It’s a “seismic change”, says the government — “the biggest” reform to British democracy “in a generation”. No, the country is not finally relinquishing Ulster, switching to proportional representation, or even axing the House of Lords. It is instead that great shibboleth of lefty politics: the children will soon be allowed to vote.
I say children because in most other contexts 16 and 17-year-olds are seen as just that. As it stands 16-year-olds cannot get married; fire a shot in anger on military service; buy their own pint in a pub; purchase tobacco, vapes or fireworks; place a bet in a dubious high street casino; get a tattoo; or legally watch pornography.
It’s part of an infantilising trend that doesn’t even stop at 18. Increasingly the twenties are treated as a kind of extended adolescence. Half the population are shipped off to the glorified boarding schools that comprise much of the university system, safe under the staff’s watchful eye. And whether or not they are university-educated, young people are lodging with mum and dad late into their twenties with an alarming frequency.
Not even young crooks can expect to be treated as proper adults. In 2022 the Scottish Sentencing Council issued new guidelines which exempted under-25s from full criminal responsibility, arguing in light of their immaturity that the “culpability of a young person will therefore generally be lower than that of an older person who is to be sentenced for the same, or a similar, offence”.
The council is only one organisation that points to brain science to justify its views. As the argument roughly goes, people’s brains do not finish maturing — or, put more rudely, begin declining — until the mid-twenties, so leniency must prevail. That the science is a deal more complicated than this suggests it is more a case of policy-based evidence than evidence-based policy.
Either way, it hardly encourages you to believe, as deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has suggested, that allowing 16-year-olds to vote will help restore democratic trust. Perhaps the yoof will be grateful at the chance to vote for the Corbyn-Zultana-Gaza party at the next general election. The rest of us should consider it peculiar that such people will contribute to writing laws without any suggestion they will be allowed to enforce them by sitting on a jury.
Yet the solution is not to continue haggling over the precise age of voting, which might reasonably be fixed at 16, 18, 21 or even 25. As with any argument over the boundaries of the demos, it is difficult to persuade a politician of something when his office depends on him not being persuaded.
Instead, we should embrace 16 wholeheartedly as the end of youth and beginning of adulthood. While many of us look back fondly to our adolescence, when our bodies didn’t creak and somebody else was doing the dishes, most teenagers crave the opportunity to be treated as fully-functioning members of society. I say we give it to them.
A little under two decades ago, teenagers could leave school at 16 without being expected to keep accumulating certificates indefinitely. Under Gordon Brown this was changed to mandate participation in some kind of formal education until the age of 18 — at least for England, with devolved governments declining to follow.
The argument was that unskilled work was drying up, and the kids needed more time to train in skills that people were actually willing to pay for. Laying aside how exactly teachers were utilising the first five years of secondary school, it’s obvious that for many 16-year-olds paid employment is still more useful than more years in the qualification mill.
Many trades are better learned on the job than in a classroom, as the government has conceded by pushing apprenticeships. But formal education is also notable for removing the indispensable jeopardy that comes with a job. Fail an assignment at school and you get a bad grade; fail a task at work and you get reprimanded or sacked.
Those as prone to indolence as me will recognise that the motivation to take things seriously only comes with serious consequences. Being in employment, where your work equates to real profit, loss and the prospect of redundancy, has a maturing effect that no education can replicate.
The same holds true for renting your own accommodation, embarking on a proper romantic relationship, or even indulging the aforementioned vices restricted to those aged 18 and above. Teenagers act up because they are immature, but they also act up because nobody trusts them to behave themselves.
Zoomers, Millennials and Gen Xers are understandably grateful for having some footloose years at the start of adulthood, looking back in horror at photos of fully-adulting grandparents barely out of short trousers. I nonetheless suspect most would take a few more years of freedom at the start of adolescence.
We should discourage the culture of safetyism which now extends from cradle to the early twenties
Some of the causes are as yet unfixable. The housing crisis will rumble on until building goes radically up and migration goes radically down. Employers will take a while being persuaded you don’t need a first in English from Liverpool to train as an accountant.
But in the meantime, we should discourage the culture of safetyism which now extends from cradle to the early twenties, with both parents and state hovering over anxious kids. Let 16-year-olds vote, but start treating them like they can be trusted with a job, jury service, and perhaps even a pint.
