Paper 2 Q5: writing to present a viewpoint

Leave the wild alone – or there will be nothing left to visit¹
We keep ‘improving’ our last untouched landscapes. It is time to ask who the improvements are really for.

The first time I walked into the valley, there was nothing there. That was the point.² A thin path, a stream louder than my own thoughts, a buzzard turning slow circles in a sky that seemed to have been made specially for it. I sat on a rock for an hour and did not see another human being.

Last summer I went back. The path has been widened into a gravel track. At its start there is now a car park, a pay machine, a set of laminated signs explaining what I was about to feel, and a kiosk selling coffee in cups that, by evening, were blowing along the stream like pale, plastic leaves³. The buzzard was still there. I am not sure it was pleased to see us.

I want to be careful here, because this argument can quickly become snobbish.⁴ I am not suggesting that the countryside belongs only to those with the boots, the maps and the free weekdays to reach its furthest corners. But I am suggesting that we have misunderstood what makes a wild place valuable. Its value lies in its wildness – in the absence of convenience. The moment we pave it, sign it and sell it, we have not made it more accessible; we have replaced it with something else.

Consider how development works. Nobody sets out to ruin a landscape. A car park is built because the verges were being churned up by parked cars. Then the car park needs toilets. The toilets need a building; the building may as well have a café; the café needs more parking. Each step is reasonable. Together, they are a slow, polite act of destruction.⁵ Ask anyone who remembers a cove or a hilltop before it was ‘discovered’, and they will tell you the same story.

Of course, there is another side.⁶ Rural communities need visitors, and visitors spend money. Families with young children, older walkers and disabled people have every right to experience these places too, and a well-made path may be the difference between seeing a view and only hearing about it. These are serious points, and I do not dismiss them.

But the answer is not a choice between a theme park and a locked gate. It is restraint. Put the car parks and cafés in the villages, where they support local businesses, and run shuttle buses to the edge of the wild. Build paths that are accessible but modest – made of local stone, not tarmac. Keep signs at the gateway, not on every rock. Let some places be easy to reach and others, deliberately, remain hard. Not every view needs a viewing platform; some of them need us to earn them.

We are lucky to live on islands that still contain pockets of genuine wilderness. They are not infinite, and once they are gone, no amount of investment will bring them back. You cannot build wildness. You can only leave it alone.⁷

So the next time a planning notice appears on a gate promising ‘improved visitor facilities’, ask a simple question: improved for whom? The buzzard, I suspect, already has an answer.⁸

Good afternoon, Chair, members of the opposing team, and everyone listening.¹

I have a confession to make.² I have a part-time job. Every Sunday I stack shelves in a supermarket, and I have learned a great deal from it: how to deal with a customer who is convinced the price on the shelf is a conspiracy, how to stay polite at the end of a long shift, and exactly how heavy a crate of tinned tomatoes is. So you might expect me to support this motion. I do not. Because the problem with this statement is one small, dangerous word³: every.

Let us start with time. A teenager’s week is not an empty diary waiting to be filled. It is already crowded with lessons, homework, revision, sport, music, friendships, and – for many students in this room – responsibilities that nobody sees. Some of you look after younger brothers and sisters. Some of you care for a parent.⁴ Some of you are training six mornings a week for a sport you love. Are we really going to tell these students that they are missing out on ‘life lessons’ because they do not also fold jumpers on a Saturday?

Then there is the question of fairness. Jobs are not handed out equally. A student in a busy town centre may find work in a week; a student in a small village with one bus an hour may never find any at all. If we start treating a part-time job as something every teenager should have, we turn an opportunity into an expectation – and expectations have a habit of becoming judgements. The students who cannot work will be made to feel they have failed a test they were never allowed to sit⁵.

My opponents will say⁶ that work teaches independence, responsibility and the value of money. They are right – it can. But so can a Duke of Edinburgh expedition in the pouring rain. So can captaining a team, volunteering at a food bank, running a school club, or helping to run a household. The lessons the motion celebrates are not locked inside a stockroom. They are available wherever young people are trusted with something that matters.

And let us be honest about the claim that work ‘teaches lessons that school never can’. School is where many of us first learn to meet a deadline, to work with people we did not choose, to recover from failure and try again. To suggest that a till teaches more than a classroom is not just unfair to our teachers; it is unfair to us, because it implies that what we do here every day does not count.

I am not asking you to vote against work. I am asking you to vote for choice.⁷ Let the teenagers who want a job, and who can manage one, go and get one – and let us celebrate them. But let us not pretend that the students who are revising, caring, training or simply resting are somehow less prepared for life.

I will be stacking shelves again on Sunday. I chose that.⁸ And that, members of the audience, is exactly the point: it should always be a choice. Please vote against the motion.