If I were making the case for votes at 16, I would say that taking part in democracy is so important that people should be encouraged to do it early. I would say that voting is different from other things that people do, and that taking part can help to prepare young people for the responsibilities of citizenship.
Instead, we tend to get a lot of false arguments about the other things that 16-year-olds can do and a rhetorical question: why shouldn’t they be allowed to vote too?
Thus on Thursday, when Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, published the government’s plan to reduce the voting age, she said that “16- and 17-year-olds can work, pay tax and serve in the military”.
Each of those actually undermines her case. They can work, but 14-year-olds can work part-time and it is government policy that 16- and 17-year-olds should be in education or training. You can pay income tax at any age. And though you can join the armed forces, you may not serve in a combat role.
In an article in The Times, Rayner went further and said that you can be married at 16. Like most people, she was unaware that the law in England and Wales was changed two years ago, raising the age to 18. The article was quietly corrected.
That mistake is the problem in a nutshell. At a time when age thresholds are generally being raised, advocates of votes at 16 have to explain why voting is different from most other things, not why it is the same.
In recent years, the age at which young people can get a tattoo or buy superglue, fireworks or cigarettes has been raised to 18.
The question is: why should voting be in the smaller category of things you can do at 16 rather than in the larger category of things that adults are allowed to do? I think that voting should be part of adulthood, but I don’t feel strongly about it, and I could be persuaded that a special case should be made for a lower age, as it is for sex, medical treatment and driving.
But the advocates of child voting really need to up their game. To be fair, Rayner did also make the better argument on Thursday: “By engaging voters early, when they are young, and allowing them to have a say in shaping their future, we will build the foundations for their lifelong participation in our electoral processes.”
There is some evidence for this. A Scottish study found that after the voting age was reduced for everything except UK parliament elections, that cohort “continued to turn out in higher numbers, even into their twenties, than young people who attained the right to vote later, at age 18”.
There are other ways of raising turnout. I am opposed to compulsory voting in principle – part of the point of voting is that it is a voluntary act – but I think that a small cash incentive for first-time voters is a good idea. Other studies have shown that “voting in one election substantially increases the likelihood of voting in the future”. And if a lower voting age does have a lasting effect in increasing engagement then there is no harm in doing that too.
My other objection to votes at 16, however, is the suspicion that it is being done for party advantage. That was plainly the case in Scotland, where David Cameron foolishly allowed Alex Salmond to expand the franchise in order to boost the separatist vote in the 2014 referendum. Cameron’s strategy seemed plausible: let the Scottish National Party choose the franchise, the date and the question, and then there could be no argument about the result. Like as if.
Equally, Rayner’s high-sounding arguments of principle are undermined by the knowledge that there are votes in it for her. The effects of the change are likely to be small. One poll this month, by Focaldata, suggested Labour and the Greens would gain 0.2 percentage points each, at the expense of Reform, Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. But it still stinks.
Yes, it was in Labour’s manifesto last year, which even used the good argument rather than the bad: “We will increase the engagement of young people in our vibrant democracy, by giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in all elections.” That is the correct procedure in a parliamentary democracy: you put it in the manifesto, get elected and enact it in law.
But there is an argument that constitutional questions should be treated differently: that is why we had a referendum on changing the voting system in 2011. And Labour ought to worry that in one list of manifesto policies polled it was the only one that more people opposed than supported.
That is the clincher for me. I am persuaded that it is good for young people to be engaged in politics. I could accept that Labour is entitled to act in its self-interest, having won a mandate for that explicit policy in the general election, if there was overwhelming support for it. But there is not, not even among 16- and 17-year-olds.
So, I realise that it is going to happen, and that it won’t be reversed once it has happened, but I wish Labour would drop the nonsense about serving in the military and make a better case of democratic principle.
