Why Can’t We Just Take Care of the Poor, Man
The Telegraph - Power to the people, not anarchy in the UK
Faced with a fall in enthusiasm for politics among adults, the Power Inquiry - most of whose members were young in the 1970s - reports today that the voting age should be lowered to 16. There is something a little embarrassing about the sight of politicians chasing the teen market, but there is no reason to think 16-year-olds would vote with any less seriousness than their parents, even if they do lack a full understanding of the realities of adult life.
Oh gawd.
The real problem with this proposal is that it betrays a dangerous misunderstanding of the problem that parliamentary democracy faces.
It ain’t just a problem with parliamentary democracies.
Parliament exists to supervise the machinery of national government on our behalf. The problem is that this machinery has extended itself deep into the minutiae of daily life - regulating almost every local and communal institution in the land - without a corresponding increase in the power of voters to hold it to account.
The result is a sad decline in political engagement, for people correctly perceive that their votes will have only the most marginal influence on the decisions that affect their lives.
It is difficult to see how extending the franchise into the fifth form would reverse the trend that the Power Inquiry was established to address, namely voters’ disgust with politicians. For, as the inquiry found, there is no deficit of political interest and activism: it is the lack of support for parties at the ballot box that threatens to undermine the credibility of the system.
Thank you Mr Telegraph writer!
The localisation of democracy would do much to correct this trend, and restore some justice and common sense to the political process by empowering those with a real stake in its outcomes.
Bringing politics to the people, by devolving power to levels at which voters could have a degree of control, would be far more likely to get the voting numbers back up. The revival of Parliament depends, most immediately, on a restoration of the power of local government.
Politicians should remember that the decline of pop music arose from disillusionment with stars who were no longer writing songs people wanted to hear. The teenybopper phenomenon provided only a temporary reprieve.
Ultimately, pop mutated into punk, the plague-on-all-houses genre exemplified by the nihilism of the Sex Pistols. Do we really want anarchy in the UK?
Weird. The Sex Pistols of politics.
February 28th, 2006 at 1:58 am
Good leader, except it claims as its own ideas things which are all in the Power IInquiry report.
e.g. “There should be an unambiguous process of decentralisation of powers from central to local government.”
The 16 year parliament voting is a tiny part of the recommendations. If you read the report, you will see it repeatedly says that doing just one part of what it recommends won’t work. As for age, notice the contrasting system recommended for the House of Lords:
“70 per cent of the members of the House of Lords should be elected by a ‘responsive electoral system’ – and not on a closed party list system - for three parliamentary terms. To ensure that this part of the legislature is not comprised of career politicians with no experience outside politics, candidates should be at least 40 years of age.”
February 28th, 2006 at 9:22 am
I don’t see how further fiddling with the House of Lords is likely to improve things. The main problem is with the politicians, and we all know that they’ll be all over the Lords like a bad rash before they’d do anything about themselves, which would just screw everything up even more, and turn off those older people who still do vote.
March 1st, 2006 at 12:40 am
Sounds a bit like the “gerousia” ie old man’s assembly they had in ancient Sparta. It’s a good idea to keep young career politicians out of it, though, they’re the worst.
March 1st, 2006 at 1:52 am
The welfare register and the voter register to become disjoint sets? Would be easy to do.
March 1st, 2006 at 1:55 am
Practically easy. Politically impossible.
March 1st, 2006 at 9:45 am
Go back to the land owner vote? Without disenfranchising women, at least.
Or here’s an idea: Actually give the Queen real power! I was reading about taxes in the 18th and 19th century (don’t ask) about how every time the Monarch would try to raise taxes, Parliament would go flipping nuts, over taxes on salt, and things. And any time it did pass if they ever tried to collect it outside of the central Londonish areas, there’d be riots. Obviously Parliament needs to be made to feel like it’s on the side of the people again. Yup.
March 2nd, 2006 at 3:26 am
Hmmm. The Queen’s done a good job for 54 years, so that’s a thought. The problem is that Parliament no longer represents taxpayers. The growth of the welfare state means that there’s a large number of middle class people working in the public sector who have a strong interest in the maintenance of high taxation, and no interest at all in how the nation earns its living. The welfare classes are of course in favour of more public spending too. The problem is that you can’t have the high levels of public spending without squeezing the productive sector of the economy, and jobs move to places like Malaysia where people make things at prices people can afford. A very Californian situation, now I come to think of it.
My bit of Yorkshire used to be marshland - to give you some idea the less boggy bit was called the Isle of Axholme - and for centuries people enjoyed a quite a decent standard of living by contemporary standards, all the fish you could eat and the occasional swan. The government would send the occasional tax collector into the area to get some money, and quite often he wouldn’t come out again, which upset the King but suited the locals just fine. This state of affairs continued until Charles 1 hired a dutchman to drain the area which he did, and people were so cheesed off at having to grow crops and pay taxes that when the Civil War started they signed up for Parliament and Charles got his head cut off. Which is a roundabout way of saying that Parliament used to be about proitecting people from an overbearing State. Nowadays it is itself the overbearing State.