Picture the scene in No 10. The mood is gloomy. The Prime Minister's personal ratings are plumbing new lows. Labour is limping behind Reform UK in every poll. So what can Starmer do? There is a lot of head scratching. Then someone - perhaps it is the master strategist Sir Keir himself - has a brainwave. Why not dust off Labour's 2024 manifesto pledge to give votes to 16 and 17-year-olds? Surely it's a winner! It worked for the Scottish Nationalists, who slyly lowered the voting age to 16 in Holyrood elections in the knowledge that younger people north of the border tend to be keener on independence than older ones.
Labour thinks it will work for them in general elections throughout the United Kingdom when around 1.6 million 16 and 17-year-olds are added to the voting register. As a general rule, younger people have been more likely to back Left-wing parties. For reasons I'll explain later, I believe that Labour's cynical and self-serving calculation may well backfire, and that younger voters won't rally to Starmer's tattered flag in anything like the numbers he expects.
But in any event this is as egregious an example of low politics as you are ever likely to encounter. There is absolutely no case for giving votes to 16 and 17-year-olds. A majority of people are against it. They know that 16 is simply too young to make an informed decision about who should govern the country. Even among 16 and 17-year-olds, almost half don't think they should be allowed to vote, according to a recent poll of 500 respondents by Merlin Strategy. Some 49 per cent didn't support lowering the voting age to 16, while 51 per cent did. The young aren't marching down Whitehall to demand the vote.
Starmer claimed last year that the issue is one of fairness. He said: 'If you can work, if you can pay tax, if you can serve in your armed forces, then you ought to be able to vote.' This is downright misleading. A 16-year-old is only allowed to join the Army with parental consent, and until the age of 18 won't be deployed on combat operations. As for tax, a vanishingly small proportion of this age group earns more than £12,570 a year, which is the threshold at which you start paying money to the Government.
There are plenty of things that 16-year-olds aren't allowed to do because the State regards them as children. Before the age of 18 they can't legally buy alcohol in a pub or in a supermarket, or purchase cigarettes. You can't drive a car or donate blood before the age of 17. In the eyes of the State, people below the age of 18 on trial for a crime are treated as minors, and their names are not published in the media except under the special direction of a judge. Not long ago, the legal age of marriage actually rose to 18 in England and Wales.
It is not just a matter of law. We all of us know - remembering our own childhood and observing young people today - how big a gap in intellectual sophistication there is between most 16-year-olds and most 18-year-olds. No, Labour knows very well that in all kinds of ways the State and society rightly regard people under the age of 18 as children. Why, then, should they be allowed to vote? The only answer is because Sir Keir Starmer believes that they will overwhelmingly support Labour.
But will they? The poll by Merlin Strategy that I have already mentioned found that 33 per cent of 16 and 17-year-olds said they would vote Labour versus 20 per cent for Reform, 18 per cent for the Greens, 12 per cent for the Lib Dems and 10 per cent for the Tories . This suggests that enthusiasm for Labour is stronger among the younger age group than among all voters over the age of 18, where support for the governing party is averaging around 22 or 23 per cent. Still, it is not stratospherically higher.
We have only endured one year of Labour misrule. It is a reasonable bet that as things get worse, which I am afraid they undoubtedly will, support for Labour among 16 and 17-year-olds will dwindle from levels that are already not especially high. Which parties will benefit as teenagers share the disillusion with Labour felt by older voters? The Greens, for sure, and the Lib Dems to some extent. Jeremy Corbyn's new hard-Left party will attract votes from the young, including Muslims unhappy about events in Gaza, who could come under parental pressure.
But it is likely that Reform will be the biggest single beneficiary. The old assumption that younger people are more likely to vote for Left-wing parties is probably no longer valid when there is so much social disquiet, particularly about uncontrolled immigration, and voters of all ages are offered a kind of political smorgasbord. The Tories as currently constituted are unlikely to draw much support from younger voters, many of whom see them as distant and unexciting and tarnished by failure. But a manifestly unsuccessful party led by Starmer, who is the epitome of dullness and the dysfunctional status quo, is unlikely to be much of a draw.
It's noteworthy that in Germany, where 16-year-olds now have a vote in European elections, younger voters have been drawn to the far-Right AfD. In the European elections last year, 16 per cent of Germans aged 16-24 chose the AfD, only fractionally behind the victorious conservative CDU on 17 per cent. The Greens plummeted to 11 per cent.
I'm not of course comparing Reform with the AfD. But I am suggesting that at a time of political volatility and shifting allegiances among all age groups, Nigel Farage is likely to be more attractive to many younger voters than pale, stale Sir Keir Starmer, who by 2029 will be almost universally reviled as the man who brought this country to its knees. I am against giving the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds in all circumstances. It is a cynical manoeuvre on Labour's part, which the general public doesn't want, and which even younger people aren't clamouring for. How richly ironic if Sir Keir's grubby ploy turns out not to deliver the political advantage he covets but merely confirms his reputation of being one of the most politically inept and ham-fisted politicians ever to occupy No 10.