Lowering the voting age shifts power towards the future, and to the people who’ll actually have to live in it
Labour has announced that the voting age will be lowered to 16 by the next election. While it pains us to praise any policy introduced by Keir Starmer – a horrible man and Dazed’s Villain of the Year for 2024 – this is obviously a good decision.
This goes beyond the fact that young people are more likely to support progressive parties: even if every teenager in the country were counting down the days to vote for Reform, as a matter of basic fairness, they should be able to. At the age of 16, you can leave home, work full-time, pay taxes and get married, so you should have a say in how the country is run. And, despite what critics might say, the average 16-year-old is probably not any more easy to manipulate, gullible or poorly informed than the average 50-year-old: we’ve all seen the kind of posts that boomers are sharing on Facebook – AI-generated news stories about Big Ben being turned into a mosque or Only Fools and Horses being rebooted with an all Black cast – and no one is suggesting taking away their democratic rights (Unless…?🤔)
In terms of pure self-interest, this is probably a smart move for Labour. While young people were more likely to vote Green at the last election, and there are indications that Reform is increasing its support among Gen Z (particularly men), they are still a reliable voting bloc for Labour, as they have been since at least the 1980s. Last year, 41 per cent of 18-24 year olds voted for Labour, while only eight per cent voted for the Conservatives and nine per cent for Reform (according to YouGov). Assuming that 16-year-olds would be similarly inclined, it’s a reasonable bet that lowering the voting age will help Labour’s chances.
Still, a lot can change ahead of the next election (which could still be four years away), and a lot already has changed – Keir Starmer is even more unpopular than he was last year, for one. If the new left-wing party recently announced by Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana takes off, it could stand to benefit from a larger number of young people having the vote, as might the Green Party. Recent research by academics at Exeter University has found that Labour faces serious challenges in holding onto the youth vote, with the Greens and the Lib Dems gaining ground. It’s also worth asking how different things might already look if 16-year-olds had been allowed to vote sooner – Brexit may not have passed, and Corbyn might well have become prime minister.
Considering that young people were only marginally more likely to support Reform than the Tories at the last election, it seems unlikely that this will result in a significant windfall for Nigel Farage. But then again, the young people of today won’t be the same as the young people of 2029. Some research suggests that younger members of Gen Z lean more conservative than their older peers, and the teenagers eligible to vote in four years time will be a different generation altogether – currently around 12 years old. At this point, it would be pointless to try and predict what their political leanings will be, although we can say for sure that there are a lot of well-funded and influential forces in the world pulling teenagers – and particularly teenage – boys to the right.
With hundreds of thousands of new voters to play for, political parties of all stripes will be incentivised to address the concerns of young people, which hopefully will have some bearing on how Britain approaches the housing crisis, higher education and climate change, and perhaps some other issues, like trans rights and Palestine, where young people overwhelmingly fall on one side (for now.) If you look at the last ten years, you won’t find much evidence to suggest that the British establishment cares about the problems and policy preferences of the under-25s, but this will at least tip the scales a bit. Even if that doesn’t happen, and the only people who benefit are Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage, lowering the voting age still shifts power towards the future – and to the people who’ll actually have to live in it.