What does the trivialisation of the franchise say about us?

Our editor wrote yesterday about the cynicism of Labour’s proposals to extend the franchise to 16-year-olds. And it is undoubtedly cynical. A critic might similarly allege that Conservative opposition to the move is cynical too – and there would be no little truth to that, too.

The charge that 16-year-olds are simply too immature to warrant the vote is weak. It might be true in many cases, but it is a weak argument because this is simply not how we otherwise assess the franchise; it invites the obvious point that many adult citizens, graded on that criteria, ‘deserve’ their vote less than many teenagers.

Yet competence is actually a weak argument in both directions. The obvious challenge for someone advocating for votes at 16 is: why stop there? However allegedly illusory are the differences between a sixteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old, they are surely greater than between an eighteen-year-old and a fifteen-year-old.

Any intellectually-consistent argument rooted in competence (and I make no claim that most arguments deployed on either side are intellectually consistent) leads quite quickly into very thorny territory for somebody who purports to believe, in the uncomplicated modern fashion, in the universal franchise.

Much more interesting, however, is the bizarre light that this move casts on politicians’ attitudes towards young people. Because many of those advocating to lower the voting age will also believe the pseudo-scientific idea that brains don’t fully develop until 25 (this latter-day Lysenkoism has actually been incorporated into Scottish sentencing policy). The previous government even consulted on proposals (backed by that modern scourge, the campaigning mum) to ban under-25s from carrying passengers in their cars.

If anything, surely the case for votes at 16 is weaker now than it was in the Noughties, when mandatory schooling ended at 16? Today, we don’t trust sixteen-year-olds to govern their own lives: they cannot decide to leave education, to drink alcohol, to smoke tobacco, to watch Aliens (although Alien is fine), or – contra Angela Rayner – to get married. There seem few people in British politics, barring the odd libertarian, who object to any of this; so whence the urgent need to include sixteen-year-olds in governing everyone else?

It could speak to a gradual but fundamental shift in how we view the franchise.

The right to vote has been fought and died over, and for that reason often viewed either as a privilege or at least a weighty responsibility. A modern audience might reject many of the fruits of this reasoning, such as property qualifications. Likewise, the older voting ages of former times (such as 21) were no more or less arbitrary than 18 or 16, as a number.

But withholding the right to vote until after the extension of other adult privileges suggests that participation in the political community is viewed as a serious responsibility – the culmination of a citizen’s journey to full maturity.

Our modern inversion, likewise, suggests the opposite – that the franchise is a thing which can be given to children. In Scotland, remember, a sixteen-year-old is given the vote on the same terms as a 26-year-old, despite the fact that Scotland thinks that sixteen-year-old won’t be able to assume criminal responsibility on the same terms for another nine years.

This is an odd shift, and this is not the only debate in which this is reflected. Consider also the idea – with which Labour has flirted also – of extending full voting rights to permanent residents. There is a progressive lobby for that, and for extending access to the welfare state (to aid integration, no less!). Yet both of those proposals strike at the foundations of the old conception of citizenship as membership of a defined community, one that comes with both privileges and obligations.

Perhaps this is simply an inevitable development in an era when the legitimate ambit of democratic politics is bounded ever more tightly by the courts, government power exercised by quangos and regulators, and ministerial decision-making channeled through the gauntlet of vested interests that is ‘consulting the stakeholders’. A couple of years ago Gordon Brown proposed enshrining welfare entitlements in a codified constitution.

The narrower you think the actual role of elected government is, the laxer you can be about who gets to participate in the political community – very Ruling the Void. (That the advocates of these changes borrow the high moral language and imperative tones of older franchise campaigns is thus somewhat ironic.)

Or maybe – although these two positions are not mutually exclusive – our current, weird attitude towards the franchise is simply the product of no joined-up thinking at all.

A politician or mandarin tells one meeting they want votes at 16, because that seems nice, and another that people can’t be held fully responsible for their actions until 25, because that too seems nice. Their trivial attitude towards the vote is revealed in the sum of their positions, but that doesn’t mean they’re cognisant of it. This would hardly be a surprise, not in a state which issues certificates of personhood to parents of stillborn children who it has just decided can be killed without legal penalty.

The Conservatives should probably repeal votes at 16 if ever they return to office, and instituting a universal age of majority is probably the way to do it. Not only would it afford a face-saving way of ditching that absurd tobacco ban, but it might just force a serious debate about when we think people grow up, and what that means.

A lot of MPs will hate that, but that’s all the more reason to do it.

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