That 16-year-old who stabbed his teacher in the head rightly cannot be named. Yet on Wednesday evening, the House of Commons gave Third Reading to a Bill to give 16-year-olds the vote. If we are going to hold the line against allowing 16-year-olds to self-identify as the opposite sex, then we need to hold the line against this, too. I have always been uncharacteristically agnostic about that one, but while the usual arguments on both sides are rubbish, this changes the game. Intentionally or otherwise, the lowering of the voting age for devolved and municipal elections in Scotland set the scene for it, and must be reversed. The quality of the elections varies widely, but a formal voting age of 18 is very nearly universal. Consider the huge difference in, say, drinking ages, or ages of marriage. Yet the world looks at the question of when to allow people to vote, and overwhelmingly it concludes that, while these things were always going to be arbitrary, 18 would do.
The Greens voted to enfranchise people two years below the school leaving age, and most girls who voted at all would vote Green. But Reform UK mostly voted against it, with none in favour, even though most boys who voted at all would vote Reform if the General Election were held this week, although the abstention of Rupert Lowe suggested that that particular wind was increasingly blowing further right again. Watch out for something similar on Proportional Representation, which UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform used to support, with Nigel Farage himself arguing forcefully in favour of it. Attitudes may change now that it was being considered specifically in order to prevent a Reform Government. Look, I am not necessarily against PR. It is just that First Past the Post is like the monarchy. It does not do any of the things that its proponents say that it does, and they spend most of their time complaining that those things are not there. But the other side's arguments are just as bad, so the case for change has not been made.
Britain has had six Prime Ministers in the last 10 years, including three in 2022. The idea that the world looks at this country and sees stability is completely laughable. First Past the Post has delivered hung Parliaments on two of the last five occasions, and there have been four hung Parliaments in my lifetime, even if only those two have resulted directly from a General Election. While I was politically active, the purported bulwark against "coalitions of chaos", the Conservative Party, led no fewer than three coalition arrangements with three different parties, including the only formal Coalition since 1945. That nightmare of austerity and war was with the supposed lynchpin of "the Progressive Alliance". But the argument for any specific or unspecific alternative is no better, and First Past the Post is what we have.
In treating of democracy, what is the demos? At the 2021-22 census, there were 10.7 million people who had been born abroad. They would have included Cliff Richard until he decamped to the Republic of Barbados. They included Boris Johnson. They included Daniel Hannan. They included Peter Hitchens. They included me. We are all British citizens, but the thing about allowing only British citizens to vote is that Britain has never done it. Almost no other country allows any category of non-citizen to vote. In the United States, you cannot become President unless you were born there. Imagine suggesting there or in Israel that any non-citizen should have the vote. National Conservatives have picked the wrong laboratory here, where an Irish or Commonwealth citizen could in principle become Prime Minister. Is anyone still sitting in the House of Commons for an English, Scottish or Welsh seat without being a British citizen, or for a Northern Irish seat without being British or Irish? That may now be an open goal for rivals to be First Past the Post. Yet it is perfectly possible.
Last year, the Migrant Democracy Project was merely stating the obvious when it called this country's qualifications for voting "colonial". Britain has a long, recent, and, as we see, ongoing imperial history. It was in the EU for two generations. It is mercantile. De Gaulle was right to call us "maritime", but not to call us "insular". Citizens of countries that were in the French Empire when he said that now have the vote in Britain as citizens of the Commonwealth. We already enfranchise the Commonwealth citizens of Rwanda, Mozambique, Gabon and Togo, none of which was ever in the British Empire. Why let a Gabonese or a Togolese vote, but not an American or an Israeli?
Extending suffrage to citizens of countries with which we had a connection is so British that it is positively Burkean, like the National Health Service. We give the citizens of the Commonwealth's other member states the right to vote and stand in elections to our Parliament, but very few of those countries reciprocate; two of the last six Prime Ministers of Australia have had to give up their natal British citizenship in order to sit in the Australian Parliament. The present system enfranchises Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, but not Americans or Israelis. Is that what those who write above the line in the Daily Telegraph want? It says that Ghanaians are more "like us" than Germans are, and that Swazis are more "like us" than Swedes are. Is that what those who write below the line in the Daily Mail want?
Countries join and leave the Commonwealth quite frequently. None of them has any more recent connection to Britain that any member of the European Economic Area has. By any measure, many have less. Some fairly recent additions to the Commonwealth have no more connection to Britain than anywhere else in the world has. Although no less, either. Britain is now globally noted for its superdiversity, uniquely combining people from every inhabited territory on Earth, some level of ethnic diversity down to every neighbourhood and village, and a huge and exponentially increasing mixed-race population in the society that accepted mixed-race people and couples more than anywhere else. So, since there would seem to be no remaining example to the contrary, require parliamentary candidates to be British citizens in Great Britain, or British or Irish citizens in Northern Ireland. But either restrict the franchise in the same way, or let everyone vote. Those two options should be put to the House of Commons, with whichever passed by the larger majority coming into effect, or with neither of them doing so if both had been defeated.
Beware of tying the franchise to the payment of income tax. 42 per cent of adults have incomes that do not reach that threshold, which Reform wants to increase. No, not "before benefits". Two in five adults have gross incomes, from all sources, of less of than one thousand pounds per month. If that does not sound like the Britain that you know, then you need to get out more. And if a Polish full-time cleaner could not vote because her income was too low for the taxman, then why should a British full-time cleaner be able to vote? So it would begin.
Then there is the matter of party funding. The Sainsbury family still owns about 15 per cent of the company that bears its name, and that company has an annual profit of more than one billion pounds, so that family is not doing too badly, and it matters enormously that it makes eye-watering donations to all three main parties only for Sainsbury's to be sent 10,000 unemployed youths who will be compelled to work for it instead of Christmas temps, and to be paid only the Universal Credit that supermarket staff also claimed on an enormous scale. Other major shareholders include BlackRock and the Qatari sovereign wealth fund, also, like several more, with impeccable political connections. You do not need work experience for an entry level job in a supermarket, and in any case there is no job at the end of one of these so-called placements, yet the State will be subsidising Sainsbury's at least twice over, and giving it free advertising into the bargain by presenting the arrangement as an act of corporate civic responsibility. I cannot remember anything more brazenly corrupt.
But as with the companies named, yet not punished, for having criminally failed to pay the national minimum wage, it would be wrong to boycott Sainsbury's and damage its workers. Rather, where is USDAW, which gives nearly two million pounds per year to the Labour Party? Conservative and Reform councils are saved from abolition, while Liberal Democrat shadow authorities are assured that they will enter into their pomp, but, from Sainsbury's, to the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields, to wherever there is an equal pay claim such as the Employment Appeal Tribunal has today rendered meaningless, what about the workers?
From the impact of immigration in driving down wages and working conditions, to the softening of the British such that they submitted to the lockdowns, to the 62,199 or more arrests for speech crimes in the last five years, those bemoaning any one or more of those should consider that none of them would have been possible, in the same way in the second case or at all in the other two, without the weakening of the trade unions. The same would be true of that old New Labour standby, compulsory voting. If they do not want to ban something, then they want to make it compulsory. People will vote if they are given anything to vote for. Indeed, with Labour now ahead of Reform, it is not clear why those agitating for compulsory voting thought that there was a problem. As with the voting age and the electoral system that had given them 403 seats, in fact.
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