Ben Lowry: It is stupid to cut the voting age to cater for older children aged 16
The decision to lower the voting age to 16 is both cynical and stupid – yet had the support of most of the main Northern Ireland parties including the Ulster Unionist Party.
It is supported by the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and local parties such as Sinn Fein and Alliance for the obvious reason that they get more votes among younger voters and so they think that they will benefit from it.
Young voters generally means either 18 to 24 year-olds, or – if it is defined more widely – under 30s.
Lowering the franchise to sixteen-year-olds increases the former cohort by a third from a six-year age span to an eight-year age span. It increases the latter group by almost 20%, from a 12-year span to a 14-year span. This is a very significant boost to a group that, in the case of Sinn Fein for example, votes ever more heavily for them among youthful nationalists the younger they are.
It is baffling to me that a relatively traditional party such as the UUP think this sensible tradition (that only full adults vote) is one that should be scrapped, regardless of the party’s suggested accompanying (I think nebulous) reforms, such as greater education of younger voters.
It is clearly unwise to give votes to children. A 16-year-old teenager is at the stage of leaving childhood, so it is not fair to debate when childhood actually ends. In some respects 16 has been seen as a point at which a greater degree of responsibility can be assumed by the young person, and for decades was the point at which people were allowed to decide whether or not to smoke. But adulthood is accepted in societies around the world as beginning at the age of 18: it was the age at which someone typically can serve in the military and so if they could die for their nation then they ought to be able to vote as to how it is run.
If the are liable for taxes, the same logic applies.
If you lower the voting age to 16, why not to 14? No-one is advocating that now, but liberals will do so in time after 16 becomes embedded. After all, there has for years now been an emphasis on the ‘rights’ of children, and a move towards the idea that they are often not responsible for their actions, which – if bad – are blamed on ‘neuro diversities’ or traumatic experiences.
It is also wrong to assume that a right such as voting must always be lowered, that to do so is some sign of progress. Voting is also a responsibility that you need to be mature enough to understand. We have often moved age limits upwards – in America they pushed up the drinking age to 21, state by state, in the 1980s to try to cut road deaths.
And on both sides of the Atlantic, serious consideration has been given to increasing the driving age (as low as 16 in some US states, and 17 here) to 18, because young people are so much more likely to cause a car crash. Our understanding of the reasons why have improved, including the fact that the development of young men’s brains means they do not have a proper sense of risk until about 25.
There is just as strong an argument for raising the age of voting to 21 as there is for cutting it to 16 (21 is widely accepted as another stage in the transition from childhood to maturity).
A full participatory democracy is only about a century old in western democracies. Editing this newspaper has heightened my sense that democracy is both a new and a fragile. It was in its infancy at the time of the earliest News Letters of the 1730s, which I have serialised, and which report on the then first-ever prime minister Robert Walpole. A century after that, in the reform legislation of the 1830s, the number of men who got the vote began to expand. Then, after the Great War, the eligibility to vote was massively widened to increase women. But it was not until little more than half a century the franchise was lowered to 18 – by, yes, a Labour government (that of Harold Wilson).
Much of the world has no democracy at all, most notably China. Other countries have sham democracies. Many Chinese citizens agree with their leaders that deciding on how a society is run is not a matter for them, the general public, but for a ruling elite.
I believe that having a free press and an adult franchise (China has neither) has helped make the west a pinnacle of civilisation, but it is a new and precarious right that many countries like Russia are curbing by underhand means.
We already have politicians who pander to general voting publics who will not accept difficult decisions. There is at times an almost childlike notion that all public services should be of outstanding quality yet populations should not have to pay for them.
We urgently need more mature thinking in the face of growing threats to democracy and that will not be achieved by cutting the voting age.