It’s now generally agreed it was the Boomers, Gen X and the Millennials who messed up everything. The Boomers, for embracing the post-war Hobbesian doctrine that man’s true nature is savage and, without laws, all will be at war one with another; docility to the ‘international rules-based order’ followed. Gen X forgot to discipline their children, voted for Blair and messed up the Middle East. The Millennials confected the woke infrastructure we are still living under, and the Boomers and Gen X ‘simps’ (submissives) lapped it up. Expecting this lot to vote their way out of the mess is delusional. Instead, all hopes rest with Generations Z and Alpha, whom Angela Rayner plans to gift the vote to before the end of the current Parliament.
I am biased because my sons will be eligible, and they and their friends are ‘sound’ (sensible). Boys and girls all work out, go to the pub, have parties, wholesome hobbies, irreverent senses of humour, a sense of adventure, part-time jobs, an admiration for academic achievement and generally know how to have a good time. As digital natives, they know how to ‘whip ChatGPT’ (their expression) and see through the bullshit. They never watch the BBC, think Andrew Tate is a sleazeball, listen to Frank Sinatra and make money from buying and selling on Vinted and Depop. They despise victim culture but would never dream of being unkind to anybody. They take people as they find them, can sniff out a ‘pick me’ or ‘a beg’ (keen to impress) a ‘simp’, a ‘rage baiter’ (a provocateur) or ‘unemployed’ (someone who just sits around, even if they have a job). Such definitions suggest that Gen Z are clear-eyed about how people are, rather than, as per the Millennial and Gen X fixation, what group they claim to belong to. These young people see through attempts at affectation and generally ‘don’t believe the hype’.
Racism or homophobia are genuinely anathema because the demographic and social mix they grew up in is such that nothing is unusual. It’s only Gen X that are getting ‘gassed’ (excited) about questions of ethnicity. For the Gen Zers ‘it’s all about the ‘vibe’. Ethnicity, race, sexuality, politics, religion, do not matter – what is important is if an individual is ‘calm’, ‘sound’ or chill.’ A reversion to the Old English idea of ‘live and let live’ is playing out in this excellent new voting cohort.
Now, a caveat. There are large numbers of children who have already bottomed out of society: the over 800,000 16-24 year-olds who are currently not in work or education. But this maps on to older demographics too: nine million working people are currently economically inactive. They all have the vote. I remember visiting our local polling booth at the last election and watching a nonagenarian who was unable to hold his head up, being wheeled in by his granddaughter to vote. He is now dead. We have the universal franchise and cannot begin to quibble about the details. Employed, unemployed, very ancient, young, professional, non-professional, tax payer, tax imbiber: all are part of the body politic and all may have their say.
Whom would you trust with the future prosperity of this country: the 16 year-old sigma (alpha) who votes for Zia Yusuf or the octogenarian Unc (elderly) who votes for Ed Davey?
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach. She is looking for a publisher for FLOURISH: How to Help the Digital Generation Leave Home and Live Happy and Prosperous Lives. Please get in touch if interested.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
It is the lack of coherency, coherent thinking, that discredits this and so much government legislation.
If sixteen year olds are to be able to vote, so many other restrictions, based on the fact that they are still considered to be children, should also be changed.
For example, they should be allowed to marry, to have a driving licence, serve on a jury, stand as an M.P.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/SN07032/
Great idea…..or not really?
You seem to have forgotten that left-wing politicians would absolutely love to take most of these rights away from adults as they should never have had them.
And they can go to prison.
And these children, aged 16 to 18, shouldn’t be forced to go to school.
If they can vote, they must be educated enough, surely.
If voting age is to be reduced to 16, then so should the legal definition of adult.
Yep, 16 year olds cannot drink, buy drink, buy knives without being questioned, buy glue that could potentially have an alternative use. They cannot drive a car, or work full time unless under the observations of an apprenticeship. They cannot join the military either.
As you say, if old enough to vote you are entitled to be judged as an adult. But that indicates another problem, where the government deem you alert enough to vote for their personal ends, but not enough to assume full adulthood.
Actually they can join the military but cannot be sent to combat until they are 18. In effect an apprentice scheme.
They need a parent’s permission to join the military. Why would that be?
Yes. And why 16? Why not 14, or 8, or 5 – there are some very bright five year olds.
I reckon my three year old granddaughter could probably make a reasoned decision on how to vote. In fact, now i think about it, I reckon she could probably do a better job of running the country than most of the recent incumbents!
the bar is set so low these days that you have to dig it up.
But the unborn can be killed by their mothers so I supposed they will not get to vote.
And the medical definition. Gender-affirming care for all.
Ridiculous first sentence. To lump every person born from the mid 1950s to the 2000s together, destroys any credibility this article may have had. Lazy grandstanding journalism.
This country is suffering from 25 years of appalling leadership where the ‘tyranny of compassion’ has meant required decisions are either ducked or pushed into the long grass. To see leadership in action look at the results of Milei in the past 18 months.
What the country doesn’t need is another group of people ‘demanding more’ (knowing they won’t be paying) but who have no idea of the meanings of debt and deficit. Raising the voting age to 25 would be a much better approach.
I fully agree. This recent habit of blaming poor outcomes on a whole generation is ridiculous. We are in this mess because the elites have been captured by a globalist ideology that gives primacy to unquestioning faith in scientists and scientific institutions; mobility of manufacturing and people to find the lowest cost; the breakdown of traditional relationships; the pursuit of equal outcomes, whatever the cost; and the suppression of dissent because they believe that only they know what’s good for us. I didn’t sign up for any of that, but unfortunately, there hasn’t been anyone to vote for who doesn’t follow this agenda.
Our political system loves to call itself democratic because this implies that intellectual simpletons will always blame their neighbours (and vice-versa) for everything instead of the people who are actually repsonible for it.
Hermann Hesse, in his novel The Glass Bead Game (1943). “Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.”
This has idea has been interpreted (attributed to various people) as, “Every generation is invaded by barbarians, its children”.
The point is culture, ie morals, values, standards, manners, laws, heritage are not inheritable characteristics like eye or hair colour for example and have to be taught.
The Christian religion – not as some claim the originator of our culture – codified our culture and provided a means to pass it along from one generation to the next.
As religion died out that mechanism died with it and was not replaced by a secular means such as civics lessons and people in positions of authority and influence affirming it.
Instead – Socialism – the repudiation of our culture, and selfish “anything goes” ideology, to debauch our culture and of course of late to replace it with other non-compatible cultures.
In fact few actually know what is meant by culture – it has been reduced to race, hair-braids, curries, rap-music, bright cotton print fabrics, etc or to others its opera and ballet and fine art.
If we don’t know what culture is, what our culture is, and quite clearly the population mostly don’t, then how can it be preserved and passed on?
Electorates from all those generations have in fact been trying to vote that ideology out for decades, by voting for politicians who lied about wanting to reverse it, just to get elected so they could expand it even further.
What that declaration overlooks is that the Country became a Marxist-Socialist State when those born between 1900 and 1924 voted in a Labour Government in 1945 which promised lots of free stuff paid for by others, and set Britain on course for the greedy, selfish, anti-family, anti-individual, anti-success, collectivist – I have a right to what I want NOW! to be provided by others – shithole.
What do we call them? Gen Stupid?
Which was achieved by enlarging the franchise in that period.
For any adult that hasn’t voted for Blair or Call-Me-Dave, as they saw the dangers, this article is another example of creating discord between communities based on DOB when, instead, they should be grouped on what behaviour they have encouraged.
We have had enough of Globalist thinking, putting foreigners ahead of natives, words ahead of actions or results, group loyalty ahead of the Truth, (relevant) education and experience, and the destruction of what has gone before, our foundations, and our self-confidence. And pitting pseudo-communities against each other in the blame game can go as well.
It is a massive mistake to judge all members of a group by those you know personally.
It is worth pointing out that for all those with above average IQ, there is an equal number with below average IQ.
Taxes and wars are the two most important things that governments are responsible for. Until you are immediately impacted by both full time then you have no business picking your MPs.
“It’s now generally agreed it was the Boomers, Gen X and the Millennials who messed up everything.”
Not by me. Humans are flawed, always have been, always will be.
Sorry, this woolly overthinking. Adulthood is necessarily arbitrary but currently it’s 18. Nonsense to give children the vote.
Joannea’s children may be wonderful sages but my experience when mending my car near a school in Brighton, which has Maoist gender benders for staff and has persuaded 25% of it’s girl pupils that they are boys. Most boys who looked 16 looked miserable and walked alone looking at the pavement. The girls went past in groups lead by one who looked bossy, with the ones behind looking around and giggling. Most of them were wearing the shortest skirts possible and some were obese. But perhaps the same applies to adults in some areas of Brighton.
It doesn’t matter how sensible “your cohort” of 16 year olds are. They are not adults. They do not …. legally are not allowed …. to make “adult” decisions for themselves. They are not held to account as adults in a Court of Law (Rudakubana was legally a child despite being just 6 days short of reaching age 18 and therefore could not be jailed for life with no remission).
Either they are adults. And have ALL the rights and responsibilities of adults. Or they are children.
They can’t be both.
They can be what the powers behind this would really like all other people to be as well: People whose lives are tightly regulated down to the point of proscribing them what they must and must not wear and to whom they’re allowed to talk under what circumstances (mask mandates, rule of six etc) but they’re allowed to tick a box every 4 – 5 years to express approval of a politician who has been carefully vettet to ensure that he’s certainly not ultra-far-extreme-anitsemitic-anyhow-right.
Voting is a meaningless exercise when candidate selection is suitably controlled and such controls are – more or less openly – firmly in place.
Hopefully most these sensible 16 year olds will choose A levels that will help them towards a wealth creating career and not something on a par with underwater basket weaving. Wealth is what the country lacks. And underwater woven baskets are not much in demand.
What this society is ultimately heading for is
1) A newborn whose head has just appeared may be legally killed in whichever ways someone in Labour sees fit.
2) As soon as the umbilical cord has been cut, he may vote Labour by proxy.
Ideally, he won’t ever have any other rights, especially not eating, drinking and talking, as he’s just going to use them in climate-damaging ways, anyway.
In my view people who think 16 year olds should have the vote, shouldn’t have the vote.
If 16 year olds are mature enough, informed and experienced enough, responsible and wise enough to “… trust with the future prosperity of this country…” by giving them the vote, why not reduce the age of majority to 16?
If not, implicitly you are saying they are not competent to be independent, legal entities, who are not, inter alia, capable of entering legal contracts, getting married without parental consent, buying and consuming alcohol and tobacco, standing for elected Office.
Watching that circle being squared will be entertaining.
Ms Gray should read Richard Eldred’s article about antisemitism being rife in schools. I have read it and it made me sick to my stomach.
How about we reverse that?
If you don’t pay tax (net) you don’t get a say in how it’s spent.
This has always been top of my wish list. Why should parasites be able to vote for free stuff? Because let’s get real, this is what ‘government’ is now reduced to – stealing property from some to give to others. The latter then vote you into power to carry on transferring wealth to them.
Boomers, Gen X and the Millennials … I’ve no idea what these mean and who invents these concocted phrases. It’s even worst when British people say Gen Zeeeeeeeeeeee and not even Gen Zed.
Glad I’m not alone in that. I also don’t know what they’re referring to but people state these words with the assumption that we all know what they’re on about. And no, schoolkids should not be allowed to vote. A totally silly notion with no good quality rationale to back it up.
British people saying “Zed” have derived it from the Norman Conquest French “Zede” corruption of the English language.
American people saying “Zee” have derived it directly from the original Greek “ZEE ta”.
I have lost all confidence in this confidence coach for writing this twaddle.
Some of her stuff I like
I disagree with what she has written here
“Ethnicity, race, sexuality, politics, religion, do not matter – what is important is if an individual is ‘calm’, ‘sound’ or chill.’ A reversion to the Old English idea of ‘live and let live’ is playing out in this excellent new voting cohort.”
FALSE. The author is preaching Satanic Globalist Moral Relativity, “Anything Goes”, which has nothing to do with Ethnic Europeans, the Western Civilization they built, and the Christianity upon which it was founded.
It seems to me that the author is obsequiously trying to flatter her own children, trying to be their friend rather than a parent.
Remember the wailing of the younger individuals among the liberal media class after the EU referendum that the crabby hands of the old folk – those soon to pass on to their account – messed up the future of the young people by voting to leave the Shangri-La of Brussels.
That came strongly to my mind too. How dare a
wise old mandecrepit nonagenarian vote in a way he thinks will benefit either other disgusting has-beens like him or – very likely – the grandchild pushing his wheelchair? ‘He is now dead’ anyway (and good riddance, from the tone in which he was described). Practically all our ancestors who built our society are also now dead, the useless morons.That’s it, blame all the previous generations as per usual, you and the kids would have fu@k all of a luxury life like you have now without the blood sweat and tears of my parents and my generations so f@#k right off and take some responsibility for once, your lot are fu£king it up not us!
And, we had kids, ( i know you have them but thats not the norm anymore)as nature requires, unlike you mamby pambies that value your careers more the future, no kids no future!
Because of the hyper levels of immaturity in today’s generations the voting age should be raised to 21!
It is the disease of far leftism that has turned this country to shit. Once you have lefties running the show nothing works.
Yes, quite. If there’s one thing you can count on the young for – it’s wanting change. If there’s one thing we need – it’s change. The Starmfurhrer needs to update his thinking.
What kind of change? Starmer is making all kinds of changes himself, and I wish he wouldn’t. I keep hearing ‘Anything would be better than what we have now’, from people who have clearly not thought seriously about the other options contained in their ‘anything’, and wishing I could personally remove the franchise from each and every person who says something like that.
I disagree with the idea of giving the vote to 16- and 17 year olds.
Most of them will vote as their friends or parents do and can be easily influenced or bribed.
At the same time, the above will
also be true for some voters above 18 years old.
Maybe there should be 3 fact-based political questions (for instance how many MPs in HOC) you have to pass before you are allowed to vote….;)
I’ve wondered about this myself over the years, introducing a kind of quiz as an actual voting ‘qualification’. How does government work, what are the main points of each party’s manifesto, what has been their actual record once in power, etc.
‘The generations before the advent of Meeee have messed everything up and now I should be given power to fix it all’ is not new. We all thought that as teenagers in the ’90s, when we were facing our own economic woes, and our parents thought it in the ’60s and ’70s. If you think those generations were wrong, why should today’s teenagers be right simply because your children’s politics seem to align more with yours as their parent? That’s hardly an argument for their powers of independent thinking. I largely agreed with my socialist father until my late 20s, not least because I’d unthinkingly surrounded myself over two decades with socialist friends on the assumption that they were good reference points because they aligned with the values I’d absorbed as a child and with the views of the man I admired most.
I saw the writer’s name and was looking forward to an exploration of actual logical reasons why 16-year-olds might be suitable electors, but this is more bubble-centred, short-term thinking of the kind that is already weakening the electoral system. Even if your children’s cohort did all turn out to be based political geniuses, there’s no reason why the next generation of 16-year-olds growing up in their wake (and indeed in different socioeconomic situations) would be similarly gifted. I don’t want 16-year-olds to be considered competent to get sex-change operations on the argument that the ones I personally know and influence are nice and sensible and wouldn’t want one anyway.
Teenagers, while no longer quite children, are not fully grown and have no experience of the responsibilities of adulthood that form the basis of the society whose government grown-ups elect. A few years ago, Michael Morpurgo wrote in the Spectator in favour of giving children the vote, and insultingly likened children – human young with underdeveloped brains, a chaotic hormonal state and only a theoretical concept of what it really means to be relied on by other people – to adult women and black people granted suffrage in previous generations. This is almost as disappointing.
A poor article Ms Gray, with poor arguments and poor thinking. And by the way, if your children are ‘sound’ (sic) and among other activities they ‘go to the pub’ with their friends, then they aren’t 16 are they? And, probably not your fault, but the photo at the top of this article shows a young man who appears to have a rather large tattoo on his shin. So he isn’t 16 either, is he?
Not a surprising viewpoint from someone who is a ‘writer and confidence coach’ looking for a publisher for her book.
Winston Churchill: ‘The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.’