Blow for Starmer as poll finds majority of public oppose lowering the voting age to 16 – in damning verdict on Labour’s flagship policy.
That at least was the headline in the Daily Mail, reporting a new Lord Ashcroft poll which found that 52% of the public were opposed, compared to 38% who supported the policy.
Let’s leave aside that, overall, the poll showed Labour leading the Conservatives by 24 percentage points – many more blows as bad as this and Labour might just win a landslide. Let’s leave aside that the text of the article later described votes at 16 as one of Labour’s flagship policies, even though that is pushing it a bit.
Let’s leave aside that the same poll found that 50% opposed the government’s much more high profile national service plan. In fact, let’s excuse all of this as a partisan headline writer’s hyperbole and move on.
Let’s focus instead on the fact that the majority of the public oppose lowering the voting age. This is a long-established Labour policy, one that Keir Starmer has reaffirmed his commitment to during the election campaign. If Labour win, it’s coming.
So does it matter that a majority of the population oppose it? Flagship or not, could this hurt Labour?
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Here, I need to declare my interest. Ever since this idea was first floated, around the beginning of the century, I have argued against it. At one point, I even set up a website, now defunct, called Votes for Adults, to put the counter-case.
I served on a thing called the Youth Citizenship Commission set up by Gordon Brown to examine the subject – along with some upstart president of the NUS called Wes Streeting; whatever happened to him? The policy produced the shortest media quote I’ve given in my career, when the Sun quoted me as saying: “It’s a daft idea.”
I am not a fan.
Yet this isn’t a blow. It’s not even a surprise. It won’t hurt Labour at the election. It may even be, broadly, positive.
It comes as no surprise to discover that there was majority opposition to the policy, because most surveys have shown this for decades. Votes at 16 has long been a niche interest.
Indeed, several years ago, the Hansard Society, a charity that studies democracy, carried out a survey asking respondents which aspects of the constitution they understood and which they approved of. The only one to have both majority understanding and approval was having the voting age at 18 – and it seemed to me curious that we would change the only bit of the constitution that people understood and liked.
Given this, will it hurt Labour? Almost certainly not. There is a broader issue here about how people vote. Half a century ago the great political science pairing of David Butler and Donald Stokes noted that for an issue to matter, four conditions needed to be met. First, the voter needed to be aware of an issue.
Second, they needed to have an attitude or opinion on it. Third, the parties needed to have differing stances on the issue. And fourth, the voter then needed to vote for the party with the stance that was closest to theirs. These are quite high bars, and many issues fail to clear them.
Votes at 16 does meet some of these criteria but it seems unlikely that it will matter enough to actually drive people’s votes, at least to the extent of making people vote one way or another. Even I won’t be letting it determine my choice of vote – and it’s difficult to think of who might.
For some people, issues like this do provide a convenient excuse or justification (“I was thinking about voting Labour, but then I heard they wanted votes at 16”, says someone who has voted Conservative for all his life…).
And the issue can matter in other ways. First, and most obviously, because once it’s implemented, the new voters it enfranchises are more likely not to be Conservative-supporting (at least in the short term).
Labour politicians will deny that this is why they are doing it – “I am shocked, shocked, to discover short-term partisan reasoning driving constitutional reform!” – and you might well think that things like this would be better done on a cross-party basis.
But if the subject comes up, it allows them to respond by pivoting to areas on which the Conservatives have acted in a way that lacked cross-party agreement (“I will take no lectures about partisanship from the people who introduced a system of voter ID designed to lower turnout and keep young people away from the polls”).
And second, whatever its merits, it does have the vague whiff of being a policy, maybe even a moderately radical one, and one on which the Conservatives oppose. It also doesn’t cost much. Giving young people the vote is a lot cheaper than providing them with houses.