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Votes for sixteen-year olds?

The 2024 Labour Manifesto promised to lower the voting age in all elections. Mike Phipps considers the arguments.

There is undoubtedly an overwhelming case for lowering the voting age to 16. Age 18 is an irrational cut-off point as under 18s can do a range of other ‘adult’ things, including joining the army, driving – and paying tax.

Many of these obvious arguments for this change are made in a short new book, Votes at 16: Empowering Young People and Revitalising Democracy in Britain, by Ben Kisby and Lee Jerome, published by Bloomsbury.

Much of the debate of this issue in the media focuses on the immaturity of young people and their supposed lack of interest in politics. “Sixteen-year-olds are great fun but they are not grown up,” wrote Simon Jenkins in the Guardian this month. The Spectator called the policy “seducing teenagers.”

Much of this debate is patronising and prejudiced – substitute any other section of society for young people and this becomes clear. “Moreover,” as the book’s authors point out, “it is predictable that those who are not allowed to cast a ballot do not become as informed about political issues as they might otherwise if they had the vote.” In other words, critics of votes at 16 have the issue the wrong way round; they are criticising young people for not being ready to do something that they are not allowed to do.

Austria, Argentina and Malta, have all lowered the voting age to 16 for national elections. Scotland and Wales in the UK, and some states in Germany, allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local or regional elections. Evidence from Austria suggests that the levels of political interest – and knowledge – of under 18s are comparable with that of other age groups under 30. One might, of course, ask why a criterion of having ‘political knowledge’ is applied to 16- and 17-year-olds is not applied to older groups.

One of the obstacles to lowering the voting age is that public opinion has traditionally been hostile. That is declining, however, and young people themselves favour a lower voter age. In this context, the enfranchising of young people perhaps needs to be seen as part of a broader project aimed at greater political engagement and integration, particularly as the turnout of 18 to 24-year-olds in British general elections is considerably lower than for other age groups.

That said, turnout was 75% among 16- and 17-year-olds in the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum, indicating a readiness to vote on an issue that has real meaning for those involved. “In short, while there is evidence of youth alienation from formal politics and institutions, young people continue to engage with political issues,” say the authors.  In particular, attention has shifted recently to policy issues, notably climate justice, Black Lives Matter and Palestine.

The Power Report, which looked into ways to increase political participation in Britain back in 2006, included lowering the voting age among its thirty recommendations.  It concluded: “When young people are faced with a genuine opportunity to involve themselves in a meaningful process that offers them a real chance of influence, they do so with enthusiasm and with responsibility. We recognise that few people take an interest in a sphere of life or an area from which they have been deliberately excluded. Reducing the voting age to sixteen would obviously be one way of reducing the extent of such exclusion.”

More political than it looks

Ultimately, it is difficult to separate lowering the voting age from broader politics: opponents, for example, are quick to point out that younger voters are more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, or were significantly more opposed to Brexit than older voters. It’s a re-run of an old attack line: voting for 18-year olds was introduced by a Labour government in 1969 – Tony Benn threatened to resign from the Cabinet if it wasn’t enacted. The Conservative Daily Telegraph called it a “senseless measure” at the time.

There is a lot of worthy material in the book on the importance of citizenship and political literacy education for young people. But a growing concern is media literacy, particularly in an era awash with ‘fake news’, conspiracy theories and the targeting of young people by far right and misogynist social media influencers. Moreover, improving media literacy has become more urgent with the increased merging of the political and media elite, a trend highlighted in Ash Sarkar’s new book Minority Rule.

One area that needs a lot more attention is the concern that the interests of younger people get ignored by politicians who don’t need their votes, a problem which is not really explored in Votes at 16. One obvious area affecting 16- and 17-year olds, for example, has been political interference in the A level curriculum by successive Conservative governments, who strove to make the content not just more onerous, but also more ‘British’.

To that one could add the failure of governments to boost apprenticeships for young people, the persistence of a two-tier minimum wage, the punitive benefits system for younger people, the appalling state of mental health services, and much more.

One wonders too whether politicians would be so quick to bemoan an “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions if younger people had the vote. In fact, there are a range of issues where young people are ‘othered’  – from knife crime to the overuse of social media and mobile phones – and where ‘solutions’ are discussed over the heads and without the involvement of young people.

And would politicians be so careless of trans rights if younger people had the vote? Judging by the average age of the massive protest in London this month against the Supreme Court judgment on single-sex spaces and the lazy mis-reporting of its implications by much of the media, perhaps not.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently reaffirmed his commitment to giving 16-year olds the vote, and Parliament is likely to start debating the details soon. With Reform UK leader Nigel Farage accusing Labour of trying to “rig future elections” with the proposal, young people look set to become the latest focus of a right wing culture war.

New from Pluto

Mike Phipps reviews Renters Unite: How Tenant Unions are Fighting the Housing Crisis, by Jacob Stringer, and Solidarity betrayed: How Unions Enable Sexual Harassment – And How They Can Do Better, by Ana Avendaño, both published by Pluto.

“Homelessness in the UK often doesn’t manifest as street homelessness,” says London Renters Union activist Jacob Stringer, “It manifests as overcrowding, unsuitable housing, sofa surfing, emergency accommodation and above all ‘temporary accommodation’ which people can be in for years while they wait for public housing that may never be offered.”

A lot of people in this position are privately miserable. But this misery becomes fully visible only through organising, when it turns to anger and action. It’s helpful that most tenant unions have a number of members with cultural and social capital, who are also being impoverished not so much by workplace exploitation – although in many jobs, that too – but through rent.

Across the Global North, housing precarity has become normalised. Rents rise and standards fall. What’s the point of asking for repairs if the landlord evicts you in revenge, or raises the rent on the improved property? In England alone, 900,000 households suffer from the effects of serious damp and mould – sometimes with deadly consequences, as the recent death of a two-year old child in Rochdale underlines.  

In London, in 2022, the average price of a one-bed flat was 44% of median pay before tax. In areas that attract tourists, tenants are evicted to make way for holiday lets.

One reason for this state of affairs is that housing is a lucrative investment. The more important the market, the more politicians are persuaded not to intervene.  But it’s a very discriminating market: “The effects of housing crisis are always unevenly distributed along lines of class and race and gender.”

The ‘market solution’ is invariably to build more. But no country has built its way out of a housing crisis. The problem is less one of supply than of affordability. As previously reported on Labour Hub, Manchester is a classic  example of this. “There is now an acute shortage of social housing, because new developments include fewer social housing units than they destroy and because social housing providers are selling stock on the private market… Tenants complain that their areas are deliberately neglected, then blighted as run-down and requiring new development, which invariably displaces them.”

As Isaac Rose points out in his recent book, “The rent burden is so high in Manchester that it outstrips London for unaffordability, due to the city’s lower wages.” Stringer’s account of the ‘transformation’ of South East London’s Heygate Estate into the privatised ‘Elephant Park’ tells a similar story.

Government intervention is often unhelpful. The UK’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme has done little but drive up housing prices: “Government funds that once went to building public housing get redirected to subsidise landlords.”

Tenant unions show individuals who are being victimised by landlords that they are not alone. More importantly, as he shows here with examples from the UK and beyond, tenant unions achieve victories – for individuals and whole communities.

The author includes useful practical information about setting up a tenant union: the need for radical direct action, a comprehensive set of demands and cross-tenure organising. Regarding the latter, he points out that some of the worst contempt directed at tenants comes from housing department council officers and housing association property managers. Local councils move people into badly maintained temporary accommodation blocks run by private landlords who are under little pressure to do repairs and at the same time often get more rent from the council than they could on the open market. It’s a racket, says Stringer, and it allows the worst slumlords to be funded by the public purse.

Stringer believes every tenant should join a union “because as we build solidarity within and between communities, we can all offer each other a chance of a different and better way of organising the world. Renters of the world unite!”

*

Ana Avendaño describes her book as a “tough love” letter to the labour movement. Unions, she contends, “have failed to address one of the most harmful, dehumanizing aspects of the workplace: sexual harassment.” Worse, they deploy “mechanisms of protection to defend harassers, leaving the victims feeling betrayed and marginalized.”

Even after the #MeToo movement, sexual harassment remains a serious problem in American workplaces. The author herself was fired for exposing it in 2019 when working for a large labour movement charity and learning that union leaders were harassing its female staff. She sued and won a substantial settlement.

At the time she still believed any problem in the broader trade union movement was confined to a few “old-school bad apples”. As she investigated, she found a largely male bureaucracy closing ranks to protect its own, while accusing her of disloyalty and freezing her out.

US unions have a history of discrimination against women, for example, arguing in the post-war era that married women in the workforce should make way for returning ex-servicemen. In the sixties, some union leaders fought to lessen liability for themselves under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which made workplace discrimination illegal.

By the 1970s, women were entering the workforce and joining unions in record numbers. In manual jobs, sexual harassment was endemic  – and unrestrained. Unions did little.

Once #MeToo took off, union leaders were quick to claim that unionisation was key to preventing workplace harassment, “typically by a male manager against female subordinates”. In fact, research shows that 60% of women who experience harassment on the job are harassed by their peers – more than twice the proportion who report being harassed by their manager – and it’s these cases which unions have a poor record of taking up.

But the greatest problem the author highlights is where union leaders themselves are the harassers. Several cases are documented here and a pattern emerges of a refusal to take seriously, or even covering up, such instances when they are raised within the union concerned.

Avendaño believes there has to be a culture change. Globally, women make up only 28% of the membership of the highest decision-making bodies of trade unions. “To put it simply, when women don’t have a voice in leadership, patriarchal practices persist.” Gender parity, however, is only part of the solution.

There are some notable exceptions. The union that represents Californian janitors, which has a large number of immigrant women among its members, has taken important steps to confront sexual harassment, which are explored here in detail.  It’s an “essential reminder,” says Avendaño, “that institutional change requires multiple levels of intervention.”

Sexual harassment is a global problem. Within ten days of the #MeToo hashtag going viral in the US, it was trending in 85 countries. Britain has had some high-profile cases involving senior union officials which are documented here. In South Africa, COSATU’s 2022 National Congress was rocked by an allegation of rape and sexual harassment, with women delegates rising from the floor to demand action. Emerging unions in non-traditional sectors which lack an established masculinist culture, on the other hand, are doing some inspiring work.

The author concludes by suggesting some basic solutions to the problem. First, start recognising sexual harassment as a core union issue. Second, unions need to focus on the nature of workplace culture (“how we behave when no one’s watching”). Third, they should build new paradigms into their education and training. Fourth, they must change how they discharge their collective bargaining duties and stop unquestioningly defending harassers at the expense of survivors. Fifth, they need to develop a broader and more inclusive labour movement feminism, which may mean looking for inspiration beyond the movement itself. And above all, unions themselves need to be model employers and stop using non-disclosure agreements as a way of silencing their own victims.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.