Democracy and the E.U. Referendum
First, a bit of background. I am a 15 year old boy in Southern England and I have never been particularly proud to be British. I never really understood the point. We are not the best at sports, we do not have the largest army or the largest economy, the days we ruled 1/3 of the world are no more and frankly we didn’t do a good job of it either. But never before have I actively disliked the fact I was British.
But never before have I felt that my country, though we have always disagreed on many things (read Investigatory Powers Bill among other things), had actively failed to protect my future, at least they pretended to care about climate change.
However, now it is different. During the small hours of this morning (probably yesterday or the day before by the time this gets published, if ever) we made a momentous, and I would argue completely incorrect, decision. We voted to leave the E.U.
A person is smart. People are dumb (K, Men in Black)
I have no issue with democracy and in fact, before tonight I was leaning towards direct democracy as a right and fair thing to do. Even if now though I no longer trust the people as a collective to make decisions for themselves in a direct democracy, I still believe democracy is right and just. However, my issue is with how it was done. While normal general elections happen every 5 years the E.U. referendum was a once in a lifetime opportunity. To me, this makes it special, and I was denied the opportunity to participate.
The IQ of a group is that of its lowest member
The voting age for the UK is 18 (reasoning, interestingly enough we are offered the opportunity to fight and die for our country before we can decide it’s leaders). Before that society has deemed that you are too young to be able to help decided the fate of your country. I understand that this is an attempt to ensure that those who are able to help decided the fate of the country have some level of maturity, and believe me I understand this, I do not think some, maybe even most, of my school classmates would be able to participate effectively in our democratic process. And though I do question if age is a correct way to determine maturity (there are many, many, many stupid adults) I acknowledge that the line has to be drawn somewhere. However as I said the referendum was different. This will last for a good many years (the last decision on the matter was in 1975 that’s 41 years ago). This will affect me for the majority of my life, and it is not unlikely that I will have had children who will be, by then a similar age to me now. That’s a long time.
Therefore I think that in issues such as these younger people should be able to vote (as was seen the in the Scottish Independence Referendum when the voting age 16). Whether the limit is 17, 16, 15 or even lower doesn’t matter. We are the ones who are going to be living with the consequences of this decision so therefore I think that we should be able to vote.
My unhappiness with the situation was not helped by a statistic I found earlier today (source YouGov Poll). The majority of older voters voted to leave. That means that those who it would affect the least (65+) voted against the opinion of those it will affect the most, by a difference of 75% of 18–24 year olds vs 39% 65+ year olds voting to remain. This, to me, feels wrong. How can those who the decision will affect the least have more of a right to vote that those it is will affect the most? To put this in perspective, according to Wikipedia 16.6% of the UK population is 65+ which was voting against slightly less than 13.1% of 15–24 year olds (I can only get data for this age bracket and I feel it is a safe bet to assume that those who were younger than the 18 year old cut off would have similar opinions). Now while this may be the smaller group of the two groups, however, if we continue this assumption onto 10–24 year olds this number goes up to 18.9% (with 0–9 band coming in at 11.8% on its own). These are young people who will who will live the majority of their adult lives affected by this decision with a large proportion having children of their own, and all of these people either could not vote or voted in the overwhelming majority (3 to 1) to stay in the E.U.
Democracy is about letting those who will be governed have a say in their government through voting and therefore I believe that we should have allowed the younger generation to vote in the E.U. referendum. Not only would this not only have possibly reversed what I consider a disastrous and misguided outcome it would have also let the age group whom it would affect most have more of a say in their future (and in the process possibly engaging them more in politics, never a bad thing).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying older citizens should not have been able to vote, they are entitled to a vote just as all the rest of us (well technically you as I wasn’t given the right to vote), I am however saying that we should allow this nation’s young to shape our national conversation. Now, more than ever, as we embark on a journey that those amongst our youth who were allowed the privilege to, actively voted against it.
As a side note this site as many interesting infographics breaking down the different demographics and mentalities of the two sides such as this one:
