Representation of the People (Young People’s Enfranchisement) Bill [HL]

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Friday 28th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for introducing this measure. I was struck by the metaphor with which he opened: that voting is the sheet anchor of democracy. Of course, a vessel needs a lot more than a sheet anchor. It needs bows, bridges, rigging, sails, bulwarks and all the rest of it. In other words, to function, democracy relies on much more than a periodic right to mark a ballot paper. It relies on a series of norms and precedents; on a measure of restraint from the winner and a measure of acceptance from the loser; and, above all, on both sides being prepared to accept the rules and not to alter them for partisan purposes.

I am afraid that around the world we have seen a retreat from democracy as defined in that fuller sense. A number of organisations measure it: Freedom House, the democracy index of the Economist Intelligence Unit and others. They all tell a similar story: after decades of improving democracy, at some point in the last five or 10 years that progress stalled and began to go into reverse, often in countries where there is still a vote and people still have the franchise. But as in Venezuela, Russia or Iran, it is a meaningless vote because the other things you need to sustain a democracy have been vitiated or lost.

We see this happening even in some of the oldest core democracies in the world. In the United States in the last couple of decades, we have seen the deplorable way in which losers automatically go to law and dispute the results. Indeed, just over a year ago, we saw the readiness of the losing candidate to go along with an attempt to prevent the validation of the vote. It seems to me that when, in that country built constitutionally on the idea of popular sovereignty, there is this unwillingness to accept votes that go against you—this readiness to treat democracy as contingent—that should alarm us here.

By the way, the kinds of people who were the first to condemn Trump were usually not equally ready to condemn the attempts to overturn the 2016 referendum in this country, but it is pretty much the same thing. You either believe in the process that all the sides have agreed in advance is going to be valid, or you do not. The same hypocrisy applies the other way, of course. The people who were most ready to condemn the democracy blockers here were willing to overlook some of Trump’s excesses.

That, in a way, is the problem. It is in some ways remarkable that we ever elevated process over outcome. It is an extraordinary thing and may come to be seen as a blip that the American electorate were more loyal to a desiccated piece of parchment hanging in the National Archives than to a real flesh and blood candidate. Yet that readiness to accept the results, and to elevate process over outcome, is what makes for a free society.

Are we confident that this attempt to change the franchise is being done purely in a disinterested spirit as a way of strengthening our democracy? Or might we allow the possibility that it is being advanced in some quarters, again, as an outcome-led measure—that people assume that 16 and 17 year-olds will vote in a particular way, reason backwards from that conclusion and come up with all sorts of more general arguments for it? Can we confidently say that the extension of the franchise to 16 year-olds, first in Scotland and then in Wales, was wholly divorced from any consideration of how they might vote in either referendums or general elections? Your Lordships’ Chamber discussed the measure that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, mentioned to extend the franchise to 16 year-olds in the EU referendum. Can we confidently say that those who were voting for the extension of the franchise had no particular vested interest in how that vote would go—that it was sheer coincidence that they happened to put those two issues together?

I cannot definitively answer that question; we all have our own motives and principles, and I am not peering into the souls of other Peers. I simply make this observation: the first time that I stood here on a Friday, the first of these debates that I participated in, last year, happened to be on a measure about the legal age at which you were allowed to take Botox as a treatment. Unlike today—when, as usual on a Friday, I am in a minority of one or two—there was an extraordinary consensus on all sides. Every speaker argued that it was right to raise the age of consent for Botox from 16 to 18. That was the message that came from the Cross Benches, the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Conservatives.

We heard all sorts of arguments, including one or two from Peers who are present today, about how this was consistent because we treated 18 as the age of consent in almost every other regard. Peer after Peer stood up to explain that 18 was the age at which you could get a mortgage, buy a bottle of wine, get a tattoo or buy a knife; and, one after another, people said, “Yes, absolutely right. There is such a thing as an age of maturity and, if we have decided that 18 is that age, we must end these loopholes on things like Botox and tattoos.”

Well, that is fine—but if as a country we have decided that that is the age of maturity, are we seriously going to argue that, while 16 and 17 year-olds should be prohibited from doing all those things, they should have the right to vote on whether everyone else is allowed to do those things? Are noble Lords seriously confident that that will be seen as a purely disinterested measure without any partisan calculation behind it? I suggest that one way to encourage turnout and tackle the cynicism of some of our voters is visibly to stop playing partisan games with the franchise.