Votes at 16 is sheer lunacy

Labour's plan amounts to naked electoral gerrymandering and should be rejected

Sir Keir Starmer has pledged that a Labour government led by him would lower the voting age from 18 to 16. I have no hesitation as a longstanding member of the Labour party in saying that I think this plan is outright lunacy.

I should explain at the outset that I consider it a good thing for any young person to take an interest in politics and the world about them, and youngsters should certainly be encouraged to participate in political discussion and debate. I am not a subscriber to the ‘Children must be seen and not heard’ school of thought.

But the truth is that 16- and 17-year-olds are, compared to most voters, intellectually and emotionally immature. Many of them are still at school. Few, if any, among them have had the life experience of the average adult. They have (in most cases) not worked in paid employment, raised a family, taken on a mortgage or paid rent, struggled to pay the bills or get on the housing ladder. All of these things endow a person with the cold, hard worldliness necessary to make informed decisions about the nature of society and how it should be run.

Wikimedia Commons / Colin

There is also a striking hypocrisy at play here. We don’t allow 16- and 17-year olds to sit on juries, stand for council or parliament, serve in combat roles in the armed services, buy knives, fireworks, tobacco or alcohol, be tattooed, own land or property, or (in England and Wales) be married. We restrict their liberties in all these areas because we understand only too well that many are not yet at a stage in their lives where they may be trusted to discharge them responsibly. And if any sort of campaign were launched to overturn any of these restrictions, it would probably be condemned as irresponsible.

Think back to when you were 16 or 17. Did you hold the same political opinions and outlook on society as you do today? Did you possess the knowledge, insight or judgement of your current self? Would it have been right for someone to have entrusted you with a vote on who should run the country and on what type of programme?

I shudder to think what state the country would be in today if someone had allowed the 16-year-old me to choose the government of the day.

On one level, Sir Keir’s pledge is little short of plain electoral gerrymandering. He knows that most 16- and 17-year-olds are not exactly conservative in their attitudes and would most likely vote for a party of the ‘progressive’ Left. So the plan would almost certainly help to swell support for Labour at the ballot box.

But instead of resorting to these kinds of cynical manoeuvrings, political parties should concentrate their efforts on winning over the existing electorate with their ideas and programme – and, if they don’t succeed in that mission, reflecting on why they failed. As a Labour member, I don’t want my party to win elections because we’ve cooked the ballot; I want to win because the grown-ups in the room believe we are the best choice for government. 

On another level, the pledge is a manifestation of the current fashion among some on the Left for dismissing all older citizens as short-sighted, reactionary, Brexit-supporting ‘gammon’ while viewing the young as imbued with some kind of unique wisdom – as though anyone under 25, unencumbered by what Marx called the ‘muck of ages’, is gifted with an ability to see and understand things in a way denied to the rest of us. We see this attitude in, for example, the near-veneration of Greta Thunberg and her every public utterance.

It’s bunkum, of course. By no measure are the young better able to grasp the challenges facing our world than more seasoned voters. And what a contrast between our nation, which too often treats older voters as a liability, and countries such as Japan, where the wisdom and experience of senior citizens is valued.  

It’s ironic, too, that, in this age of ‘safetyism’, when we are so preoccupied with keeping young people out of harm’s way – telling them to check their mental health every five minutes and creating ‘safe spaces’ where there ears can be protected from ‘offensive’ views – we should think they are equipped to deal with the task of choosing the government, with all the implications such a decision entails for war and peace, democracy, prosperity, and the general well-being of the nation and its people.

Some who support the Labour plan make the argument that working 16- and 17-year-olds are liable for income tax, and there should be ‘no taxation without representation’. But any child who receives an income from employment (child actors and models, for example) is liable for income tax, and few people would argue for extending the franchise to all children for this reason. In any case, if it’s a showstopper in the argument, I’d be quite willing to see 16- and 17-year olds exempted from any requirement to pay income tax.

The plan for votes at 16 is political opportunism at its worst. There is no sound case for supporting it, and – hold on, let me check the population statistics – around a million and a half reasons for doing the opposite.

---

A reminder that you can follow me on X/Twitter: @PaulEmbery