Once again, I apologise for not having blogged in a while, I have recently undertaken work experience that left me very little time to draft/ compose a blog post. In the intervening period, however, the Scottish Referendum took place and the Scottish people voted to remain within the Union; Thank You Scotland! It is from the referendum that I wish to draw the topic of this, my next blog post. Many of the Scots that voted on 18th September were 16 and 17 years old, younger than the legal voting age in the UK for General, European and Local elections. This tosses some interesting questions into the political cauldron regarding extending the franchise to younger people, a subject that has been on Labour's backburners in recent years and a pet fancy of the Lib Dems for many years, and it has now truly entered the political vogue after the Scottish experiment.
This gladdens me. I have long been confused as to why we do not extend this relatively basic right to 16 and 17 year olds when we trust the latter to drive safely and the former is trusted by society to make comprehensive decisions about marriage and having children, despite still, legally, being children themselves. It is socio-culturally bizarre that we think, as a country, that someone can decide to start a family but they cannot be trusted to consciously vote for whoever best serves their interests and potentially those of their family too! At a time when people complain that politics is not engaging and doesn't emulate society for real, we should be doing our best to encourage more people to consider their political standings and involve themselves in the democratic process, something which the Scottish Referendum was exemplary of.
Turnout in the aforementioned referendum was a staggering 85%! Such a rate has never even been seen in a General Election since the Second World War. This turnout rate was an excellent reflection on the interest of Scots in the referendum and the level to which all strata of voters had been engaged by both the Yes campaign and the Better Together campaign. This, of course, includes the 16 and 17 year olds, who all saw a great opportunity to influence their futures by deciding how their country should be run. This brings me to the reason that best supports why younger people should be given voting rights. By very definition of their age group, younger people have greater vested interests in which government runs the country as they have more of a future to be affected by long term political decisions. Older generations, if they feel benevolent at election time, may vote based on what sort of society THEY THINK their children/ grandchildren want to inherit, Why not, therefore, leave that decision to younger people themselves, who could vote for what sort of society they wanted and what sort of society they want to set up for their children.
Generally speaking this is fairly sound as a concept, but there is one issue I would be concerned about, which is how informed the new young voters would be. Strictly speaking this is a problem for ALL voters, not just potential future young voters; are voters reliable enough to make a sound choice at the ballot box when the majority's main sources of information are purely: personal/ family convictions, parties' literature/ broadcasts and the popular press? Don't misjudge me, I think it is important, in some cases, to vote with your heart as well as your head, but voting purely on an emotive basis, depending on which party can sway your feelings best, is no foundation for a sound democracy. The basic element of the problem is that politics isn't easily understood by all; it has its intricacies. We need to provide our nation with an inherent understanding of political schools of thought and how the democratic process in Britain works. Had this been the case in 2011, more people may have been inclined to vote for AV as an electoral system. Should we be including "Government and Politics" as a statutory subject at GCSE for school children? I think so, as it would allow most 16 year olds and above to make a reasonably well conceived choice at the ballot box by the time they finished their mandatory education: to quote Lyndon B. Johnson, 'We must open the doors of opportunity, but we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.'
To conclude I think to reject entirely the concept of enfranchising 16 and 17 year olds is nonsensical and potentially dangerous to any party that refuses to adopt this seemingly popular stance. Britain is long overdue (by over 80 years) an extension of voting rights, especially to a group that is already entrusted with other, equally important personal choices. I would also hope that such a move would encourage more people to engage in the democratic process and thus knock turnout rates back up to what they used to be, constantly in the 70-80% margins, if not higher! This is, however, something that would need to be done properly, and also used as an important vehicle for looking at how we engage people with politics in Britain and what can be done to further that engagement. Hopefully this should flow naturally through Westminster and not require extensive external effort like the fight for women's votes did a century ago.
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