Labour are extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds. It may have been a manifesto promise, but in the current context it’s hard to see it as anything other than gerrymandering. Behind in the polls and facing ever mounting political pressure, they have resorted to unabashed cynicism to boost their electoral chances.
No taxation without representation, Keir Starmer claims. If this reform were being passed a century ago, or even just 50 years ago, he might have been on to something.
You see, while summer jobs for 16-year-olds might be Starmer’s idea of modern child slavery, mid-adolescents are now going to be handed a serious civic responsibility with little life experience at all. In all fairness, there are vanishingly few opportunities for teens to actually acquire any.
Think of your grandparents’ generation, when most students (particularly if they were working class) left school by 16, if not earlier. The opportunity cost of staying in secondary education was often too great. They then entered full-time employment (provided that there was enough to go around), mostly as apprentices, commencing their early entry into adulthood. Full secondary schooling was largely the preserve of the upper classes.
In 1969, the voting age was reduced from 21 to 18. If an 18-year-old could buy a beer, possibly be married already (16 was the minimum age at the time – with parental consent) and fight for Queen and country, why couldn’t they be entrusted with a vote? For those reaching the minimum age in that year, they had most likely been working in full-time employment for at least two years since they had left school.
Compare that to today. A 16-year-old can’t yet buy alcohol or drive a car, never mind get married. Indeed, students are mandated to remain in full-time education or training until 18. If a student wants to leave school at 16, he or she will have a tough time finding an apprenticeship: the number available has declined since 2015, and so has the number of under-18s starting one. The Armed Forces is an option, but only a minute fraction of 16-year-olds will actually volunteer (less than 0.5%) and young recruits can’t serve on operations until they are 18.
Largely, this means the options are limited to staying in school until 18.
No doubt, formal education is envisaged as providing a country’s youth with the skills that they need to advance and thrive in adulthood. But over the course of several generations, political and societal expectations have increasingly postponed the responsibilities of adulthood for mid-teens, claiming it to be for their benefit while simultaneously reducing their agency, leaving an increasingly coddled cohort that probably isn’t as mature as ones preceding it.
This emphasis on education not only delays maturity for current A-level students, but arguably has knock on effects for older cohorts as well.
For students leaving school at 16 in the 1960s, by the age of 21 they would have had roughly half a decade of work experience under their belt and were likely getting on with the other things adults tend to do: buying a house, getting married and starting a family. At the time when the minimum age to vote was reduced to 18, it was not uncommon for a young woman to be married by 21 and to be a mother by 24, with men two to three years older at each event on average.
Today, thanks to the dreams of Tony Blair, 50% of young adults now enter higher education after completing high school at 18. With master’s degrees increasingly common as the pool of tertiary students expands, more of the country’s young adults will only be graduating by their mid-20s – burdened by large debt obligations and facing dire job prospects. They will also get married (if at all) and have children roughly five years later on average than their grandparents might have done.
Perhaps giving 16-year-olds the vote is not what they really need. With the view that university degrees are no longer the golden ticket they once were, with large debts to pay off and AI likely to limit the future prospects of graduates, it would be better for a 16-year-old today to skip higher education and enter the world of work earlier. For that to happen, reforms to funding for apprenticeships are pivotal.
A country is always going to need its modern butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. It would also give young people the opportunity to assume greater responsibilities for themselves and thus provide greater agency for their futures, without the millstone of student debt. It might – just might – also be a partial fix to this country’s fertility challenges.
Yes, the reduction in voting age should be reversed. But if we are to say that 16- and 17-year-olds aren’t yet adults, we might do well to consider how we can open an alternate path to responsible, civically-minded adulthood. Open some doors for them, and they might just surprise us all.
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