British Voting Age

Hello again

2006-12-10T23:50:00.000Z

Thankfully the V@16 brigade haven't made any significant ground recently as I've been very busy, but this blog has had a surprising number of visitors in the meantime.

I'm just returning from the long hiatus to highlight an article on the BBC website today. It doesn't manage to go much deeper than the "but they're old enough to do X" and the "but we don't know enough about it all" arguments, but there are a couple of interesting parts...

"In Albania, for example, members of the country's youth parliament have successfully campaigned to raise the minimum drinking age from 16 to 18. They thought too many teenagers were getting drunk."

If all teenagers were so dispassionate when analysing themselves the world would be a very different place! Whilst I personally wouldn't necessarily disagree with a drinking age of 18 (although the gradual, Mediterranean way of introducing wine etc from a young age is a good way to avoid the binging culture in the UK/US), I'd say a majority of teenagers rightly or wrongly would - it's natural for people to want what they can't get.

I'd suggest that unfortunately this fascinating anecdote from Albania is an anomaly however - lowering minimum age restrictions for XYZ is a standard demand of "the voice of the youth". In my experience, the types who get involved in Youth Parliaments and become the token young people who get consulted about things by the Social Services often have the balance between opinionated righteous indignance and considered pragmatism heavily weighed towards the former.

"For thousands of years of human development, 15 or 16-year-olds have been considered as adults - but we treat them legally pretty much the same as a five-year-old or a six-year-old."

This grand statement by Alex Koroknay-Palicz of America's National Youth Rights Association is as vacuous as they come (how on Earth can the first part be quantified, and even if it could it doesn't mean that the young have always enjoyed the same political rights as elderly people - the opposite is closer to the truth), and like many V@16 statements is as much an argument for having no voting age than one for reducing it to 16.

"If you're 13 and you kill somebody, they say: 'Oh, you're a responsible adult. We're going to throw you in jail for the rest of your life.' Whereas, if you're 13 and you want to vote, they say: 'Oh, you're a stupid little kid. You don't have any rights.' So they only seem to treat people as adults when they do something wrong."

Alex again. Isn't being able to judge murder as being a bad thing a bit of a jump from being able to make an informed judgement on the future national economic policy?

"In most countries, the legal age of majority is 18. That's when the law recognises that you are an adult - that you are entitled, in law, to have control over your own body, your decisions and your actions. But that's not the same as what's called the age of licence, which is what you're allowed to do at any particular age: drink, marry, or drive a car, for example."

A welcome distinction made here by journalist Robin Lustig. 18 isn't an arbitrary age, it is when you are recognised as being autonomous, and responsible for all of your actions. Picking a different age for voting rights would, however, be a much more abitrary decision.

"Psychologist Helen Haste at the University of Bath says under-18s are perfectly capable of making the sorts of decisions that could entitle them to vote. 'They can recognise that we are part of a community and that we have to work together as a group of people in a community, whether that community is a school, a village, a town or even a country'."

Yes they can, but as with adults many under-18s are not socially conscious. Sadly that is something that can't be filtered out by any restriction.

"Many young people do seem to be much more capable than adults are prepared to believe. Many are already playing an active role in influencing the decisions made in their community. So what will the world be like when they finally take over? No-one can be sure - but I'm looking forward to finding out."

This closing statement seems to view under-18s as a unified group in a similar way to the V&16 campaigners who outrageously compare themselves to the suffragettes. Young people are just that: people who are young, who are still developing in every way on their road to maturity.

Gordon Brown advocates votes at 16

2006-02-27T11:36:00.000Z

If you follow daily news you can't have missed the fanfare today that accompanied the publication of the Power to the People report. From some of the coverage you would have thought that there was a general election on the issue - The Independent devoted several of its front pages to the document. It's basically just another detached-from-reality policy paper from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
There were some interesting proposals in it, such as voters having the option to tick a box that will give their party of choice £3 worth of Government funding. However, it makes the same lame assertion of campaigners that lowering the voting (and candidacy) age is needed to engage younger people in the political process. Is there not enough work needed already with the 18-24yrs group, the age group with the lowest voting turnout? What would this do to the already flimsy Government mandate at general elections - Labour currently runs the country comfortably from the votes of 22% of the electorate (this touches on electoral systems which I don't want to get into).
I'll post again once I've read the thing properly, maybe it expands on the "16yr olds have the right to vote" mantra. Now that the "Votes at 16" campaign have got their biggest backer yet in the shape of the dour Scotsman, perhaps I should consider the potential problems with such a reform.
Would the logic of their slogans flip around to "I can vote but can't drink/drive, and need permission to marry/go on school trips."? Wouldn't it be simple if we just had one age where you were recognised as your own person in most spheres of life. Oh, hang on a second...
(Click here to download the full report)
Update: I've no idea why his article disappeared today!

"Were Canada to raise the voting age to 21, the young would not be disenfranchised but rather would be given back their teeth"

2006-01-24T12:27:00.000Z

Excellent article in Canada's Macleans magazine advocating raising the voting age there to 21. Most of the arguments equally apply to simply not lowering it. I was asked for an interview a while ago but I've been too busy recently unfortunately.

"Young people don't vote, a problem that's now discussed so much that our eyes can be forgiven for glazing over -- like a teenager's in a civics class -- whenever it's raised. In Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere, there are high-profile campaigns to try and lower the voting age to 16 in the hope it will encourage young people to take part in the democratic process.

But there's a growing body of evidence to suggest that's a wrong-headed approach. Scientific, sociological and demographic evidence indicates that young people are, in essence, too immature and too detached from functioning society to be entrusted with the vote. What if the move to lower the age from 21 to 18 was wrong in the first place and ought to be reversed?

The idea of raising the age of suffrage isn't that far-fetched. It was only in 1970, after all, that the federal government hit upon18 as a good age to start kids voting. But kids today aren't what they were in 1970 -- not the stakeholders in the political process, nor the models of civic engagement their boomer parents once aspired to be. Many today still live at home, more remain in school longer, and more move willy-nilly from job to job before settling on a career. In 1971, 22 per cent of Canadians between 15 and 19 held full-time jobs, compared with just 13 per cent in 2001, according to Statistics Canada. "The traditional adulthood of duty and self-sacrifice is becoming more and more a thing of the past," James Côté, a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario, explains. In 1970, adolescence ended abruptly after the age of 19; now it languishes well into one's 20s or 30s."

From Cheddar to Stilton

2006-01-12T20:28:00.000Z

"Young people are much more mature now than they were when I was 16" says Eric Martlew, MP for Carlisle, in support of a recent Early Day Motion.

Did he genuinely mean this or was he appeasing the young 'uns with vacuous compliments? I wonder what evidence he has to back up his definition of maturity?

A dictionary definition offers "The state or quality of being fully grown or developed." As I've noted before, important parts of our brains are still developing at the age of 21. Many teenagers have their growth spurts around the age of 16 and after. Most 16 and 17 yr olds haven't experienced the realities of living independently, and as such, unlike in the 'olden days' often have no idea how to maintain a house, provide their own sustinance or look after a child. Rates of truancy, crime, drug use, drunkeness and violence are higher than ever. The yoof of today have not experienced the hard times of war, rationing and economic depressionthat our parents and grandparents have. What is Martlew's definition of maturity?

I listed Sudan as one of the only countries in the world to have a voting age lower than 18. Despite being a barely literate generation, I would be happy for 16 yr olds in that country to have the vote - the elder sister who has looked after her younger siblings since her parents died of AIDS, the young lad who was kidnapped for the army, escaped, and tried to make a living for himself in agriculture. These are the life experiences that matter, not that a 17 yr old so-and-so who likes their opinions to be heard can drive a car.

Maturity comes through time on this earth, but also through experiences. It's not something that improves in each generation because of better technology or an egalatarian education system. The 21st century teenager isn't forced to grow up too fast, he/she has the leisure to enjoy life during these educative, formative years without real responsibilities. This isn't a bad thing. It won't be long before they mature enough to hone good life skills and attitudes, and it won't be long before they will have the opportunity to vote.

"The right to vote starts at 16"

2006-01-12T20:04:00.000Z

So says a campaign poster by the votes at 16 campaign.

I was initially impressed with the eye-catching nature of the advert, but the more you ponder on this sentence, the more absurd it seems. Which deity ascribes us the right to go to a polling station once we have been alive for 5844 days? If most of the arguments to reduce the voting age to this number of days of life are cogent, then why are 5843 day olds so inferior?

The only philisophically viable approach to voting age is to either have no voting age at all (I would respect talk of rights in this case), or to believe in a pragmatic starting age - the blatantly obvious watermark in this country being 18, the age of adulthood (although in East Asia, for example, you are not recognised as an adult until 21).

A future alliance?

2005-12-14T17:57:00.000Z

My main motivation for creating this blog was to provide some small balance to the issue of voting age in this country. It seems I am the main paladin at the moment, but I'm confident that more people will come out of the woodwork once the issue hits Parliament.

You may recall in the run up to the Electoral Commission publishing its report on voting and candidacy age, a similar blog was authored by Philip Cowley, although it hasn't been updated since the Commissions report almost fatally crushed the Votes at 16 campaign. The link for his very good 'Votes for Adults' blog is in my links section.

At the same time Professor David Denver, something of an expert on these matters, provided some solid intellectual weight against the weak premises of those wishing to reduce the voting age.

In terms of political parties, the Conservatives policy of both voting and standing at 18 was vindicated by the specialists at the Electoral Commission, but the Lib Dems, and their youth wing (note the other distasteful policies in that document!) still stand by the ill thought out idea of further reducing the voting age, and use the VA16 campaigns' mottoes almost verbatim.

As previously mentioned, whilst the vast majority of the public support the status quo on this matter there are no obvious groups to actively campaign against changing it - it's much easier to garner support for changing something than keeping it, especially on an issue that few can get passionate about! (well, the other side do like to compare their cause to the suffragettes, but that is both disrespectful to their noble cause and misleading in comparison - women were forever denied the vote whilst itching rebels-without-causes will get their right soon enough.)

In the near future, an alliance of like-minded people such as myself, Prof.Denver and Philip Cowley may well need to formed into a more professional voice for common sense on this issue - there's just too much at stake to let this proposal waltz through to legislation.

The bandwagon rolls on

2005-12-05T13:32:00.000Z

The Early Day Motion advocating lowering the voting age has managed to get a hundred signatories from MPs (less than one in six). It is concerning that it has even got to that as there is a one-sided campaign targeted at MPs.

Few people outside of a metropolitan elite bubble would feel that the noise made in Westminster for this proposal is proportional to the feelings of most people. Or is that because they all want to keep those inferior 17 year olds at bay?

Only yesterday there were strong signs that the legal smoking age will rise to 18 from 16. If it wasn't so politically correct I'm sure one of the slogans of the Votes at 16 campaign would have been
"I can smoke but I can't vote" or perhaps
"I can damage my health to look cool but I don't have the God-given right to not bother to go to a polling station to vote for the party that says it will reduce the drinking age"

Wheres another poll showing clear public support for keeping votes at 18 when you need one!

Google fight

2005-12-01T23:16:00.000Z

In an extremely close fight, Votes at 18 beats Votes at 16 in a key indicator of public opinion.
p.s. putting the phrases in quotation marks makes a huge difference, but we won't mention that ;)

Edit: It's now virtually neck and neck due to recent coverage!

Not the most serious of posts :)

Electoral Administration Bill

2005-11-24T03:54:00.000Z

The subject of voting age has been brought up under the Electoral Administration Bill by Diana Johnson MP in the relevant committee. Another committee member Harriet Harman MP, Elections Minister, also looks favourably upon lowering it. Alex Folkes says that it was debated for an hour on Tuesday, although not according to this. I'm not disputing it, would just like to see the transcript!

Several people have told me in the last couple of weeks that there's no point in this blog as it will never become law, I wish I shared your optimism!

For the first time since the Electoral Commission dealt it's blow (or should I say 'kick in the teeth'), VotesAt16 has been creeping back on to the agenda.

Don't get complacent!

p.s. Thanks for all your emails of encouragement, though I would encourage you to share your thoughts as comments as well, if you have a Blogger account.

"Grow up!" - Joshua Rey

2005-11-24T03:34:00.000Z

I managed to dig out this article I remember reading in The Times Thunderer column 18 months ago. It gets a bit philisophical but is a good read.

I particularly like: "Yet even many adults make the preposterous comparison between Votes at 16 and the Civil Rights movement. We all, not just the young, are losing the capacity to see ourselves as continuous moral persons through time."

Enjoy...

A fatal Catch 22?!

2005-11-14T01:59:00.000Z

The sharper minds amongst you may have picked up on a potentially fatal flaw in my arguments. I am still a teenager at 19 years of age, although as previously mentioned I have held these opinions from roughly the age of 17 - when I was ineligible to vote.

If I am right in my premises about young voters (particularly this one), can you the reader take those very premises of mine seriously?

If not, then does that therefore make my arguments wrong?

It's a funny catch 22 where my arguments dig their own grave to prove that they are right!

I could spin that clash of logic in different ways, but I'd like to clarify that my 'arguments' aren't actually that under 18's are all intellectually inferior!

I do think that my age adds weight to my position on this issue - past advocates of similar views on voting age have been at least middle-aged and talked about the superiority of adults etc.

Turning tide

2005-11-13T22:19:00.000Z

Heard of The New Party?
They are a small party with some support in Scotland and have a raft of interesting policies.

Letting them down somewhat was their initial support for a lower voting age, but after inquiring about it a couple of months ago they told me "We no longer support votes at 16" and subsequently "On review we decided things are fine at present".

I generally believe that change comes from within and therefore reform through mainstream parties, but I respect this party not only for it's sensible change of policy but also because despite it's size it is against proportional representation on principle.

I took the time to remind Alex Folkes, caretaker of the Votesat16 campaign (and on the payroll of the Electoral Reform Society as their Press and Campaigns Officer), that The New Party should no longer be listed as a supporter on the campaign website (the one that strangely went offline for at least 3 months in the summer period) but some months later this hasn't happened for some reason...

Worldwide conspiracy!

2005-11-11T13:05:00.000Z

I've been doing some research..

What do Nicaragua, Somalia and Brazil have in common?

Apart from having huge levels of poverty, they are the only countries in the world which have the low voting age of 16.

A few more exemplar countries accompany them in also having minimum voting ages lower than 18...

Iran,
North Korea, and
Sudan
(oh, and some place called Seychelles)

Apologies if I have missed any other countries, I used all the evidence available 11/11/05

Evidently, nearly every single democratic, developed and civilised country in the world is content that eighteen or older (Japan's is 20, for example) is the sensible age to start voting.

A curse on those adult types who universally deprive us of our 'rights'!

This of course is not an argument in itself- if no idealistic people went against the flow the world would be greatly worse off, there are a few things that I myself believe in that a majority of the world doesn't. It is however revealing that there is no global sense of outrage at under 18's being ineligible to go to the polling stations. There are pockets of resistance to the conspiracy, such as in Florida, but they are invariably led by the chattering classes rather than the common yoof.

Yes, the votesat16 campaign in the UK can claim the support of the eminent organisations the British Youth Council and the UK Youth Parliament, but organisations made up of the minority that is the politically active young person are hardly going to reject the opportunity to vote by a matter of principle. I digress.

The choice is clear: go against the consensus of the civilised world and be a guinea pig for spurious reasons, or focus on important matters such as -insert any higher priority-

Come on, it's a no-brainer! (almost literally)

2005-11-10T04:06:00.000Z

Teenagers don't have adult brains - that's a psychological and anatomical fact.

All you need is some teenagers of your own or an MRI scanner to hand to find this out for yourself!

a) Our brains are still restructuring past the age of 20, the prefrontal cortex (frontal lobes) in particular.

b) It just so happens that the prefrontal cortex facilitates abstract thinking, self-control and making moral judgements.

c) Is it sensible to extend suffrage to a group that is inherently lacking in these qualities?

Neuroscientist Jay Geidd, of the US National Institutes of Health is involved in this kind of research and sums it up quite nicely...

"It's not that the teens are stupid or incapable... It's sort of unfair to expect them to have adult levels of organisational skills or decision-making before their brain is finished being built."

(Recommended reading: "The Primal Teen" by Barbara Straught)

"You can't fatten the pig on market day"

2005-11-09T15:56:00.000Z

"We have citizenship in schools now, so 16 yr olds are knowledgeable enough to vote"

So says a common case for 'the other side'. Yes, the ball has started rolling on citizenship education but i've yet to find a teenager who has experienced it! I am very supportive of it, I was even on the steering committee for a pilot project in Merseyside that ran day long events for sixth-formers to foment the principles of Global Citizenship.
The case for keeping the voting age at 18, rather than raising it, may be enhanced in several years if citizenship classes are established in our education system from a young age. Hopefully with this in place we can encourage a culture of active engagement in society amongst young people, perhaps with more debating societies and even pretend hustings at election time in schools.
As things stand, I can't accept the above statement as an argument for further reducing the voting age when citizenship education has barely started, and as a concept it is plainly not in the hearts and minds of young people like it used to be.
John Howard, Prime Minister of Australia, likes to use the phrase:
"You can't fatten the pig on market day"
I think it has pertinence!

NUS policy

2005-11-09T12:57:00.000Z

The National Union of Students was not as sound however.

I asked them if they had a policy on it, and they do predictably want to reduce the minimum age. Their response, which I have pasted exactly here, justifies the policy basically by saying 'engagement in democracy is important' - a pretty vacuous and irrelevant statement even by their standards!* As a member, I find it a very unconvincing reason for having a corporate policy on it. They will have to be more imaginative in their justification of advocating reducing the voting age to exactly match it's membership…

"Thanks for your recent question. NUS has policy that the age of voting is reduced to 16. This is not a recent policy move, for a long time the National Union has believed that being engaed in the democracy of the nation has huge benefits to the individual and society.

For more information you might be interested to contact our Vice President Further Education who has more info around this policy."

If you would like to make representations to the Vice Pres. of Further Ed., I enquired and found out her email is ellie.russell@nus.org.uk.

Let me know if you get any interesting responses!

*Note their bland reaction to this resignation!

Tory truths

2005-11-08T16:20:00.000Z

I was surprised to recieve a comprehensive reply from Conservatives.com to a brief email about voting age. The position of the tory party is to be commended, I wish they'd talk about it a bit more as an issue though! Perhaps they don't want to bring it into the public mind unnecessarily, although I'm confident the status quo arguments would win through when it does.

Dear Mr Coates,

Mr Howard has asked me to thank you for your recent email and to reply
on his behalf.

The Conservative Party is very concerned that levels of political
participation among young people are currently so low. We are
determined to do all we can to ensure that this apathy is challenged and
the younger generations are given every opportunity to feel connected
with the political process.

We do not believe, however, that lowering the minimum age of voting to
16 would be the correct way forward in tackling political apathy among
young people, and we are very pleased that the Electoral Commission has
reached this same conclusion. As research carried out by the Commission
shows, the underlying reasons behind such low levels of participation
are deep-rooted and structural, encompassing a broader feeling of
alienation from the political process. Making technical adjustments
such as lowering the voting age would, therefore, do little to help
matters.

Instead, we feel that we should focus our energies on highlighting the
relevance of the political process to younger people, demonstrating that
politicians are listening to young people and are developing policies
which respond to their needs. We also believe it initially important to
address the low-levels of turnout amongst those young people who can
vote, but choose not to, before we even consider extending the franchise
to even younger ages. At the same time, we should consider this issue
within an international context, as a clear majority of countries have a
minimum voting age of 18. We do, however, perceive the present gap
between the age at which one can vote (18) and the age at which one can
stand for election (21) to be illogical and we are therefore fully in
support of reducing the age of candidacy to 18.

Thank you again for taking the time to write

Yours sincerely,
David Beal
Office of the Leader of the Opposition

Parental influence

2005-11-08T16:06:00.000Z

Would 16 yr old children need parental permission slips to go to a polling station?

Hopefully they would have some friends at the vintage age of 17 years to give them a car lift to the station, and an old fogey 18 yr old coming along for the ride so he/she can take legal responsibility for them!

- On a serious note, in this day and age we are thankfully starting to move away from tribally voting for parties - giving sixteen and seventeen year olds the vote will mean a significant proportion of voters will be voting according to parental influence (or coercion).

- It is equally undesirable to have teenage rebels who will vote for any party other than the one their parents vote for.

- There is no doubt that, in a bid to be different, a higher proportion of 16/17 yr olds would vote for extremist parties than more elderly and experienced voters do.

- Postal voting is already susceptible to fraud - adults open the post in a household, their children are unlikely to know there is an election going on.. what do you think will happen in that situation?

Not to be confused..

2005-11-08T15:47:00.000Z

There was of course something of a previous "votes at 18" campaign in this country (in those pre-internet days) - which led to the Representation of the People Act in 1969, although not without controversy.

So what has changed since then?
Has God done a Socrates - despaired at 'the youth of today' - and used his omnipotence to zap some wisdom from experience unnaturally into the senses of 21st century yoof? Have teenagers evolved a prematurely enhanced understanding of the concept of 'opportunity cost'?
The evidence would suggest not.

Unlike many, I do not advocate revoking the afore mentioned Act of Parliament and raising the minimum age of voters - it seems to me that eighteen is the obvious watermark of adulthood, and therefore voterhood.

Time for a voice!

2005-11-08T15:31:00.000Z

Debates on the British minimum voting age have for too long been led by an organised campaign, funded by 'the liberati' and 'voice of the youth' organisations.

Well, this my long-considered attempt at restoring some balance.

Voting age is a subject unlikely to rouse too much passion, except perhaps with the odd young idealist without a cause, but i've always felt strongly about it staying at eighteen... since the age of seventeen!