The 2024 Labour Manifesto promised to lower the voting age in all elections. Mike Phipps considers the arguments.

There is undoubtedly an overwhelming case for lowering the voting age to 16. Age 18 is an irrational cut-off point as under 18s can do a range of other ‘adult’ things, including joining the army, driving – and paying tax.

Many of these obvious arguments for this change are made in a short new book, Votes at 16: Empowering Young People and Revitalising Democracy in Britain, by Ben Kisby and Lee Jerome, published by Bloomsbury.

Much of the debate of this issue in the media focuses on the immaturity of young people and their supposed lack of interest in politics. “Sixteen-year-olds are great fun but they are not grown up,” wrote Simon Jenkins in the Guardian this month. The Spectator called the policy “seducing teenagers.”

Much of this debate is patronising and prejudiced – substitute any other section of society for young people and this becomes clear. “Moreover,” as the book’s authors point out, “it is predictable that those who are not allowed to cast a ballot do not become as informed about political issues as they might otherwise if they had the vote.” In other words, critics of votes at 16 have the issue the wrong way round; they are criticising young people for not being ready to do something that they are not allowed to do.

Austria, Argentina and Malta, have all lowered the voting age to 16 for national elections. Scotland and Wales in the UK, and some states in Germany, allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local or regional elections. Evidence from Austria suggests that the levels of political interest – and knowledge – of under 18s are comparable with that of other age groups under 30. One might, of course, ask why a criterion of having ‘political knowledge’ is applied to 16- and 17-year-olds is not applied to older groups.

One of the obstacles to lowering the voting age is that public opinion has traditionally been hostile. That is declining, however, and young people themselves favour a lower voter age. In this context, the enfranchising of young people perhaps needs to be seen as part of a broader project aimed at greater political engagement and integration, particularly as the turnout of 18 to 24-year-olds in British general elections is considerably lower than for other age groups.

That said, turnout was 75% among 16- and 17-year-olds in the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum, indicating a readiness to vote on an issue that has real meaning for those involved. “In short, while there is evidence of youth alienation from formal politics and institutions, young people continue to engage with political issues,” say the authors.  In particular, attention has shifted recently to policy issues, notably climate justice, Black Lives Matter and Palestine.

The Power Report, which looked into ways to increase political participation in Britain back in 2006, included lowering the voting age among its thirty recommendations.  It concluded: “When young people are faced with a genuine opportunity to involve themselves in a meaningful process that offers them a real chance of influence, they do so with enthusiasm and with responsibility. We recognise that few people take an interest in a sphere of life or an area from which they have been deliberately excluded. Reducing the voting age to sixteen would obviously be one way of reducing the extent of such exclusion.”

More political than it looks

Ultimately, it is difficult to separate lowering the voting age from broader politics: opponents, for example, are quick to point out that younger voters are more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, or were significantly more opposed to Brexit than older voters. It’s a re-run of an old attack line: voting for 18-year olds was introduced by a Labour government in 1969 – Tony Benn threatened to resign from the Cabinet if it wasn’t enacted. The Conservative Daily Telegraph called it a “senseless measure” at the time.

There is a lot of worthy material in the book on the importance of citizenship and political literacy education for young people. But a growing concern is media literacy, particularly in an era awash with ‘fake news’, conspiracy theories and the targeting of young people by far right and misogynist social media influencers. Moreover, improving media literacy has become more urgent with the increased merging of the political and media elite, a trend highlighted in Ash Sarkar’s new book Minority Rule.

One area that needs a lot more attention is the concern that the interests of younger people get ignored by politicians who don’t need their votes, a problem which is not really explored in Votes at 16. One obvious area affecting 16- and 17-year olds, for example, has been political interference in the A level curriculum by successive Conservative governments, who strove to make the content not just more onerous, but also more ‘British’.

To that one could add the failure of governments to boost apprenticeships for young people, the persistence of a two-tier minimum wage, the punitive benefits system for younger people, the appalling state of mental health services, and much more.

One wonders too whether politicians would be so quick to bemoan an “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions if younger people had the vote. In fact, there are a range of issues where young people are ‘othered’  – from knife crime to the overuse of social media and mobile phones – and where ‘solutions’ are discussed over the heads and without the involvement of young people.

And would politicians be so careless of trans rights if younger people had the vote? Judging by the average age of the massive protest in London this month against the Supreme Court judgment on single-sex spaces and the lazy mis-reporting of its implications by much of the media, perhaps not.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently reaffirmed his commitment to giving 16-year olds the vote, and Parliament is likely to start debating the details soon. With Reform UK leader Nigel Farage accusing Labour of trying to “rig future elections” with the proposal, young people look set to become the latest focus of a right wing culture war.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.