Playing with democracy

Teenagers should be able to govern themselves before they get the vote

Three years ago the British parliament voted across party lines to raise the minimum age of marriage from 16 to 18, following a long campaign to protect adolescent girls from coerced or forced unions.

In Britain today it is illegal to perform tattoo or gender-altering surgery on a person under 18, with or without parental consent. Under-18s cannot bet, buy tobacco, own a firearm, enter a sex shop or watch an X-rated film. Obviously.

Clinical evidence shows the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain responsible for impulse control, planning and rational decision-making – is not fully developed in the average human until around the age of 25. Yet by the time of the next British general election, 16 and 17-year-olds may be casting votes.

Labour’s Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner told the BBC last week: “I’ve felt passionate about this for a long time. This is about engaging young people in what’s going to happen in the future.” Rayner insists this is not about trying to rig the vote in Labour’s favour. Yet it hardly needs spelling out that the Labour Party has an obvious interest in lowering the voting age.

Polling consistently shows that neurologically underdeveloped voters tend to favour parties of the left. That is to say voters under 25, the age at which the prefrontal cortex typically reaches full maturity, consistently prefer left-of-centre parties to those on the centre right. The latest YouGov survey in Britain, for example, found that Labour (28 per cent) was narrowly in front of the Greens (26 per cent) in the 18-24 cohort. The Conservatives (9 per cent) trailed in fourth position behind the Lib Dems (20 per cent).

The debate over whether voting should be confined to citizens capable of managing impulses, weighing trade-offs and engaging with complex decisions was lost long ago. Yet the shift towards enfranchising younger teens has little in common with earlier voting age reforms, which were grounded in detailed inquiries and principled arguments.

When Britain lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in 1969, it did so on the recommendation of the Latey Committee’s 1967 Age of Majority report, which examined civil law provisions affecting young adults. The report recommended that 18 be the minimum age for entering contracts, making wills, consenting to medical treatment and other markers of adult legal responsibility.

The 26th amendment to the US constitution, ratified in just three months in 1971, lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 in direct response to the Vietnam War draft, which conscripted nearly a million 18 to 21-year-olds. In Australia, the Whitlam government’s 1973 reforms were adopted with bipartisan support – accompanied by more than a little embarrassment from opposition benches that they hadn’t moved earlier.

By contrast, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s plan to enfranchise 16-year-olds feels cheap and opportunistic – devoid of serious rationale, absent any considered review and unsupported by evidence that it will strengthen democratic engagement. It is the policy equivalent of a mood board: a few social media talking points, a vague appeal to progress and a sanctimonious air of redressing past wrongs.