Labour’s handing 16-year-olds the vote is uncommon glimpse into actual plans
‘So, Sir Keir Starmer,’ we might ask, ‘why does an ordinary Labour leader like you want to give the vote to Left-wing teenagers?’
For Sir Keir has said that he will extend the franchise to all voters between the ages of 16 and 18, about 1.5 million of them. The suspicion that this is cynical calculation by a man who intends to stay in power if he gets it is not just idle guesswork, either.
According to the highly reputable British Election Study, age has replaced class as the biggest predictor of how people will vote. At the 2019 general election, the Tories won the support of 56 per cent of those aged 55 and over, but only 24 per cent of those under 35.
For Labour it was almost exactly the other way round. They were backed by 54 per cent of under-35 voters, but by only 22 per cent of those aged 55 and over.
The Labour leader has blustered that his scheme is really all about fairness and justice. He argues that because 16-year-olds pay tax and can join the Army, it is only right that they should help elect the Government.
Sir Keir has said that he will extend the franchise to all voters between the ages of 16 and 18
But these days the state encourages young people between 16 and 18 to stay in education and training if they can, and their earnings are likely to be small. It’s highly likely that very few of them pay much in the way of income tax.
And if anyone who pays tax has to have a vote, then what about all those ten-year-olds, paying a stinging 20 per cent in VAT on ice creams and chocolate bars? It’s a poor argument.
As for the Army, Left-wing campaigners recently fought successfully to bar soldiers aged under 18 from combat. Defence chiefs did not much like this change, but a growing tide of opinion defeated them.
Recruits may still join at 16, but they are normally banned from actual fighting until they reach voting age. Wouldn’t giving votes to 16-year-olds strengthen the generals’ case for letting the same 16-year-olds go back into battle, especially in an age when getting anyone to join the military is so hard?
The Labour leader is going very much against the trend in his own movement — which is to treat under-18s as children rather than adults. Many Labour MPs supported last year’s Act which raised the minimum age for marriage in England. It went up from 16 to 18.
In 2007, it was a Labour government which increased the minimum age for buying cigarettes from 16 to 18. Then there is the issue of jury service. When the voting age dropped from 21 to 18, in 1969, the jury age soon followed it. This is logical.
If you are old enough to decide the fate of your country, you are surely old enough to decide the guilt or innocence of an accused person.
We cannot really be surprised at Labour for seeking to find whatever votes it can, wherever it can, whenever it can, Peter Hitchens writes
Sir Keir should be asked how consistent he is in all this. Does he want 16-year-olds on juries? If not, why not? Does he think his own children will be mature enough to get married, buy tobacco, buy drinks in pubs, or get tattooed at 16 rather than at the current age of 18?
If they’re not fit to take such decisions, why on earth does he think they should be able to vote? You can almost hear his mind flip and flop as he tries to cope.
He has already flipped on his 2020 pledge to give votes, in general elections, to 3.4 million European Union nationals living in this country. Only a year ago he confirmed he was ‘still thinking about’ this. Then he said last Monday that he had gone off the idea.
Sir Keir famously zig-zags like a wartime convoy evading U-boats. But where he has zigged, he can zag, and where he can zag, he may yet zig.
If he attains power, how long will it take him to dig up and revive that plan for votes for EU citizens? Labour, by its nature, does not want to give up power and thinks it has a permanent right to rule. And it sometimes lets this slip.
In its February 1974 general election manifesto, the party promised ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’. Note that ‘irreversible’.
In 1997, it asserted that ‘New Labour is the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole’. This was an astonishing claim to have superseded the old two-party state.
But it goes deeper than that. Labour’s programme would take many years to work. So Britain’s traditional alternation between two parties, every few years, very much gets in the way.
Labour’s greatest Left-winger was Aneurin Bevan, still admired by people such as Sir Keir.
On May 21, 1945, at the party’s Blackpool conference, he rashly let the truth slip out, saying: ‘We enter this campaign not merely to get rid of the Tory majority — that will not be enough for our task. It will not be sufficient to get a parliamentary majority.
‘We want the complete political extinction of the Tory party and 25 years of Labour government. We cannot do in five years what requires to be done’.
In the end, the 1945 Labour government took six years to fritter away its huge majority. Harold Wilson, too, managed only six Labour years between 1964 and 1970.
Blairism was conceived to overcome that problem — but even that slick machine ran into trouble after 13 years. That is why Blair and his aides fought so hard in the 2001 election to browbeat the Tory party into accepting their programme and to become more like them, as it did under David Cameron.
In light of this, we cannot really be surprised at Labour for seeking to find whatever votes it can, wherever it can, whenever it can.
There are still many millions of people in this country — and they tend to be those with more experience of life — who have heard Labour promises before, and have even been beguiled by them. But they have also experienced what actually happens when Labour comes to office.
So how odd it is to observe the recent media frenzy over Rishi Sunak’s ‘national service’ plan. This idea has the sickly look of a policy bound to fall apart within days of contact with reality.
By contrast, Sir Keir’s bottomlessly cynical proposal of votes at 16, will certainly happen if he wins. It will be one of his first actions if he comes to power. Yet it has seen very little scrutiny. It is time that this changed.
In this nasty little plan we see right into Labour’s mind — and what we find there is not pretty at all. You don’t often get a danger signal as clear as this one.
