Editorials

Lowering the voting age: why it’s a bad idea

21 February 2016

By James

We’re hearing plenty of talk lately about lowering the voting age to 16: even though the next general election is a long way away, there is the EU Referendum looming on the horizon (as any news website, it seems, will never tire of telling us), as well as any number of potential by-elections and so on that could produce a precedent for the reduction in the voting age.

Of course, this is an idea which is not just bad but awful on a biblical scale. Today’s youth (of which your humble writer considers himself to be a member) are ill-informed with regard to politics, spouting either hackneyed views absorbed from their parents or seemingly attractive radical statements taken from the far left, the far right or the downright stupid. Young people, without actually thinking for themselves, will either take the same political stance as their parents or find the furthest one from it they can, as an act of pouty teenage rebellion.

It’s all fairly simple, in the end: teenagers and their hormone-addled brains have not experienced the rigours of everyday life affected by politics, and are not sufficiently their own people to separate their own views from those of the people around them.

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