No, of course the “Youth Parliament” (posh schools’ booze-up, cokefest and orgy, doubtless at public expense) should not have been permitted to use the chamber of the House of Commons. Or the chamber of the House of Lords, come to that.
More broadly, politics is like Radio Four and so many other things: something into which one grows. Changing any of them to suit the unformed misses the whole point, and cruelly robs those unformed of the means to their own formation.
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Was your New Labour opponent there or is she too young?
ReplyDeleteDid she attend a posh schools’ booze-up, cokefest and orgy, doubtless at public expense? What do you think?
ReplyDeleteI tend to agree.
ReplyDeleteWhen you sit in a Politics tutorial and a 19 year old raises a hand to get some clarification "Was Margaret Thatcher a Conservative or Labour?" ..........and you tend to think this person got a A at A level..........it is not inspiring.
Besides if 14 year olds had the vote, the Grren Party would win by a landslide.
Even a superbly well-educated 16-year-old is still a 16-year-old.
ReplyDeleteLowering the voting age even further (the obvious agendum here) would pose a very serious threat to democracy, since no one seriously imagines that the opinion of a 16-year-old matters as much as that of his Head Teacher, or his doctor, or his mother. So why, it would be asked unanswerably, should each of them have only as many votes as he had? Thus would the process start.
Harold Wilson probably thought that he might gain some advantage from lowering the voting age. But in fact the Sixties Swingers hated him, and handed the 1970 Election to Ted Heath, to no one’s surprise more than Heath’s and his party’s, because, after Selsdon and all that, they had thought that he was going to entrench economically their own moral, social and cultural irresponsibility and viciousness. As it turned out, they had to wait another nine years. But they did it in the end. By voting Tory.
The lesson should have been learned. The very young would not even vote for a party which had been in office a mere six years, a long time to them. So the extremely young are certainly never going to vote for a party which, by the time of the General Election, will have been in office since they themselves were a mere three years old.
Have you actually researched the UK Youth Parliament, or are you just wittering nonsense?
ReplyDeleteYou only had to see them, if you felt that even that was necessary. And as soon as they opened their mouths...
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