Votes For Adults

Missed among Brown's constitutional reform proposals is his revival of that old chestnut, votes at 16. But even a superbly well-educated 16-year-old is still a 16-year-old. Lowering the voting age even further 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 has been in office since they themselves were a mere three years old.