European Union (Withdrawal) Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Earl of Listowel

Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 26th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel]

I am sorry; it is late. I would like in principle to retain the charter. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is not part of British law, and the charter has been a means of channelling the principles of the UNCRC into British law. We need that. The minimum age of criminal responsibility in this country is 10 years old; we can lock up children of 10 years of age. Even in Turkey—with respect to Turkey—it is 16, and 14 around the continent. We are really harsh with our children and we need such protections.

[Lord Blencathra]

My Lords, as the tail-end Charlie in this debate, I too shall be brief. I believe that there is nothing fundamental about this so-called charter. It was a political wish list cobbled together by the EU in the year 2000, incorporated into the Lisbon treaty in 2009, and opposed by every Labour Government Minister. In fact, Gordon Brown would not even go to Lisbon on the first day to sign it. He wanted to distance himself from it. It includes such meaningless waffle as the right to “physical and mental integrity”, and such wonderful new rights as the right to marry and the right to freedom of thought. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, so cleverly exposed, my right to freedom of thought seems to apply only to the 20,000 EU laws. If I am thinking about any other UK laws, the charter does not seem to apply.

Of course, the charter contains the fundamental right to a fair trial. Well, 803 years ago, this noble House put the right to a fair trial in Clause 39 of the Magna Carta. That is the most important fundamental right of all, which we have had for more than 800 years. The Magna Carta was also known as the “Great Charter of Freedoms” and the late Lord Denning called it,

“the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”.

That is what our predecessors in this House did—not the King, not a foreign court but this noble House.

European Union Referendum Bill

Debate between Lord Blencathra and Earl of Listowel

Wednesday 28th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blencathra]

There is a lot of detail there and it is a route that I dare not step down. Whatever language or terminology I try carefully to choose, I will inevitably offend someone somewhere. That is not a risk I wish to take. I simply say that the fact that one can get the pill at the age of 16—rightly so—is no justification for saying one should therefore have the right to vote.

I concluded with a list of all the things that Parliament has decided that people can do only when they are aged 18. Some sound so trivial, but if that is what Parliament decides, it is perfectly legitimate to say that the age of majority is fixed at 18 and that we should not lower it for the purposes of this referendum.

Just because young Scottish people aged 16 and 17 were enthusiastic, it is irrelevant to deciding on this matter. Politically, we know why the SNP Government lowered the age. It is because their private polling suggested that 16 and 17 year-olds would be twice as likely to vote for independence as for staying in the union. You can bet your bottom dollar—or your pound Scots—that if their private polling had been the other way around, the Scottish Government would not have lowered the voting age to 16. They would have kept it.

If these amendments are passed, accepted by the other place and become law, we will have 16 and 17 year-old Commonwealth and Irish citizens also being granted the right to vote, because they are included on the register. If some noble Lords’ amendments to include European citizens were passed as well, we would have 16 and 17 year-old children from European countries also being allowed to vote. If we get a close result with that scenario, I think a lot of British people would be outraged that a majority of 200,000 to 300,000, either way, had swung the vote, because of the inclusion of 16 and 17 year-old European, Commonwealth and Irish citizens. That is a rather dangerous route to go down. However, we may be able to talk about that later.

I oppose these amendments because the age of majority is 18. It should stick at that but if we want to change it we should do it in a general Bill relating to the franchise. We should then take a close look at all the other things that these 16 and 17 year-old children cannot do, because, if we lower the age of majority to 16, we should change the law on a whole range of things from buying knives to buying a pint.

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I feel passionately about this issue. I have been wondering why that is the case, especially as so many people that I respect hold exactly the opposite position to myself. Principally, it is because I have often seen, over many years, young people in care being allowed to make decisions that are not age-appropriate. A local authority will, quite commonly, offer a 16 year-old in care a flat of their own and a sum of money or the choice to stay with their foster carer. Many choose to take the flat and the pot of money. We are told that in many cases, drug dealers befriend and move in with them, or they cannot manage to meet the rent and they lose the flat. I spoke to a foster carer who said that her foster daughter was doing so well in school before a local authority offered her a flat of her own; now she is doing very badly in school and the carer does not know how she is doing in her flat. One of the reasons I feel so strongly about this amendment is that I am concerned about whether this is an age-appropriate decision—although clearly children are not going to harm themselves, in the way that children in care apparently can often be harmed by being giving decisions too early, in this particular case.

I listened with great interest to my noble friend. I have sympathy for his concern that this is a very long-term decision that we are coming to as a nation, which will affect the young people in question particularly. But I am afraid I disagree with him; I heard the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, differently. I respect the great depth of knowledge and the effort that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has put into this issue; I have heard him speak about it on many occasions. My sense, is that for him, at least, this is part of a project—not just an issue for this particular referendum Bill but more generally—to lower the franchise. I feel really concerned about that, although there are many people I respect who think it is the right thing to do. Some child development experts would agree with them, while others would be concerned.

There is concern about the impressibility of 16 and 17 year-olds. Some of your Lordships may remember the film “All Quiet on the Western Front”. It begins in a schoolroom, with a teacher talking to young people and enthusing them with notions of the greatness of their country and the importance of fighting for it. It then follows their careers in the Army. Your Lordships may remember that in the Chinese Great Leap Forward young people were targeted and used as the force for taking that forward. Your Lordships may also remember how effective, in the 1930s, some nations were at manipulating their youth to do things none of us would agree with.

There has been concern about growing nationalism across Europe and there are increasing pressures. Thankfully—and tribute should be paid to the Government and the coalition Government before them—we have avoided the serious unemployment which is a large contributory factor to this. But at some future date we may not be so fortunate. It concerns me that we are painting a target on the back of our young people by giving them the vote at the ages of 16 and 17. There are people who are very good at using the internet to manipulate people, and 16 and 17 year-olds, as we know, have been vulnerable to this in various ways.

I am also concerned about the wider ramifications for children around the country. Noble Lords have spoken from experience, which I cannot yet do, about their own children. Of course, many children will not have had the support that I hope your Lordships will have had—I hope I am not speaking out of turn. I am thinking particularly about the work the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, took forward recently during the passage of the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill. The noble Lord listened to the concerns of parents of 17 year-olds who had been held in custody in police cells. They were sometimes held over the weekend for two nights and, regrettably, a number of those young people had taken their own lives after that experience. The noble Lord listened to those concerns and acted promptly to change the law. I was pleased to learn, recently, that it had changed and that 17 year-olds in custody will be treated as children.

The last time that we debated this matter, Barnardo’s produced a briefing in which it sought to change the Children and Young Persons Act 1933. In that Act, the age of majority is 16 and Barnardo’s wanted to see it raised to 17. In aid of his approach, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, put forward the argument that if you are old enough to marry and join the Army at 16, you should be able to vote. Others may say that if you are old enough to vote at the age of 16, you do not need to be treated as a child and can be put in a police cell at the age of 17. If you are old enough to vote at 16, maybe it is not so outrageous to have an age of criminal responsibility of 10—the lowest in Europe: I think the average age is 14. I am concerned from that angle.

I conclude with my concern about child development issues. These children are in the middle of adolescence, which is a very interesting period. I do not want to be too technical and maybe this will be quite obvious to most of your Lordships. Young children are very attached to their parents and to their siblings. In adolescence, they make a move from that attachment to an attachment to their peers and eventually to a romantic partner of their own. That is a huge change, which will play out in many different ways. Partly, they will react against their parents. Quite often they will take polar opposite views and values to their parents—for some time, at least. I can think of that in my own family history. My father grew up in a landowning family; he was an aristocrat. When he went to private school, he became the school’s only socialist, reacting very strongly against the ideals of his parents. He moderated over time.

We are not talking about young people voting Labour or not, but I worry that if we set this precedent it will be used on other occasions. Young people may be more likely to vote for Labour or the Liberal Democrats—parents tend to be more conservative, so their children may be reacting.