Elections: Voting Age

Lord Adonis Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I support votes at 16, and I commend the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for leading on this issue so robustly. It was Aristotle who said:

“We are what we repeatedly do”.

This is of course why education is so important in forming social habits as well as acquiring information and skills.

In this country we are ambivalent about educating teenagers in democracy and democratic duties, even as we complain incessantly that teenagers are too irresponsible and disengaged. The issue of the voting age typifies this ambivalent and contradictory stance. We deplore the fact that only 44% of 18 to 29 year-olds voted in the previous general election, yet many draw the conclusion that to lower the voting age would pile apathy on apathy. I draw the opposite lesson. Too few young people vote, in part because democracy and education in democracy are not, as Aristotle would put it, repeatedly done at school and college as teenagers are maturing.

Democracy and civic responsibility need to be taught and learnt in schools. We cannot carry on, as with sex education a generation ago, expecting them to be learnt spontaneously or informally, where parents are not engaged, and then complain when this does not happen. This is why the previous Government introduced citizenship as a subject in the school curriculum. It is why I strongly support school councils, in primary schools as well as secondary schools; it is why, in my own party, I am constantly urging university students to stand in local elections and to become councillors; and it is why I now believe that the time has come to lower the voting age to 16, in national and local elections.

I take up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Norton: this is not because that is the only step needed to promote civic responsibility among teenagers. He and my noble friend Lord Wills have identified a number of other possible steps, many of which I support. However, I do not understand the argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, against votes at 16 that because it is only one among several steps needed, and not a panacea, it should therefore not be taken at all. That is a very conservative argument against progress of any kind.

It is important not to see these things in isolation. Education and democracy need to go together literally. Most 16 to 18 year-olds are in school or college, and that is where the polling stations should be as well. Every school with a sixth form and every further education and sixth-form college should have a polling station, and young people should be registered to vote there—instead of there being the perversity that some schools are actually closed on polling day so that the adults can vote undisturbed. If we did this, voting would become a semi-obligatory rite of passage, like taking GCSEs and A-levels; citizenship education in schools would have a stronger and more urgent focus; candidates and parties, in local as well as national elections, would regard school and college students as a key constituency; and mock elections would lead to real elections within the education system itself, in the same way that mock exams lead to real exams, and work experience leads, it is hoped, to real work. All this can and should be done.

I have one final point. We are told—and were told again by the noble Lord, Lord Norton—that Britain should not innovate in this way because it might make us look odd internationally. When Britain helped lead Europe in introducing and sustaining democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, we often looked odd. But we were odd and right, and others followed. I am sure that it would be the same, in time, with votes at 16.