Carmen Smith, a 28-year-old Plaid Cymru activist, is set to become the youngest member of the House of Lords. Despite the average age of Lords being 71, it is not just Smith’s age that makes her an unusual appointment. As a member of the Welsh nationalist party, Smith believes in an independent Wales and wants the House of Lords abolished. She acknowledged that she would be one of very few members campaigning to put herself out of a job. “I fundamentally disagree with an unelected chamber,” she said. “However, while it exists, we must have voices there that are standing up for the people of Wales because decisions are made there that impact them.”
Some critics claim that she only got the job because she was a woman, pointing to the party’s internal process, which ensured its first nomination for a new peer was female. Smith came second to a man in a vote of party members, but she ended up in the Lords. Smith defends the process, arguing it helps to improve the representation of women in a Chamber that is 70% male. Plaid Cymru is one of only two parties, along with the Greens, who elect their nominees for the Lords. Under the party’s nomination system, after five years, Smith will be subject to a reselection process to see if members want her to continue in the role. She says this makes the selection of representatives for what is an unelected chamber more democratic.
Working in politics since her early 20s, Smith says being singled out as young is “nothing new.” Growing up on a council estate in Llanfaes, a small village in north Wales, she did not have any interest in politics until she was about 15. It was meeting Leanne Wood, who was Plaid’s leader at the time and knocked on her door while canvassing for local elections, that inspired her to start following the party. The youngest of seven siblings, Smith was the first in her family to go to university, studying law at Bangor.
Smith says she wants to be a voice for groups who are less likely to be heard when laws are being shaped, whether that’s young people or Welsh rural communities. “Where decisions are made on legislation that affects people across the UK, it must be people that are representative of them that are part of making those decisions,” she says. Among the issues she hopes to focus on is coal tip safety, pointing out that this is paid for by the Welsh government, despite the contribution of mining communities to the whole of the UK. As a life peer, Baroness Smith is entitled to sit in the Lords until she dies, but she has no plans to do so. “I want to bring in new voices and hand over that baton to someone else,” she says
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