I was originally in favour of lowering the voting age to 16. On principle, it made sense. If you can work, pay tax and are subject to the law, then representation should follow. No taxation without representation is not decorative rhetoric. It sits at the core of parliamentary democracy.
I have changed my mind, not because I doubt the capacity of 16 year olds, and not because I want to narrow the franchise, but because I think we are expanding rights in a system already showing strain without strengthening the preparation that should underpin those rights.
We have drifted into the habit of treating arithmetic as optional. We want generous public services, low taxes and fiscal credibility, and we vote as if those aims can coexist without tension. Then the bond markets clear their throat, mortgage rates rise and we call it an unforeseen shock.
The trade-off is straightforward. Tax cuts today mean spending cuts or borrowing. Borrowing means interest. Interest means future tax or future restraint. There is no fourth door marked miracle, however attractively it is painted at election time.
The NHS makes the point concrete. Even those who use private healthcare ultimately rely on the NHS backbone. Private consultants are trained in it. Emergency cover is run by it. Complex intensive care capacity is built and maintained by it. You can pay for comfort and speed, but when something serious happens the system underneath is public. If that backbone weakens too far, everyone feels it.
Yes, democratic systems contain corrective mechanisms. Markets react. Courts intervene. Elections punish excess. But those corrections still allow for damage before the lesson lands. Mortgage shocks are a brutal tutor. Pension instability is not a classroom exercise. Relying on crisis as the primary teacher is an expensive way to run a country.
Foreknowledge is cheaper.
Education will not eliminate conviction or ideological preference. Some voters will understand the trade-offs perfectly well and still prefer lower taxes and a smaller state. That is legitimate. But understanding provides a counterbalance. It shortens the gap between promise and consequence. It makes it easier to spot a design flaw in a policy before the engine seizes.
At present we send young people into adulthood able to analyse poetry and solve equations, yet many cannot explain how a Budget works, what the Office for Budget Responsibility does, how borrowing compounds or why gilt yields matter. Constitutional and fiscal mechanics are treated as peripheral knowledge, and public debate drifts accordingly.
Teaching political and fiscal literacy in the final two years of secondary school would not settle political arguments. It would not produce uniform outcomes. It would simply raise the floor. After two cohorts had passed through, a generation would enter the electorate with a working understanding of trade-offs and institutional limits. Even if that improvement is modest, modest improvements in resilience matter.
A serious civic curriculum would have to be tightly defined and politically neutral, focused on process and arithmetic rather than ideology. It would test spending fantasies as hard as tax fantasies. It would expose the mechanics behind expansive promises as well as revenue cuts. That is not indoctrination. It is maintenance of the operating system.
For that reason, if we are going to lower the voting age to 16, we should strengthen that operating system first. Not because catastrophe will follow otherwise, and not because 16 year olds are uniquely reckless, but because prudence suggests upgrading the foundations before widening the structure. Two years of reform before expansion is not obstruction. It is sequencing.
Democracy is a system of trade-offs, not wishes. We can choose lower taxes and leaner services. We can choose higher taxes and thicker institutional protection. What we cannot choose is to deny the connection between the two and hope that constraint will be gentle when it arrives.
It never is.
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