This
week, the UK Lib-Con coalition government and the Scottish National Party
(SNP), which holds the majority in the Scottish Parliament, are set to announce
they have come to an agreement on the terms for a referendum on Scottish
independence. The SNP has agreed that there will be only one question on the
ballot paper: should Scotland leave the UK. In return, the UK government will
agree to the nationalists’ preferred date for the election - some time in 2014,
to coincide with Glasgow hosting the Commonwealth Games and the seven-hundredth
anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn. More importantly, it seems, the two
sides have agreed to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote, too.
There is plenty to be said
about the wisdom of throwing away 300 years of common history. Scotland became
part of the United Kingdom in 1707 once the Treaty of Union was approved by
parliaments north and south of the border and the history of the two countries
has been intimately entwined ever since. There seems little benefit to
dissolving this union now. It is also right to wonder what exactly
‘independence’ would mean within the European Union. When so much law is now
decided in Brussels rather than Westminster, and the Scottish Parliament
already has considerable control over domestic law and policy, how much more
‘free’ would Scotland be if nominally independent?
But what is also remarkable is
the cynicism of the SNP: a party that has been trying to take adult rights away
on the minutiae of everyday life is now insisting that teenagers who will very
likely still be at school or college are in a position to make a historic
judgement on the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK.
There are good reasons to
believe that 16-year-olds are in no position to take such a serious part in
political life. In the past, the majority of 16-year-olds would have started to
make their way into the adult world, getting jobs, paying taxes and possibly
starting to think about marriage, kids and a home of their own. Yet there has,
historically, been little support for the idea that the voting age should be
lowered from 18 to 16. But now, less than 20 per cent of all Scottish school leavers, even
taking into account 18-year-olds leaving school, will enter the world of work.
Most 16-year-olds go on to further education and training.
But politics requires the
ability to make decisions for yourself and be in a position to take responsibility
for those decisions. The famous cry of the US colonists before the war of
independence - ‘no taxation without representation’ - could equally apply in
reverse. How can you seriously decide about the great political issues of the
day if you’ve never contributed to paying for public services or at least made
your way in the semi-independent world of higher education?
The issue of reducing the
voting age has been on the agenda for some time. That’s not because politicians
seriously believe that 16- and 17-year-olds have really got something serious
and new to add to political life. Rather, it’s a desperate attempt to shore up
the legitimacy of current political institutions. When it comes to boosting
electoral turnout, any turnout will do.
Such cynicism is particularly
galling from the SNP. While every major party in British politics has competed
to show how nannying and interfering it can be, the Nats have probably run off
with the prize of being the worst authoritarians of all. In 2007, the SNP
(admittedly, with the support of all parties in the Scottish Parliament) raised the age that cigarettes could be purchased from 16
to 18. In May 2012, the Scottish Parliament approved an SNP bill to introduce a
minimum price per unit of alcohol, to be set at 50 pence per unit. (This in
itself could be a test case for the limits of Scottish independence if, as
seems likely, the European Union rules that minimum-pricing laws are an illegal
restraint of trade.) In 2010, the parliament threw out a measure in an SNP bill to raise the age
for buying alcohol in shops from 18 to 21. However, a year later and with a
full parliamentary majority secured in the May 2011 election, the SNP
government had proposed that Scottish local authorities would be
able to raise the legal age for purchasing alcohol in shops from 18 to 21 on a
case-by-case basis.
In short: the SNP believes
that 16- and 17-year-olds should be able to have a significant say in the
future destiny of Scotland, but are not to be trusted to buy cigarettes until
they are 18 and would ideally like to prevent them from buying alcohol until
they are 21. The SNP is hardly alone in the view that adults are not to be
trusted with even quite minor lifestyle decisions. For example, the Nats were
not in charge when Scotland became the first part of the UK to introduce a
smoking ban, in 2006. But the hypocrisy of arguing for a lower voting age while
stripping existing voters of personal freedoms is really quite staggering.
That said, maybe the SNP are
merely ahead of the curve in British politics, being the most explicit
promoters of a diminished view of the citizen and of political participation.
In contemporary politics, voting has been reduced from a serious decision about
the future direction of your country to the provision of a figleaf of
legitimacy to fundamentally anti-democratic politics. How can there be real
democracy when no real issues of substance are voted upon? Similarly, free
speech is chipped away at constantly because we are not to be trusted with
dangerous ideas. It is no surprise that it is the SNP that has brought in draconian laws to lock up football fans for simply saying
or singing the wrong thing.
The SNP are the torch-bearers
for this destruction of citizenhood, where governments can reduce the vote to a
childish choice while removing the freedom to have a cigarette or a drink at
the time of your choosing. To rephrase William Wallace in Mel Gibson’s film Braveheart: ‘They can give us
votes, but they will take away our freedom.’
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