The Daily Echo 26 April 07

Written by Sandra Gidley MP on Thu 26th Apr 2007

At the beginning of the week I joined some children at a local Secondary school to talk about politics. One of the items on the agenda was a discussion about whether the voting age should be lowered to 16.

One pupil pointed out the responsibilities he had at the age of 16 and felt that, given those responsibilities he should be able to vote but I was quite staggered when the majority of the 14 and 15 year olds put their hands up to indicate that they did not feel the voting age should be lowered.

The consensus seemed to be that they "really didn't know enough" in order to make an informed choice. One pupil expressed the view that most young people would be guided by their parents and pupils generally felt that they had received little or no information on the political parties. Given this I asked them whether they felt they would be much wiser at the age of 18 than at the age of 16. They were not sure that this was the case but seemed to accept it as the norm.

I told them I had news for them. Many adults did not completely understand the political system or the differences between the parties but I felt that their vote was just as valuable as someone else's. One young person suggested that maybe people needed to pass some kind of test before being allowed to vote. Very dangerous ground!

The debate was lively and I enjoyed the discussion but afterwards I felt slightly depressed. Despite the introduction of citizenship classes the vast majority of young people were not really interested in the democratic process although a number had noticed that we were in the middle of local council elections.

The best advice I could give them was to think about the thing that most mattered to them and to find out where all of the political parties stood on the issue. I would hope that they would want to find out more. But I may be expecting too much because adults votes are swayed by many factors. Some hold a lifelong political allegiance but others judge politicians by their actions and often vote against something rather than in favour. Votes are cast for different reasons and each has equal validity. That's democracy and long may it reign. What I find much more frustrating is the non voter who complains about all politicians. So, before anyone opens their mouth to complain they should make sure they vote!

Published with the kind permission of The Daily Echo