This Is Votes For Children

Polly Toynbee seems not to have noticed that, whereas most of Ed Miliband's Conference speech was rapturously received, great swathes of the hall declined to applaud his little surprise of votes at 16, which he had sprung out of nowhere.

Does she not remember what it was like to be a politically active Sixth Former? Does he? It is not an experience that I shall ever forget.

Based on it, I know with absolutely certainty, as I cannot believe that either she or he does not, that next to no one in that age bracket would vote.

In fact, those who were known to do so would have an even rougher and tougher time than people like that - people like Polly Toynbee, Ed Miliband and me - have had since time immemorial.

Would most of those who did vote, vote Labour? What if they did?

Their number would always be too small to make any difference, and the trends guaranteeing semi-permanent, if not permanent, Labour government from 2015 onwards have been building up since 1955, which was around the time that some of the present generation of 16-year-olds' grandparents were being born.

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 the Sixties Swingers hated him (that is largely forgotten now, but it is true), and they handed the 1970 Election to Ted Heath.

If there had been a General Election, as was once widely expected, in the spring of 1996, then, having been born in September 1977, I would have been able to vote in that election, even though I would still have had a couple of months of school left to go.

But my still being at school was my choice. I was free to walk out any time I liked. I had been for more than two years by then. I would have been, even if the school-leaving age had been raised to 18, as is now going to happen.

Lowering the voting age to two years below the school-leaving age would literally be giving the vote to children: to people whom we, as a society, had decided were not yet capable of deciding for themselves whether or not they wished to leave full-time education.

It is still well within living memory that most people left school, and went straight into taxpaying work, a full seven years before they were entitled to vote.

Now, we propose that people should have the vote two years before they are able to leave school. I say again, this is votes for children.

If anyone doubts quite how monolithically middle-class our political culture has become, then consider that it has almost certainly never occurred to the proponents of lowering the voting age that even 21 was ever attained before leaving full-time education, never mind a third of one’s life to that date after having done so.

If Miliband wants to do something in this vein, then he ought to promise to repeal the provision for fixed-term Parliaments, the effect of which is that the present Government cannot think of anything to put into a Queen's Speech, while even the legislative business that has already been announced has all but ground to a halt.