Labour MPs are pushing Sir Keir Starmer to drop plans to lower the voting age to 16, worried it could end up boosting support for the Green Party. The Mail has the story.
They are calling for the PM to realise it would be “total madness” to press ahead with the measure now, as Zack Polanski’s party is surging in popularity among younger voters.
Instead, Labour backbenchers are privately suggesting that 16 and 17 year-olds should only get the right from 2030 – safely after the next general election, expected in 2029.
One senior MP told the Mail on Sunday: “With the way opinion polls are going, it would be total madness to bring this in before 2029.”
He appealed to Local Government Secretary Steve Reed, who is overseeing the reform, to realise that “otherwise, we’re just giving Zack Polanski and the Greens more votes”.
When the plans were first set out last year, Labour faced claims of trying to rig future elections on the grounds that younger people tended to vote for them over the Tories. But one survey appeared to show that the Greens, a threat in some Labour-held constituencies, could benefit even more.
An ITV Youth Tracker poll by Savanta published last November showed support for Labour among 18 to 25 year-olds had collapsed from 43% in March last year to just 25%. Backing for the Greens had soared from 16 to 32%.
Worth reading in full.
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Another mad idea from the left defying rationality. For whom the youth are likely to vote should not be a reason. Quite why schoolchildren should vote when they have little experience of the realities of life and earning their own living is beyond me. Personally, I’d restrict the vote to anyone who had worked full time and paid tax for at least 12 months. The problem now is that the benefit class now outweigh the working (broadest sense) class.
Can anyone explain the sudden appeal of the Greens?
Legalisation of hard drugs. Suits drug addled Green voters.
Open borders. Avoiding a Reform government which threatens controls.
Suits immigrant Moslems.
In an ideal universe, or at least in the much saner pre-1950s universe, drugstores (funny name, ain’t it?) would sell drugs to people who want to buy them and the state would have no business interfering with this. The world doesn’t need saving by prohibitionists and their attempts so far have conclusively demonstrated that their approaches for saving the world don’t work. So-called “illegal drugs” are ubiquitous and the only people who are thoroughly f***ed are those in need of medications some would-be world saving prohibition zealot has declared to be illegal.
Nobody needs to go through the torture of acute lumbago (and related ailments) for days or even weeks on end. Drugs which can cure this have existed for a long time and are perfectly harmless to use. They even used to be available prescription free until those who enjoy the thought of other people suffering put their heavy hands on them.
It isn’t the drugs which cure lumbago that the Greens are planning to make available.
As far as I know, they’re simply planning to abolish anti-drug-laws and this would definitely be a return to European sanity from a period of American madness. Abuse of drugs used to be legal but socially unacceptable for a serious long period of time and this worked very well.
The Greens want everything so-called young people have been indoctrinated to believe to be The Right Thing™ and since they’re not hampered with having to make real-world policy decisions, they can be more radical than practical in this respect and this appeals to people with no actual experience with life as the only problems they’ve had to deal with so far are the entirely artifical and perfectly harmless ones the school system creates for them.
Starmer will lower the voting age anyway, it’s in his DNA. Anything that drives another nail in Britain’s coffin.
I suspect Starmer would be just as happy in the Greens. I can’t think of anything they stand for that he would disagree with.
The age was set to 18 when people generally left school when 16, and could vote only once they’ve experienced a few years of working life. Due to the push into higher education, we should now be considering raising the voting age to perhaps as much as 23. If we persist in lowering the voting age to 16, we should lower school leaving age to 14 and lower all age restricted activities to 16 – driving, drinking, smoking, gambling, on line content, adult prisons, credit cards, loans and mortgages etc.
This feeds into another thing that angers me intensely. We are continuously bashing pensioners for having the temerity for living too long. Sixty plus year olds are punished for it by having the state pension delayed, despite most of them having paid tax and national insurance since the age of sixteen or eighteen. No one is looking at the teen-agers going to university for fake degrees, so not making a serious contribution to the cost of running the country, as well as the fake illness that means, having taken their fake degrees they can’t be arsed to get out to work because they been made afraid of life.
I think I have the solution Labour is looking for: They just need to give 16 and 17 year olds a limited right to vote. Since they’re not considered grown-ups yet, they’ll be only allowed to vote in ways considered sensible by grown-ups. That is, they may not vote at all or they may vote Labour. This gives them an opportunity to learn about this voting think in a safe environment where their untrained choices cannot possibly cause any harm.
Current 16 and 17 year olds will have reached the age of majority in 2029.
16 and 17 year olds in 2029, today are 13 and 14 and I doubt many of them will have any interest in or awareness of politics now or over the next three years.
Turning up to vote requires effort, and since voting will have no reward for them, they won’t bother.
Where it may make a difference is it allows daddy Muslim to fill out postal ballots for more of his children, but that will mostly affect places that are already lost to the civilisation as we know it.
Thereby proving if such were necessary that it was all a cynical attempt at gerrymandering.
It was obvious all along, but even so, what bastards they are.
Put the voting age up to 21 again.
Actually, logic demands the voting age be raised to 25!
Lol saying the quiet part out loud. I thought giving votes to kids was the right/moral/sensible thing to do and nothing to do with party politics or garnering votes for yourself at the expense of others. Can anyone with a functioning brain fail to understand that they are a bunch of hypocritical tossers?
They have had some experience of the effect of lowering the age in Scotland and Wales already.
Yeah, Scotland is a good one. 16 year olds are old enough to vote, but they want to made education compulsory until 18.
See also: “no offender under 25 should be sent to prison, because their brains are not fully developed yet”. But they’ve had the right to vote for nine years by then…
No mention of the postal votes being another advantage to the Green Party.
Another political example of beware of what you wish for and are you sure that the law you pass today won’t come back and bite you with interest tomorrow. I’m still intrigued about how a sixteen year old is so wordly experienced that they can elect a politician but so wordly inexperienced the day before that they cannot make full use of the internet and social media.
And they can’t leave education or gamble for another two years.
They can gamble with their future and that of the rest of the country, but not their pocket money.