A sinister plot to lower the voting age to 16
WITh politics at its most febrile for years — and the young increasingly vociferously engaged — it was an inevitable development.
half a century after the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18, there is a clamour for it to be cut again — to 16.
Prime movers behind this demand are influential figures in the opposition parties. Of course, this is all too predictable because it is conventional wisdom that the young are anti-Tory.
Champions of the youth vote include Ed miliband, the Scottish nationalists’ leader in Westminster Ian Blackford, Green mP Caroline lucas and Jo Swinson, of the lib Dems.
Superficially, the logic of their argument may seem compelling.
As they wrote in a joint letter to the Guardian (where else?): ‘The decisions made by those in power in the coming years will profoundly affect the entire lives of young people.’
Indeed, they will. But on that basis why shouldn’t 14-year-olds be given the vote? Or ten-year-olds?
If that sounds absurd, the left-wing think tank Demos once went further and urged that babies should be enfranchised!
Joking apart, I believe that the true motivation behind the calls for the voting age to be lowered has nothing to do with rights for young people. It is an entirely cynical ploy.
Winston Churchill is said to have sagely commented on how the young are innately left-wing. he is attributed with the quote: ‘If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.’ There is plenty of good sense in this remark. But the left’s desire to expand the size of the electorate among the young is deeply sinister.
The fact is that the young are much more vulnerable to peer pressure than their elders. Anyone who has opinions against the crowd risks becoming a social pariah.
Sadly, this is made much more dangerous by the power of social media, which notoriously enforces group-think and conformity, and propagates fake news.
Only
later in life do people gain the confidence to have opinions of their own. It was very noticeable in June’s General Election how young people seemed to vote as a herd and not as individuals.
In this context, it is disgracefully dishonest of left-wing political parties to try to take advantage of the vulnerability of the young.
Elsewhere in the world, the minimum voting age is almost universally 18.
The handful of exceptions are not good examples of strong societies. They include some of the world’s most poorly governed countries — such as Cuba, Ecuador and Brazil. Unsurprisingly, Scotland followed their example as the SnP opportunistically tried to secure the country’s independence in the 2014 referendum by giving 16 and 17-year-olds the vote. It almost succeeded.
Whenever the issue is debated, the reason given to extend the vote is to encourage young people to be involved in politics.
Of course, that is a noble mission. But casting a vote is not the only way to be engaged. And, not giving them the vote isn’t discrimination, as some claim.
In other areas of public life, 16-year-olds are not allowed to sit on juries or serve as magistrates. And they are not permitted — quite rightly — to be sent to adult prisons.
By law, they cannot take out a mortgage. In England, youngsters must stay in full-time education — or start an apprenticeship or traineeship — until they are 18. look back to your younger self. At 16, we may have thought we knew everything about the world but, in truth, we were impressionable and hopelessly naïve. Still dependent on our families, we had no proper stake in society.
Some believe that the privilege of voting should be restricted to taxpayers. I disagree. In any case, only 40 per cent of voters pay any income tax. But lowering the voting age would reduce that percentage, and that would not be a good thing for society.
Of course, campaigning for a lower voting age is not the only lollipop labour is offering the young. In its manifesto for last month’s election, it wildly promised to give university students free tuition — thus freeing them from fees of up to £9,250 a year.
The £9.5 billion cost of this was fantasy economics. yet even though a 16-year-old GCSE pupil ought to have recognised this as utterly irresponsible, hundreds of thousands of youngsters voted labour — with 207,000 people aged 18 to 24 rushing to join the electoral register on deadline day.
no wonder Corbyn & Co and the lib Dems with their la la land economics want more of their support. Both parties know through bitter experience that people with a knowledge of how the world actually works are unlikely to vote for their reckless policies. So they want to expand the franchise to those who happily believe in a fantasy world where countries have no borders and the State has limitless coffers to pay for everything.
let’s not forget that the political heroes who fought great battles in the 19th century, including, later, the Suffragettes, for an expansion of the franchise, thought 21 was the right age to start voting.
And that was in an age when children not yet into their teens worked in factories, fought in the Army, went to sea and had gritty experience of life.
It’s undoubtedly a good thing that today’s children have easier lives. But that doesn’t mean they should be given the vote.