Nigel Farage and the real reason Labour has dropped votes for 16-year-olds... writes STEPHEN POLLARD
My son Max is sophisticated, witty and thoughtful, and I am constantly surprised by his insights. But there are five crucial words missing from that sentence: for a 12-year-old.
Max is a child – but he will likely be 16 by the next general election, and so under Labour’s original proposal to allow children to vote, he would have been able to decide the next government.
Love him as I do, I can’t in all conscience consider him in any way fit to vote, even in five years time. It is one of the most important civic duties those of us who are mature enough to be given the vote can carry out.
Nigel Farage rapping along to Eminem song Without Me in an attempt to connect with younger voters
So it’s a relief that Labour has decided – at least for now – to ditch the idea. To many people’s surprise, today’s King’s Speech made no mention of the plan.
I would like to think that Sir Keir Starmer has taken time to consider the policy again and decided that it was, in the end, bad. For one thing, 18 is what is known as ‘the age of majority’ – when you start to be able to act as an adult legally. It makes no sense to arbitrarily allow 16-year-olds to vote when they can’t legally sign a contract.
But politics is rarely like that. When a party ditches a proposal it has long been pushing there are usually more cynical reasons than a calm consideration of its merits.
In this case, most obviously, almost everyone thought the idea was mad. Like all parties, Labour conducts its own polls, and these will surely have come back with a clear message: that voters opposed giving children the vote.
Given how smoothly Labour’s transfer into government has gone so far, and how its first King’s Speech is designed to push flagship policies that will entrench support for the party, it would have been – to coin a phrase from Yes, Minister – ‘bold’ for Labour to promote an idea it is likely most of the electorate thinks is bad.
That means, perhaps, that we can’t rule out the party coming back to the idea in a year or two’s time. Except for one other thing, which I suspect was even more pivotal in leading to the idea being ditched.
It has been widely assumed that Labour was keen on extending the vote to 16-year-olds because that would have given the party a huge electoral boost at the next election. That was certainly the view of former Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly, who called it ‘gerrymandering’.
But there is a flaw in that assumption. Polling shows that far from Labour cleaning up the youth vote, Reform and the Greens have significant support.
A survey of 16 and 17-year-olds a few days before the election showed that while 39 per cent would indeed have backed Labour if they could vote, 23 per cent said they supported Reform and 18 per cent the Greens. The Tories managed just 5 per cent.
No wonder: Nigel Farage has 815,000 followers on TikTok - more than double the number for the Tories and Labour combined. And anecdotally I have heard about even stronger support for Reform among the young. In a number of school mock elections, Reform actually won.
So it would make no sense for Labour to push votes for 16-year-olds. Not only is it a bad idea in itself, it could actually make things worse politically for the party.
In that sense only, perhaps we should all be grateful for the good sense of 16-year-olds.
