Younger voters will make it a simple numbers game
THIS week, were I still a university degree convenor, I would be meeting and re-greeting the first three-year generation of undergraduates to have missed out almost entirely on voting in the 2016 EU referendum. Its consequences will significantly shape their remaining lives – much longer lives than most of those who collectively created the narrow Leave majority.
Then, come October, I would be lecturing to many of them – David Cameron’s timely memoir at hand – about the workings of UK Government and explaining how, institutionally, this situation came about.
First would be context. How did EU membership, which five years ago just eight per cent of us considered “important” in Ipsos MORI’s monthly Issues Index, become an apparently unavoidable subject for only the third national referendum in UK history?
Secondly and more audience-relevant, how did our quaint, uncodified, make-it-up-as-you-goalong British Constitution enable a hubristic prime minister to call a constitution-changing referendum with fewer conditions attached than their student bus passes?
For Cameron, any plurality would do.
Any written national constitution would have explicit written safeguards.
Cameron still defends his rejection of, say, a 60 per cent vote threshold, because Leavers, with their 51.9 per cent, would have seen it as a “stitch-up”.
Never mind Remainers, with their 48.1 per cent. But there was an off-the-shelf turnout-based precedent readily available, as imposed by Parliament on the 1979 Scottish devolution referendum.
Then, a near-identical majority (51.6 per cent) supported a devolved Assembly, but Parliament’s hurdle required 40 per cent of all registered electors – hardly an outrageous hurdle for so momentous a decision.
The 64 per cent turnout, though, meant a full-electorate Yes vote of under 33 per cent, and that first devolution bid failed.
The same formula applied to the higher 72 per cent EU referendum turnout would have produced a 37 per cent Leave vote – changing history, and my student audience’s lives. For them, though, that’s barely the half of it.
Third topic, therefore, would be how two-thirds of their three-year student generation were deprived even of this say in their own futures by a collection of unelected, unaccountable, predominantly Conservative Lords (average age 70-plus) voting in what they openly acknowledged was their own party’s perceived electoral interests.
To recap, the law had been changed to enable 16- and 17-yearolds to vote in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. And, to no one’s great surprise, this cohort of probably the most politically aware and informed teenagers in history participated enthusiastically – moreover, in greater numbers than 18-24s.
Which was the Cameron Government’s problem, when all parties in the House of Lords except the Conservatives proposed lowering the voting age similarly for the EU referendum.
Yes, 16/17-year-olds would probably vote disproportionately Remain, but, much worse, it would be difficult to avoid later making the same concession for a General Election – when many of this potentially 1.6 million-strong electorate might well vote other than Conservative. After serious armtwisting, therefore, the Lords’ vote was overturned – in what then, if hardly by today’s standards, seemed a particularly cynical manoeuvre. Incidentally, also excluded, again in contrast to the Scottish referendum, were tax-paying EU citizens resident in the UK and longer-term British expats living in the EU, some of whom aired their material interests during the PM’s recent Luxembourg visit.
Even then the episode was called a disgrace, and, were a repeat contemplated in a second EU referendum... well, select your own noun.
Personally, as someone with strong views on the issue but also a septuagenarian, I’d readily, were it legally allowable, have given my vote unconditionally to a 16/17-year-old and would again.
Scotland subsequently – and unanimously, with the Ruth Davidson-led Conservatives changing their minds – extended the 16/17-year-old franchise to the Scottish Parliamentary and local elections, and Wales is following suit.
England and Northern Ireland aren’t, apparently, reasoning that, despite being mature enough to pay taxes, marry, enlist, and face criminal charges, only at 18 can you grasp the complexities of voting in about the world’s most simplistic electoral system – and that, like 19th century women, the way to develop their political maturity is to bar their participation.
We can never know how, or how decisively, 16/17-year-olds might have voted in the referendum.
But, assuming a two-thirds turnout – slightly higher probably than in a General Election, because life-affecting causes energise teenagers more readily than party manifestos – a 70-75 per cent Remain vote would have cut the 1.27 million majority to probably under 500,000 or 1.5 per cent.
Which even most Brexiteers might have hesitated to label the “clear”, “conclusive”, “definitive” Voice of the British People – initially anyway.
Not to worry. We know, thanks to NOP pollster supremo Peter Kellner, that by mid-January this year the whole 1.27 million had disappeared anyway, at around 1,350 a day, through enough mainly Leave voters dying and enough mainly Remain young voters reaching voting age – and without one 2016 Remainer changing their mind.
Currently, however, the odds against a second In/Out referendum this year (12/1) are enormously longer than on a General Election (4/9 on).
This despite Boris Johnson’s failure to secure his October 15 election date, precisely calculated to exclude significant numbers of potentially Labour-voting students who would fail to meet the September 27 registration deadline and be disinclined to journey home to vote.
That was one not-so-secret plan that backfired spectacularly. Because it virtually guaranteed that student welcome weeks and freshers’ fairs everywhere will have their NUS/ Electoral Commission “Got5?” (minutes to register to vote) and partisan voter registration drives, social media campaigns, and even website info on whether their vote will be more effective from their uni or home address. What fun!
I’d readily, were it legally allowable, have given my vote unconditionally to a 16/17-year-old and would again.