Voting at 16

Apparently, 16-year-olds are too wet behind the ears to vote. Poor lambs. They know how to file a tax return, work full time, even get married (with parental consent) – but hand them a ballot paper and they’ll melt like a snowflake on a hot bonnet. That’s the argument, at least, from the Keep Voting for the Past brigade – a coalition of the wilfully condescending and the tactically terrified.

Let’s be clear – the experience argument is a fig leaf so small it wouldn’t cover a gnat’s undercarriage. If we’re going to start dishing out the vote based on wisdom, insight, and an informed grasp of the modern world, then half the electorate would be sent home with a biscuit and told to brush up on reality.

Take the Brexit vote. A decision so complex and far-reaching that even the people who campaigned for it now spend their days blaming others for the fallout. And who carried it over the line? Largely, the 60- and 70-somethings – those stalwart warriors of nostalgia, marching into polling stations with memories of rationing and the firm belief that somehow, somewhere, a Polish plumber had stolen their birthright.

Now, I’ve nothing against the elderly – I’m one myself – but let’s not pretend every grey voter was consulting the European Commission’s trade protocol over breakfast. Most were voting on gut, flag-waving fantasy, or something they heard from the bloke down the pub who once met a lorry driver who couldn’t get into Calais.

Yet these same people are apparently fit to decide the future of the country, while 16-year-olds – who live the consequences daily, who study current affairs, who pay VAT on tampons and bus fares, and who will live with the mess – are told to sit quietly and leave it to the grown-ups. The same grown-ups who voted for Farage, fell for the bus, and now whinge that “Brexit hasn’t been done properly.”

It’s laughable – or it would be, if it weren’t so contemptible.

The truth is, the experience line is a smokescreen. It’s not about maturity. It’s about control. Young people tend to vote differently – less xenophobic, more progressive, more future-facing – and that terrifies the soggy middle-aged men who’d rather set fire to the house than let the kids choose the paint.

“No taxation without representation” was once a revolutionary cry. Now we’ve got teenagers paying income tax, council tax, and national insurance, yet still being told they can’t vote because they haven’t yet had the life-shaping experience of shouting at the One Show. You couldn’t make it up – but they do, every day, in Parliament.

So let’s stop pretending this is about experience. It’s about demographics, it’s about electoral maths, and it’s about clinging to power by any means short of barricading the polling station with Daily Express back issues.

Let them vote. They’re not the problem. The real threat to democracy isn’t young people getting involved – it’s the older generation pulling the ladder up behind them and blaming the EU for the splinters.