Too Fast to Live; Too Young to Vote
I think I can say pretty confidently that if William Hague had been a pupil at the high school I attended, his return from the Conservative Party Conference in which he’d given a star turn would have been marked by a bit of a kicking. The school wasn’t officially called ‘Hard Knocks’, but let’s just say the phrase probably originated from within those sadistic walls. What I’m hinting at in a roundabout way is that a passion for politics, let alone speaking at a bloody Party Conference that had been broadcast live on television, was not something that would have earned you popularity points amongst your peers. However, had Hague appeared on the podium inhaling the contents of a glue-bag and had then proceeded to head-butt whoever tried to remove him, he’d have been received back at school as a hero.
The last General Election that I was too young to vote at was 1983. Even if sixteen had been the minimum voting age that year, I still wouldn’t have been able to enter the polling booth because I only turned sixteen six months after Thatcher’s landslide. If I’d been eligible, it’s doubtful I would have participated because I simply wasn’t interested. For one of the few occasions of my adolescence, I suspect I shared something with my generation. I didn’t know anybody my age who was interested. Attending an all-boys high school was not the exclusive province of the wealthy back then; single sex schools outnumbered mixed ones where I grew up and being entombed in an environment in which even the most frumpy female teacher provoked lustful daydreams and obscene caricatures (guilty – ashamed to say) underlined what dominated most of our thoughts. That and football, pop music and TV. That’s all we ever really seemed to talk about, anyway.
For me, any kind of vague interest in politics came later; like many my age who were raised in t’north, the Miners’ Strike of 1984/5 served to politicise even those who had previously been wilfully ignorant. For good or ill, it mattered and it wasn’t an event that called for fence-sitting. Roundabout the same time, give or take a year or two, ‘The Boys from the Blackstuff’ aired on the BBC and that also had a huge impact. Although it’s now chiefly remembered as a damning indictment of the devastating effect Thatcherism was having on declining industrial towns, the fact remains that Alan Bleasedale wrote it during the Labour Government of Jim Callaghan. What this proves is that the decline had begun long before the Iron Lady moved in to No.10.
By the time I was actually old enough to vote for the first time, any nascent political views I had were slowly taking shape, though I wouldn’t really say I was worldly-wise enough to judge the state of play in the same way I would be able to four or five years later. I don’t think that’s necessarily unique, though. Teenagers are especially good at things that perhaps over-25s aren’t. They tend to be imbued with a belief that they’ll live forever, that they’re smarter and cleverer than anyone older than them, and that the pursuit of a good time doesn’t include watching the BBC Parliament Channel. The new ‘Baby of the House’ is 20-year-old Mhairi Black, SNP victor of Douglas Alexander, but her astonishing achievement at winning a Westminster seat so young shouldn’t detract from the fact that she’s something of an aberration for her age.
Last year’s Scottish Independence Referendum did make a bit of song and dance about the eligibility of sixteen and seventeen-year-olds in the voting process and it is claimed by many that the presence of so many spotless (and, let’s be honest, not so spotless) faces helped galvanise the event in a way that made most General Elections appear lacklustre. Turn-out was more than 84%; at the previous General Election, it had been 65%. Had 16/17 year-olds been allowed to participate at the last Election, would it have made a great difference to the result? Well, figures show older voters tend to be more conservative (with both a big and small C), whereas younger voters traditionally lean more to the left. They are also apparently more pro-Europe, which is perhaps why the House of Lords, not in thrall to a Tory majority, is expected to press for the voting age to be reduced in time for an EU Referendum.
Not that annoying exposure to Yoof in a supermarket queue or being witness to the Friday night fancy dress parade should necessarily be an accurate barometer as to how disastrous unleashing them upon the nation’s polling stations might be, but I’m not so sure it’s that good an idea. Of course, dimness is an attribute that doesn’t recognise boundaries, either those of age or social demographic; there are numerous idiots in life whose idiocy is often their only common connection. But it’s hard for anyone living in a predominantly student neighbourhood (as I do) to have much faith in the effects of higher education, let alone the thought of lowering the voting age so that all the beneficiaries of Blair’s academic reforms can have a say in who runs the country. Mind you, could they be bothered if you couldn’t do it via a text message?
Yes, I won’t deny I’m generalising; such subjects tend to lead to generalisation. I’m sure there are many highly intelligent sixteen and seventeen-year-olds out there who could make a political judgement with far more shrewd accuracy than their parents could, unencumbered as they are by old tribal party loyalties and in possession of an optimism that has yet to be crushed by the reversal of a politician’s pre-Election promise. But is naivety a desirable quality for participating in an Election? An awareness of political history can help form a judgement when it comes to which party gets your vote, and for me this is something I acquired gradually over many years. I’m glad I couldn’t vote in 1983 because I would probably have opted for the Monster Raving Loony candidate just for a laugh; teenagers occasionally do stuff just for a laugh, remember.
And, anyway, is it that great a wait from sixteen or seventeen to eighteen? I know years seem to last longer when you’re younger, but surely hanging on till you’re eighteen before you can vote means there’s more time to concern yourself with sex, drink and drugs – and even for those not invited to such parties, it means time to study the form-book and decide which, if any, party represents your own belief system. Politics, like most aspects of existence that have a habit of impinging upon one’s thoughts as autumn approaches, is serious; and there should be phases of one’s life that don’t require seriousness. For most, that means childhood and adolescence, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Enjoy it while you can, kids. Those nasty men and women from Westminster have got the rest of your lives to play with as it is.
Petunia Winegum
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June 11, 2015 at 9:21 am -
My only qualm with voting for 16-year olds is the same as for welfare recipients, in that if you aren’t chipping in, in the form of income taxes and national insurance, then you shouldn’t have a say.
That would probably mean most people nowadays not being eligible to vote until they leave school at 21, with those going directly into employment after school at 18, being a minority.
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June 11, 2015 at 12:13 pm -
So … you think that welfare recipients shouldn’t get a vote? Along comes a candidate who promises job opportunties for the unemployed … and they aren’t allowed to vote for him? I sense you have a bee in your bonnet about welfare recipients and it has addled your brain.
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June 11, 2015 at 1:09 pm -
There is nothing irrational about saying “No representation without [net] taxation”.
It’s the only way of stopping layabouts from voting themselves ever increasing welfare earned by the sweat of others.
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June 11, 2015 at 9:35 am -
Like, I can have bum sex but I can’t vote? Wot sort of fascist regime is dat?
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June 11, 2015 at 12:15 pm -
Bullshit logic: the two things have nothing in common.
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June 11, 2015 at 12:25 pm -
Bullshit logic: the two things have nothing in common.
Au contraire. We bend over for the Government all the time..
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June 11, 2015 at 9:48 am -
The idea of lowering the voting age worries me. If sixteen, why not fourteen or twelve or ten? I feel like I already live in a world where children are in control, and their views are given way too much consideration. There are many things in life that are deemed age appropriate, and I think 18 is plenty young enough for voting. Under international law young men and women are not allowed to go into combat in the armed forces under 18, therefore under 18’s should not be allowed to vote. Also not many under the age of 18 pay income tax so why should they have any say in how government money might be spent via the ballot box? No, this all smacks of politicians desperate to get votes for their particular set of vested interests.
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June 11, 2015 at 9:59 am -
I think the UN says they shouldn’t be having sex until 18 either so at least the notions of self-directed behaviour are consistent, not that the international laws have much relevance, short of the UN directing local laws as well.
Politicians desperate to get votes for vested interests? Isn’t that pretty much the definition of traditional western democracy? It’s a system that was specifically designed to preserve and protect minority opinion, It’s Socialism that seeks to impose a (possibly faux) majority opinion.
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June 11, 2015 at 10:22 am -
Taking an interest in politics does not preclude indulgence in sex, drink and drugs. See any Tabloid for details (which may or may not be wholly truthful!).
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June 11, 2015 at 10:33 am -
but surely hanging on till you’re eighteen before you can vote means there’s more time to concern yourself with sex, drink and drugs
This Boys & Girls, is what we call in the debating game “A Winning Argument”. Personally I wish had spent far more time drinking Merrydown, smoking funny things and having freaky-deaky-monkey sex at every opportunity and less time punching my fist in the air in the square “shooting my mouth off about saving some fish”.
Mind you as I was, by the age of 19, an alcoholic, drug user, 60 a day man with several STD tests behind me and a bulk standing order at the Family Planning Clinic for free condoms (Yes Son, back then you could get brand name condoms off the NHS free and gratis)….I’d guess the Pleasures of The Flesh didn’t come too short after all…
…and girls back then liked to educate their bloke post coitus …pillow talking “Trotskyism-post modernist revisionism and a pre Stalinist state”
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June 11, 2015 at 10:43 am -
I’d hazard a guess that you, like me, have made at least one visit to what used to be called ‘The Clap Clinic’? I think there’s a future post in there!
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June 11, 2015 at 10:58 am -
I’d hazard a guess that you, like me, have made at least one visit to what used to be called ‘The Clap Clinic’?
“You may feel some slight discomfort urinating later today” or The teenage Blocked Dwarf was found by his panicked-by-his-scream Edinburgh ‘steady’ on her toilet floor writhing in agony, and cursing -between screams- all umbrella wielding “Pox Doctors” everywhere.
I can ‘get’ most kinky things, I may not find them personally enjoyable but I can understand why, say, certain men find being forced to eat a school dinner type meal by a cane wielding female ‘Prefect’ erotic BUT those people who get off on having things shoved the wrong up their Urethra ….sorry I just can’t see the appeal….makes my eyes water just thinking about it….
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June 11, 2015 at 11:15 am -
A Jap’s Eye for a Jap’s Eye indeed. Aargh…
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June 11, 2015 at 11:39 am -
Why particularly the NHS pox doctors thought a shoving a cocktail umbrella down your japs eye , opening and then dragging it out like a sea anchor was a good idea I will never know. Perhaps to disincentivise risky sexual behaviour?
Personally, I’d have rather peed in a cup myself.
That’s the price you pay for dating the receptionist at a clap clinic.
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June 11, 2015 at 12:34 pm -
Don’t forget the basic rule – whatever it is, it’s only ever ‘kinky’ the first time you do it.
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June 11, 2015 at 2:25 pm -
Now that’s one area where us women do have it easier. With me, my recollection is that it was just a poking about up the front bottom – which I was pretty used to by that time – plus the needle in the bum. Oh, and the lecture about “Make him wear a condom next time, dear!” (followed the blank look when I asked “But what if he says no?”)
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June 11, 2015 at 12:21 pm -
Only a few weeks ago BBC Radio 4 was telling us that adolescents shouldn’t be held criminally responsible for their bad actions.
So too young to make sensible decisions for themselves but old enough to help decide for everyone else?
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June 11, 2015 at 12:41 pm -
The answer, of course, is to have a single age of majority – one standard composite age when a young person qualifies for all the rights & responsibilities of adulthood, prior to which they would have no personal rights and their parents/guardians would take full responsibility for all the actions of their under-age offspring.
Drinking, smoking, gambling, sex, porn, credit, driving, voting, tax-paying, criminal responsibility etc. – it would be a fascinating debate as they tried to arrive at the single agreed ‘rite-of-passage’ age.
Any suggestions ?-
June 11, 2015 at 12:55 pm -
Youngest Dwarfsprung got ‘caught out’ when they brought in the ’18’ rule for buying cigs. He was 17 and had been smoking since he was 14, buying his own (when not nicking mine) since he was 16. They, the garage, wouldn’t sell him the smokes but were happy for him to pay for the 25 litres of petrol he’d just put in the tank of his car-in which his pregnant girlfriend was sitting ….and a packet of headache tablets that are still classed as prescription drugs some places.
I don’t know the stats but how many 17 die behind the wheel or from overdoses of paracetamol or ibruprofen a year? Can’t be as many as are, apparently, killed by cigarettes at such a tender age….
“Sorry World”-Tom Wilson:
“Just don’t get caught ith no beer in your hand if you just turned 18
They don’t mind you ownin’ an acetylene torch
and a gallon of gasoline
You just can’t buy smokes at the liquor store or y’all will both go to jail
But they’ll sell you a rope
so you can hang yourself while you’re listening to Nine Inch Nails” -
June 11, 2015 at 1:10 pm -
June 11, 2015 at 2:09 pm -
The Americans appear to have a system referred to as “Emancipation” at 18. I was reading some guy who’d dropped out of school, had a job and was renting his own flat (partly it seemed because he loathed his parents). Apparently so far as the State was concerned, his parents were still liable for his actions. He seemed to be enquiring how he could emancipate himself rather than having to wait for his birthday.
I was mooching about the other day and noticed that a woman tending one of the 4-dead-in-Ohio back in the 1970’s was actually only 14 at the time, and reading an excellent biography of Bob Mitchum explains that at 14, he left his Ma in new York and hitch-hiked his way across the USA… mostly on Freight Trains it seemed. One can only assume the US has lots of laws but it is only recently that anyone wants to enforce them simply because they exist. The future’s is bright. The future’s red, white and blue with pretty stars.
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June 11, 2015 at 1:25 pm -
I’d assumed that the reduction of the voting age by the fish people was simply an attempt at cynical exploitation of the idealism & inexperience of youth.
My instinctive view is that we spend a great deal educating the young in the narrow classroom sense, but not a lot about the real world of responsibilities & consequences. I guess you have to live a little to get that. Nearly 60 years ago, I’m sure doing O-level British Social & Economic History 1760 – took me several years living to be put into a proper perspective. My perception is that the extension of adolescence into the twenties & beyond for many is an argument against lowering the age to vote.
On the Europe thing we have the tension of younger voters who have known only the status quo, and for whom leaving is a leap in the dark, against the older voters who know a different world and don’t much fancy where we’re going.
I know of course that my own view is entirely logical. -
June 11, 2015 at 1:50 pm -
I went through a lefty phase in 1968 – I was fourteen and enjoying the glandular pleasures of reading about revolution. My father (a serving Army officer) arrived home just as the rest of us were watching a rather swivel-eyed interview with Tariq Ali.
Wordlessly, he handed me a first edition of a little-advertised book by Robert Conquest. It was already well-thumbed. It was called “The Great Terror”. I still have it.
It placed within me a Great Dread of the Big State.
I had the pleasure of telling the author of this a few years back. The Great Man was tickled pink; “So puberty worked for you…”
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June 11, 2015 at 3:08 pm -
I have no problem with votes at 16 – but only for people who are working and paying tax. NEETS can bugger off until they start contributing. Simples…
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June 11, 2015 at 3:45 pm -
The 3 Neo-Dwarves are all SURVIVORS of “Education, Education, Education”. All now supposedly adult and all, more or less, illiterate in both their mother tongues. Yet all of them certified as having above average intelligence in younger years (one even up at around 140 IQ). Now their school days are thankfully almost a decade behind them but I can still recall how IGNORANT they were at age 16. They seemed to know quite a bit about soldiers in WW1 suffering from ‘Trenchfoot’, Healthy Eating and the geography of the Slave Trade but nothing much about, what in my day at the same school, would have been called ‘Current Affairs’. Nor did they have the grounding in History, Religious Studies nor English Lit to provide them with a framework on which to hang whatever information they gleaned from the Documentary Channel.
As I said, this was almost 10 years previous, I dread to think how ill-informed current 16 year olds are. Pet, you may have voted for The Monster Raving Loony Party BUT I’m damn sure you would at least have known 1. The Monarch’s name, 2.The Prime Minster’s name and party (hard not to if you grew up in Scargill’s heartland I guess) and 3. Why Mary Whitehouse was an interfering ol’ Cow.
Now maybe the, gloriously ill-named, “Education system” has improved in the last ten years but I’m betting most current 16 year olds couldn’t even spell ‘Parliament’ (we had a whole English Lesson devoted to the spelling of ‘Parliament’, ‘Government’ and other such words, I recall) let alone explain their own parents political affiliations.
“Churchill, he was like the King Of England ?” [sic] my then 14 (I think) year old.
So I’m not bothered about 16 year olds being allowed to vote…most of them would have trouble just getting the concept of drawing a cross in one box with their “swizzle stick” [sic- a current CBEEBIES show].
Personally I would insist that anyone , of what ever age after say their 16teenth Birthday be required to pass a short written test before being allowed to vote, along of the lines of “What country is this?”, “Who is the current Monarch?”, “Which language is this test written in?”, “Today’s date?”, “Two thousand and fifteen years since which event?”, “Can you spell your own surname?”.
(and for those of you who think those test questions are meant as a joke, let me assure you they aren’t. Only last week Youngest Dwarf wanted to know if ‘November came after June?’)
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June 11, 2015 at 4:44 pm -
My daughter recently said to me… “David Cameron… he’s the Conservatives, right?”
I blame the parents…-
June 11, 2015 at 5:03 pm -
To be fair to your obviously very smart daughter, Cameron’s not exactly “the Conservatives, right” – more “the Conservatives, wishy-washy, pinkish, all-things-to-all-voters, EU-at-any-price etc”.
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