lord of the Flies appreciation society had a ringleader, you can bet your last can of Creamola Foam it would be John Loughton. The 20-year-old Edinburgher was the winner of the most recent, though largely unwatched, series of Big Brother and is chairman of the Scottish youth parliament - founded, he says with youthful relish for the fascinating factoid, "exactly one day before the Scottish parliament proper". As of last week, he's also the latest addition to the Calman devolution commission, the parliamentary talking shop designed to give unionists a final bat-squeak before the Great Project of Alex Salmond slouches towards Holyrood.
Clearly something of a revolving bow tie of a choice, Loughton is nonetheless insistent - as the Monkees were also - that he's the young generation and he's got something to say. Usually this concerns "young person issues", such as the environment and top-up fees and the voting age. Anything more contentious, any stand stronger than, say, opposition to a new tax on downloading iTunes, might prove problematic further down the road, as Wendy Alexander discovered recently when her student ban on "racist" Rowntree Mackintosh sweets at shops on the campus of Glasgow University came to light.
Added to which, Loughton suggests his generation might be a bit post-political, keener on big handshakes and all-say-aye solutions than on the Punch and Judy ding-dongs of the party system. So, for the meantime, then, it's all three-thumbs-up positivity from Loughton.
He calls to ask that I text him to confirm the time of our appointment. In an attempt to imply that I haven't quite succumbed to jumbo bags of Werther's Originals and James Last by the log fire, I grudgingly adopt the finger-clicking teen abbreviations of textspeak and reply "CU then". I don't recall ever having to do this with George Foulkes.
Youth parliaments also exist in Tasmania, Queensland and Newfoundland, you'll be reassured to know. Fittingly, the offices of the Scottish youth parliament, in a business-centre place by Haymarket station, are very purple, with Playskool cubes for sitting on and purple washes on the walls.
Loughton bounds out of a corridor and proffers one of those handshakes that leaves you singing like a Bee Gee. He's a sizable fellow, what the tabloids in his Big Brother phase called a gentle giant, 6ft 2in, though that measurement may also apply around his torso, looking with his spiky ginger thatch and his broad plain of a face as though DC Thomson had a hand in his making.
As the coffee arrives in antisectarianism mugs, it becomes clear that it's issues not orthodoxies for Loughton, though he's willing to concede that broadly, privately, he is pro-devolution, pro the status quo (he could be meaning the band, of course), happy with the way things are but happier if they were just a tiny bit different, in some manner he isn't yet able to specify, hence his readiness to sit on the commission.
"It's a trap, I think, to think that independence is a black and white issue," he says. "I'm open to finding any way forward that is the best way for the people of Scotland, whatever that turns out to be. There's value in the Union, nothing is broken, but we can still get a better deal."
I put to him, of course, the obvious problem that grown-ups are cleverer, wiser and just generally less annoying than young people, and Loughton responds with the thought that 100 20-year-olds, by definition, possess 2,000 years of experience. True - but they've also spent 300 years watching Teletubbies and pouring apple puree into the toaster.
The central thing about the conspicuously achieving Loughton, one supposes, is that he's from West Pilton, that embattled (which is a polite way of saying scabby) Edinburgh sink estate where Irvine Welsh grew up, where fridges live on grass verges and the pubs require that you wipe your feet on the way out. Shilpa Shetty, another Big Brother victor, was not from West Pilton, it hardly needs pointing out. Loughton came through largely unscathed, however, being of a size that generally persuaded bullies to steal the dinner money of other children and being, even though he says so himself, "quite a likeable guy, really".
Before he stood for the youth parliament, Loughton started a degree in sociology and politics at Stirling University. Uncompleted, it remains on hold until politicking is out of his system, though it must have been constructive in pondering the nature v nurture debates behind the divergent fates that he and his brother, Steven, have met. A rather more typical victim of a West Pilton childhood, Steven was convicted of abusing police earlier this year.
"People often ask me how I turned out so differently," he says. "All I know is that there was a flick in my engine towards the end of my time at school and not everybody gets that same flick. Steven's situation is difficult for me - nobody wants to see family members ending up like that. But there's only so much one person can do. The reality is that what happened to Steven happens a lot in places like Pilton. It's the fault of social breakdown rather than any one individual like him. My philosophy is, lend a hand, don't point a finger."
His familial background also tells of its locale, his mother, Donna, 38, having left Loughton's father to begin a relationship with the man's brother. Their three resultant children, therefore, are simultaneously Loughton's stepsiblings and his cousins, while his uncle is also his stepfather, all of which would provide a challenge to any youth parliament thinking there might be on the 21st-century blended family.
"It's not a major issue for us - that's the way things are," he says. "You don't plan life, it pans out, and we as a family just have to deal with that. It's not a conventional family, but you tell me what a normal family is."
Untypically, though, it was Big Brother that came looking for Loughton rather than the other way round. Seven months into his elected post at the apex of the youth parliament, Loughton was asked if he would consider appearing in a new kind of Big Brother. Stung by claims that recent series had trawled new depths of combative vulgarity, particularly after the Jade Goody racism row, its producers posited a higher-fibre version of the show in which wellintentioned yoofs competed to carry out the instructions of such unseen celebrity controllers as the actor Alan Cumming and comic Matt Lucas.
Abandoned swiftly by viewers during January, Big Brother's Celebrity Hijack made it only as far as E4, but Loughton emerged victorious, picking up the £50,000 prize. Much of the cash is gone now, he says. He's bought fittings and furniture for his mother's flat in West Pilton.
"I had her crying in a furniture shop the other week," he says, smiling. "She'd never had a sofa of her own before. They were always from charity shops or pass-ons from relatives. We ended up arguing over it. She didn't want to take it off me."
The money has also bought him his own "reward" - a preposterously blingy watch that has colonised his left wrist, a huge rectangular slab of silver plate and fake diamonds, made by the world-renowned house of Fossil. It cost, he says, about £100, and it's altogether appropriate really for an activist whose USP is that his own hour hand has gone around fewer times than those of most politicos.
"What happened to George Galloway was the first thing that came to mind when I was considering the Big Brother offer," he says. "My rationale was the same as George's, to show that politics doesn't have to be worthy or dreary. So I ended up dressing as an octopus for the show, perhaps not as famously as George being a cat or a robot, but with the same purpose, to show that politicians and political activists are human."
And then it was back to the daily round of the pop-sock parliament, the exclamation-mark executive, with its bonsai rallies and mini-me conferences wielding such titles as Towards Harmony. Loughton may well stand for re-election to chairman in June.
For as long as shopkeepers forbid more than two youngsters to enter their premises at lunchtimes and Asbos are considered by youths as badges of honour, there will be work for a youth parliament to do. In the meantime, Loughton is receiving his blooding in grown-up, full-bearded politics, courtesy of the devolution commission. Its six other members, he might be interested to know, in his factoid fashion, have a collective age of more than 300.
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3864015.ece
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24-02-2008, 10:49 PM
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