IT’S NO SECRET that in recent weeks and months, many MPs have been considering whether or not they want to continue in their chosen profession. And I’m not saying I’m considering standing down, but it’s fair to say that the Commons is not an uplifting environment these days.

The constituency, however, is a different matter.

After any time spent in London listening to colleagues’ complaints and fears, their conspiracy theories and dispiriting forebodings, being back in Glasgow is literally a breath of fresh air. And the reason I’m in a better mood than I’ve been for a while is because tonight I presented one of the prizes at the annual awards ceremony at one of my local secondary schools, King’s Park Secondary.

And although I don’t usually do this, I’ve reproduced the speech I made. Not because it’s particularly brilliant (some of the stuff about James Croll is lifted almost verbatim from Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything), but because writing it reminded me why I’m in parliament.

One day, probably some way off, parliament will regain some of the respect it’s lost, and the ambition to serve as an MP will once more be seen as a noble one. One day.

In the meantime, this is what I think:

Members of Parliament are used to telling other people what to do, how to live their lives, how to be a good citizen.

And you know something? I don’t think many people are listening to us any more, because they have concluded that MPs no longer have the moral authority to tell anyone how to live their lives.

It’s a pity it’s taken something like the expenses scandal to make us aware of the fact that we should have been listening, not talking, in the first place. Why should I, as a middle aged (young middle aged) man lecture these excellent young people on how to be a good citizen. Because from what I’ve heard, they’re already far better at it than I was at their age.

It’s become something of a cliché that all young people are trouble-makers. It’s also become a cliché that young people get too hard a time and that they’re too often demonized.

Well, here’s another cliché to make up the full set of three: many, many young people know far more about good citizenship than most adults, and certainly more than many MPs, as we have seen from recent newspaper coverage.

And I think those young people who actually make an effort, who want to make a difference in their community, in their world, should be recognised.

I’m delighted that King’s Park Secondary took me up on my offer to sponsor this annual Citizenship Award. Mind you, there’ll be a general election between this one and the next one, so it could be a one-off.

And my part in all of this is a very small one (no, that doesn’t mean the speech will be short – stop looking at your watches). All I have to do is buy the shield (not on expenses) and present it. But I have no say in choosing the recipient. I leave that to the people who know the candidates far better: the school itself.

And I don’t offer any guidance about what criteria should be used to judge the winner. I want it to go to a “good citizen”. The rest is up to the school and to the pupils.

I’m delighted that the Computer Lunch Team have been chosen as recipients. From what I’ve learned of them, they are very worthy winners.

I want to make one more point and it involves a short history lesson, so please bear with me.

In the 1860s, journals and other learned publications in Britain began to receive academic papers on hydrostatics, electricity and other scientific subjects from a James Croll of Anderson’s University in Glasgow. One of the papers, on how variations in earth’s orbit might have precipitated ice ages, was published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1864 and was recognized at once as a work of the highest standard.

Croll was the first to suggest that cyclical changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit, from elliptical (which is to say slightly oval) to nearly circular to elliptical again, might explain the onset and retreat of ice ages. No one had ever thought before to consider an astronomical explanation for variations in Earth’s weather. Thanks almost entirely to Croll’s persuasive theory, people in Britain began to become more responsive to the notion that at some former time, parts of Earth had been in the grip of ice.

When his ingenuity and aptitude were recognized, Croll was given a job at the Geological Survey of Scotland and widely honoured; he was made a fellow of the Royal Society in London and of the New York Academy of Science and given an honorary degree from the University of St Andrews, among much else.

So there was some surprise, and perhaps just a touch of embarrassment, when, following the publication of his first paper, it turned out that Croll was not an academic at the university, but a janitor.

Born in 1821, Croll grew up poor, and his formal education lasted only to the age of 13. He worked at a variety of jobs – as a carpenter, insurance salesman, keeper of a temperance hotel – before taking a position as janitor at Anderson’s (now the University of Strathclyde) in Glasgow.

By somehow inducing his brother to do much of his work, he was able to pass many quiet evenings in the university library teaching himself physics, mechanics, astronomy, hydrostatics, and the other fashionable sciences of the day.

Croll was obviously untypical in some respects, but in a vital way he was very typical indeed: he was a clever intelligent working class man who was denied the education that would have helped him meet his full potential. He managed to overcome that handicap by having a persuasive personality and a gullible brother. But millions more through the ages have not been so fortunate.

My own father was forced to leave school at 14, and he never gained any formal academic recognition. Yet he is one of the cleverest men I’ve ever known. Ability wasted.

And for every James Croll who was lucky, who somehow beat the odds to have his ability recognized and to make a genuine and important contribution to mankind, how many thousands – millions – of other geniuses, academics, chemists, engineers, doctors, mathematicians have been lost to us because of a short-sighted notion that education was only for the better off?

Which is why I have supported wherever I could the chance to improve educational opportunities, because on every single occasion where such opportunities have expanded, pupils from less well off backgrounds have disproportionately benefited.

Every week, in the faces and the work of young people in this constituency I see for myself the commitment, intelligence, confidence (and occasionally bare-faced cheek!) that will, in time, open up opportunities for them that their parents could never have dreamed of. That makes me, as well as their teachers and parents, incredibly proud.

So good luck with whatever choices you make for yourselves. If I had one word of advice, and if you were in the mood now or in the future to listen to the advice of an MP, I would say this: You can make wrong choices – that’s not the end of the world and you’re young enough to make more than one. But whatever you do, don’t waste your ability and your skills, because you’re the only person on the entire planet who can use them.