Why giving six-year-olds the vote isn't actually such a bad idea

“NONE of us can talk to our parents,” says the narrator of John Lanchester’s forthcoming dystopian novel, The Wall. It paints a bracingly bleak picture of Britain’s future. Ravaged by climate change and the associated migrant crisis, we have decided to build a National Coastal Defence Structure – a literal wall – around our coastline. It takes a lot of manpower to keep a metaphor like that functioning, so every British teenager is conscripted to spend two years of their life guarding it, looking out for “Others” coming out of the sea.

It’s miserable. It’s cold. And one of its effects is to destroy any intergenerational understanding. The older people (the ones who can remember beaches) are doubled over with guilt; the younger people are in no mood to take lectures from them. “Want to put me straight about what I’m doing wrong in my life, Grandad? No thanks. Why don’t you travel back in time and unf***up the world and then travel back here and maybe then we can talk.”

So, if you’ve had a lousy 2018 – compounded by a stressful, overindulgent Christmas where the nation’s neuroses seem to have wheedled their way right into your family home – well, here’s some airy escapism to look forward to in 2019. And it has set me thinking, between pigs-in-blankets and despair and sneaking off to play Lego with my son. What can we do to avoid such a calamity? How could we improve our capacity for long-term decisions while improving intergenerational fairness? What hope for our sad, windswept, dyspeptic islands?

Well, we could, as David Runciman, political scientist at Cambridge University, argued in a Talking Politics podcast earlier this month, give six-year-olds the vote. “And I’m serious,” he added.

His argument is straightforward and persuasive. We’re in a democratic crisis, have you noticed? A demographic crisis too: we’re getting older and older as a society. And at moments of democratic crisis, Runciman argues, extending the franchise has always been the only honourable way out. We could impose a maximum voting age – 75? 65? 32? – but that would be a bit mean. We could lower the voting age to 16 but that’s never captured the imagination. So let’s be realists and, as the French used to say in 1968, demand the impossible! Let’s give children the vote. Personally I’m persuaded by giving babies the vote, but Runciman favours age six. By then, they ought to be able to read – and thus trusted with a pencil, a voting booth and the finer details of the common agricultural policy.

I can’t see the problem, to be honest. Britain has often led the way with democratic reform – wouldn’t that make a more positive national narrative than, say, slowly destroying ourselves? I am picturing Andy of Prehistoric Adventure fame earnestly hosting the CBeebies debate… compulsory gungings for the losers on election night; politicians actually being held to account for once. John Humphrys has nothing on a self-righteous schoolchild when it comes to exposing the flaws in a scheme. “But why did you build in a punitive element to universal credit, Iain Duncan Smith? Why? But why? WHY?” Children have an acute sense of fairness, an openness to new ideas and use more state services than any other constituent.

It certainly wouldn’t be as stupid as, for example, destroying our collective wealth, alienating all of our closest allies and entering into an extended period of rancorous self-absorption so that Jacob Rees-Mogg can enjoy a more tax-efficient hedge fund, right? “I hate Brexit!” as my own four-year-old announced at the Brexit, sorry, breakfast table the other day. “It’s so BORING!” That is precisely what’s wrong with it. There are so many more interesting things we could be doing with our time. And Brexit – a project of the old imposed on the young – is precisely the sort of perverse outcome this rebalancing might help us avoid in future. I’m sure we’ve all read plenty of articles by middle-aged men complaining about how truculent and emotional young people are these days; but what they so rarely acknowledge is how truculent and emotional old people are these days – and how it’s old people who have the voting power by sheer force of numbers.

I am trying to see the arguments against. Perhaps most obviously, it would amplify the votes of parents – most children would end up voting in the way that their parents told them to vote. Is that in itself a problem – weighting the system to those with more stake in the future? Another is that it might introduce an element of randomness: children might opt for the candidate with the prettiest name or the party with the cutest logo. But election by lottery isn’t the absolute worst.

Perhaps the strongest argument against: it would be a terrible burden on our young, already among the most anxious and embattled in the western world. Well yes. But wouldn’t this be a powerful way of focusing minds on that precise problem? Banning homework wouldn’t be the worst child-centred policy, come to think of it. It’s that or the wall, you decide!