Votes For Adults Action Week

Hereby inaugurated, to run alongside the Votes At 16 Action Week that begins today.

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, the Swingers 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 Conservative.