Good news teenagers! Awkward stepdad Keir Starmer has arrived clutching a present, presumably in the hopes of ingratiating himself with you. What could it be? An Xbox? A new phone? Tickets to see Lana? Yeah don’t get too excited — it’s just the thankless right to vote in Britain’s depressing, pointless elections.
The expansion of the franchise should be a momentous occasion, accompanied by sober debate and at the end of a hard fought campaign. Yet whilst women sent letter bombs in order to win their vote, and working men faced cavalry sabres, the nation’s teenagers will largely be encountering participation in democracy as an entirely unlooked for, and certainly unfought for, consolation prize.
Historians looking at this epochal change might be surprised at the timing. 70 years ago, the average child left school at 15, and many 16 year olds were in work and preparing for their married lives. But there was no great clamour to enfranchise the youth then. Now, decades later, at a time when nearly half the population is still in education by age 21, we are inexplicably handing the vote to the least mature generation of all time. Between later marriage, the inability to buy a house, and the general millennial and zoomer “failure to launch” there is an increasingly plausible case for saying that independent adulthood begins somewhere in the mid 30s. Yet even as the age of maturity recedes ever further into the future, we are pushing the voting age down to 16 — at just the time modern teenagers are enjoying their first TikTok-induced mental breakdown.
Despite the occasional implausible read across from the existence of the cadets to claims that young Britons are old enough to die for their country (they aren’t) and should have the vote, there is ample evidence this generation is uniquely disengaged from national pride and defence. Just 41 per cent of Gen Z say they are proud to be British, representing a halving of patriotism amongst the young over the past 20 years, and “willingness to fight for your country” is at record lows. Compare this to World War One, in which a quarter of a million boys under the age of 18 volunteered to fight in the trenches, many of them lying about their age to do so. This at a time when the voting age was not 18, but 21.
If patriotism, along with trust in institutions and democracy, has withered amongst young people, it is not they who are to blame, but an older generation that has created a society that encourages cynicism, and thus proves itself worthy of such cynicism in the process. There are no civics lessons in Britain, nor any story of national culture and history told in its classrooms. Only the most abstract and anodyne of liberalism is osmotically imparted, with the consequence that young people are well versed in the idea of “human rights” (and how many of them they personally have and can assert) but have little notion of public or political life as densely woven net of laws and common obligations.
As if this generationally imparted cultural amnesia were not bad enough, young people have seen their economic prospects systematically squandered by older generations, who have relentlessly voted themselves higher pensions and higher house prices, even as they have cheerfully imposed higher taxes and tuition fee debt on their children and grandchildren. To add insult to injury, these same young people have been exposed to the social experiment that is smartphones and 24/7 unregulated internet access, with many traumatised and troubled as a consequence.
The very fact that the franchise is now being extended to 16 year olds should tell you how little it is valued
And what of the vote? Isn’t that some small compensation? To judge how much of a gift this measure is, see how much weight our political class has given it in the past few decades. Citizenship is no longer a sacred set of privileges and obligations, but is instead handed out freely to recent immigrants, even when their only contribution is to make outsize claims on our generous welfare system. As for the vote itself, with local government denuded of everything but bin collection and an impossible social care burden, and national politics frozen in a perpetual omni-party, democracy has been reduced to a largely symbolic exercise. The very fact that the franchise is now being extended to 16-year-olds should tell you how little it is valued: it is now a useless enough thing that it can be unthinkingly handed to children.
Young people should and probably will regard this as what it is: an insult. But it is also an opportunity, one which many may choose to take to vote for dissident parties of right and left, rather than rewarding the sweaty-palmed establishment that is enfranchising them. If so, it is no less than they deserve.
