This Day and Age

I am still not convinced about lowering the voting age, into which we are being bounced because 16 and 17-year-olds have voted in the Scottish referendum.

I continue to believe in the force of the many arguments that I have advanced against it in the past. But my mind is no longer entirely closed to that change itself.

With the introduction of individual registration, I suspect that the proportion of the extremely elderly that remained on the electoral register would be hardly, if at all, higher than the proportion of those all the way up to the age of about 25.

Of those registered, if 16 and 17-year-olds were able to be so, then I strongly suspect that a higher proportion of them would actually exercise the franchise than of the over-90s, who are also a very small cohort overall.

I have seen the way in which candidates press the flesh in nursing homes when there is an election coming up. Some of the residents know exactly what is going on. Others are decidedly confused. Others again hardly know Christmas from Tuesday. 16 and 17-year-olds would be very much the same.

(By the way, I am wholly unshocked by the practice of activists filling in postal voting forms on behalf of the institutionalised elderly who ask them to vote for those activists' candidates. If that did not happen, then those electors' clearly expressed preference would go uncounted. If the Conservatives did not do exactly that in such staunch areas as they retain, then I should be speechless. Nor do I blame them in the least. Very far from it, in fact.)

Like a lot of my vintage, I see one third of bus passes used to commute, for much of the year from and to homes heated by the Winter Fuel Allowance, and then I consider that there will be none of those things for us, even though the people now coming into them no more fought in the War, and were no more on this earth while the War was being fought by anyone, than we were.

In my more mean-spirited moments, I ponder that people who "worked all their lives" were paid to do so, and ought not to have spent it all, as of course many of them did not, with the result that they are now loaded.

Or I ponder that they have not in fact "worked all their lives" if they have retired a mere two thirds of the way through the probable length of their lives.

I make no apology for seeing no War-like debt to be repaid to those whose formative experiences were sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, full employment, cheap housing, student grants, public ownership, municipal services, the explosion of mass consumer affluence, and the felt need to demonstrate against another country's war because this country was not waging one.

However, I believe in full employment, cheap housing, student grants, public ownership, municipal services, and opposition to American wars of liberal intervention.

I am by no means averse to the finer things in life. I fully recognise that few are those who could really manage without their bus passes or their Winter Fuel Allowances. I support the principle of universality to the very marrow of my bones.

No, the question is one of balance.

Balancing generational interests is as important as balancing class interests, or regional interests, or urban and rural interests, and so on. Only social democracy can do those. Only social democracy can do this.

The sheer size of the ageing Baby Boom is such that the democracy in social democracy might require a modest reduction in the voting age.

While that case has not yet been made sufficiently convincingly to justify the change, I am less and less decided that it simply never will or could be.