“Voting age to be lowered to 16 in UK by next general election”, the Guardian reports.
No, this does not mean you can leave school. You are too young and irresponsible to make such a big decision.
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Congratulations, sixteen year olds! We now trust you to help decide the nation’s futureNatalie Solent (Essex) · Children's issues · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Education & Academia · UK affairs July 17th, 2025 |
 11 comments to Congratulations, sixteen year olds! We now trust you to help decide the nation’s futureLeave a Reply |
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This sort of thing usually indicates that the partys ideas are too half-bakes and hare-brained to convince a politically ignorant 18 year old, so they need to widen the target demographic to include the even more politically ignorant 16 year olds.
So will smoking, driving, and drinking ages be adjusted to reflect how adult 16 year olds are?
Billl,
I have a feeling this may backfire on Labour.
Perry, Natalie,
Does anyone have a full list of what you can and can’t do at 16? Can you get your own place to live? Can you get a phone contract?
How do you justify only *some* children having adult voting rights? “They can work”. So can 12-year-olds. “They can pay tax”. So can 12-year-olds. “They can join the army”. That’s an argument to ban child soldiers, not to give some children the vote.
Keir Starmer said it was important that teenagers who paid taxes had their say on how the money was spent.
Does that mean that people, whatever age, who don’t pay taxes should not have a say in how tax money is spent? Or that, perhaps, people who pay more taxes should have more of a say in how their money is spent?
The best thing we can hope for is that there is a massive majority in Stormzy being voted in as the next Prime Minister. And Tide pod eating,ice bucket challenges, and how many marshmallows you can shove up your bum, be requisites for entering the civil service. What can go wrong?
I seem to recall that there were young people who were entitled to vote bawling their eyes out when the result of the EU Referendum was announced. They hadn’t realised that they had to actually vote if they wanted a specific outcome. There was a guy who thought that the EU Referendum was about football. I have also heard of people voting for the candidate that they didn’t want because they thought that they were voting them off like they do on reality TV.
The Leave side in the EU Referendum was significantly aided by the fact that Glastonbury was on at the same time. Festival-goers could, of course, have arranged postal votes in advance but loads of them didn’t think of it.
How Glastonbury reacted to Brexit – Evening Standard, 24th June 2016.
To be fair, most 16-17 year olds can’t afford Glasto tickets.
Fraser Orr asks, “Does that mean that people, whatever age, who don’t pay taxes should not have a say in how tax money is spent?”
Don’t tempt me.
Should be interesting. UK 15-year-olds about to be banned from social media (read that somewhere) because they’re too immature, but the next day at 16, they can vote!
But this sounds like it might backfire on Labor. Kids are coming out more conservative than their parents these days. Farage probably appeals to more 16-year-old boys than Starmer.