“Hands up those who think they should have the vote?”

Oddly, having checked, I find I asked this question to a room of sixteen year olds, sixteen years ago on the sixteenth of the month.

There is however no voodoo to the result.

Half of the thirty or so teenagers (so, about sixteen of them!) said yes, the other half were a quite convinced no. I can’t remember which way it broke but it was damn close to 52 to 48 percent. Funny how often that happens.

Now, the interesting thing was not who said yes or no, but what happened next. I base this not on any of my own political bias or judging individuals but what I’m about to relate was witnessed by others and commented on later by all of us.

The dilemma was this:

The half that said they should have the vote at sixteen went on to explain why (some eloquently, others much less so) and in so doing  demonstrated an immaturity, and general ignorance about society, politics and the economy that left one feeling, they probably were too young to have the vote.

The half that felt they shouldn’t have the vote explained all the reasons why their friends and fellow pupils were not ready to exercise their democratic right because it was clear they did not have the maturity and experience. Some even owned that naivety themselves, thereby, in my opinion, showing a level of maturity and self-knowledge that demonstrated they were probably ready to handle the responsibility of voting!

My experience back in 2009 left me precisely nowhere on the votes-at-16-question if the criteria was just ‘age based competency’.

For what it is worth, as a check, I asked my own sixteen year old, yesterday.

My children, including the six year old, are by no means expected to agree with their father and very frequently don’t!

My daughter was clear, without any pre-discussion, that she didn’t feel she or her friends were yet mature or informed enough to vote, and as for those that are, they would just be better prepared when they did vote – at eighteen.

Since Labour announced they would be bringing in votes at 16 a whole swathe of argument and counter argument has been bandied around, similarly getting us precisely nowhere. Looking at adult voting competency doesn’t help much either.

For the 2005, 2010, and 2015 general elections, I was on the road for the BBC talking to voters throughout the campaigns, every day, up and down, and in every corner of the UK.

It reinforced my strong view that if you never leave Westminster, you will never understand politics in Westminster, and Westminster can’t understand the politics of outside.

It also provided a vital insight into the very curious ways some ordinary voters come to their own personal decisions on who they favour and what party they support and how even that can’t guarantee how precisely they will vote.

The fact is there are many adults whose decision process before they mark a ballot paper is so unfathomable, so bizarre, that you can reasonably ask: are they intrinsically better qualified than the innocence of teenagers?

I think it would be a very hard case to prove.

Labour’s Chris Bryant mounted a spirited defence of principle on social media – which was probably the right forum given the logic was too flawed for more than 120 characters.

“Absolutely right that 16 and 17 year olds be allowed to vote in elections. They are part of our present as well as our future”

Well yes, ok, as far as it goes, but that applies as much, when you think about it, to my six year old as it does to my sixteen year old. Yes, it was in their manifesto but it wasn’t in the Kings speech, leaving me to mangle the marvellous comedy character Mrs Merton:

“So Labour, what is it about your falling popularity and public dissatisfaction with your performance that first attracted you to moving on votes at 16 now?”

There is a naked self-interest to the theory behind this move that should be visible from space.

When Keir Starmer was in his opposition holier-than-thou period he loved to riff on how he’d instil an honest openness to a Government that would put country before party in service of the British people.

Extending the franchise to 1.5 million British teenagers is in truth about as wholly self-serving and transparently cynical an example of party-before-country-grift as you could honestly imagine.

I’d recommend reading Dr Stephen Curran’s piece on ConHome on Friday as to why such a plan, might not have the effect Labour think. That of course remains to be seen, but it doesn’t yet seem to have occurred to our beleaguered Government.

However cynical the ploy, and possibly flawed the logic, or worrying that a host of new voters who are not really ready for the responsibility may get the vote- none of that, for me, is the real point of why this shouldn’t happen. All of these arguments are valid, but have their reasoned counters, however much we might disagree.

I think the issue is much simpler. For everyone. Adults and children.

It’s about when we all accept a child becomes an adult. And in the UK mainly that’s eighteen. It should stay eighteen.

Having worked in the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for over five years and seen the societal and bureaucratic anomalies of having certain things open to sixteen year olds and others fixed at eighteen, it seems bizarre to be looking for a new exception to that, rather than what has been so far a trend to settling on one age at which we divide children from adults.

Are some sixteen and seventeen year olds possessed of the emotional maturity and general intelligence such that they appear like adults? Of course, there are. Just as there are twenty somethings who show all the characteristics of a bunch of twelve year olds.

Indeed there are one or two MPs who seem to revel in sub-teenage levels of debate. We all know who they are.

Generalised cut off points produce anomalies. They always have.

Some have pointed to Reform’s opposition to votes at sixteen as incongruous because it presupposes at seventeen years and 364 days old an individual should not have the vote, but a day after and a Reform councillor is apparently ready to handle running a council at 18 with a budget of millions.

Again on the face of it, that looks like, what youngsters call a ‘mic drop’ argument, but as I say these anomalies appear either side of any fixed boundary be it, land, age or legal status.

Without a passport I can’t travel, and would be stopped at a port, but the day it arrives I’m good to go. So what?

For me it was our very own Lord Hannan who made the best point about a fixed age of maturity at eighteen. Both on social media and in the House of Lords he highlighted a catalogue of Labour hypocrisy and inconsistency on the issue:

“Labour backed raising the age of consent for getting a tattoo, buying alcohol, watching porn, opening a bank account, purchasing cigarettes, using a sunbed, or being tried as an adult.  Now they tell us they are acting from principle”

We should have eighteen as the universal age of maturity, majority and official responsibility, not support this desperate carving out of such an egregiously self-interested and partisan exception.

Labour trying to argue that right now this is a deep seated matter of principle, is frankly – childish.

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