Votes For Adults

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. Indeed, it is already starting in Scotland. “Some” 16 and 17-year-olds will have the vote. Which ones, exactly? And why, exactly?

Harold Wilson probably thought that he might gain some advantage from lowering the voting age. But in fact the Sixties Swingers hated him, and they handed the 1970 Election to Ted Heath. They did so to no one’s surprise more than Heath’s and his party’s, and they did so 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.

As for Ed Miliband’s being in favour of this, he may have been in the past, but even then he was in that case pretty much the only person in the Labour Party who was. He would not be now, I confidently assert. If he ever really was.

He should appeal directly to those who can and will vote by declaring his implacable opposition to it under any circumstance, including if it should appear in the Scottish referendum legislation together with some Old Dixie-style property, “literacy” or Poll Tax qualification thus introduced into our political system. The electoral base of the SNP, of course.