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Here it is as promised, a bill introduced to parliament on Thursday proposing to give the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds by the next general election. Good. The accusation from the Conservatives and Reform last year was that this was gerrymandering. “Rank hypocrisy” says the Sun. If polls had shown that the young traditionally swing to the right, would Labour have espoused this? I don’t know.
Nigel Farage’s claim that the young are turning to him is largely overblown, according to YouGov polling, with only 9% of 18 to 24-year-olds saying they would vote Reform – no better than what Ukip achieved in 2015. However there is a gender gap, says More in Common, with boys nearly twice as likely to support parties on the right. The Tories, who will lose out, search for reasons to oppose the bill and come up with some rum arguments. I particularly enjoyed Claire Coutinho’s concern that young people do not need the “added pressure” of deciding whether to focus on their exams or “stay up to watch” political debates, as elections are often in the summer exam season.
In power, the Tories went to great lengths to stop young people voting: David Cameron’s government barred colleges and universities from registering students automatically. Meanwhile, parents were barred from registering young people at home, so students’ vote depended on their personal determination to register, at a time of turmoil in their lives – and frequent address changing. It worked, with young people the largest disenfranchised group.
The age when people become more likely to switch to the right reached 66 at the last election. The 16- and 17-year-olds who will actually vote in the next general election are now aged 12-13, so candidates had better get to work on them. Yet the reality is that in our corrupted and perverse electoral system, the votes of these teenagers are highly unlikely to affect any seats: there are too few of them in any one seat to shift the dial even if they all voted for the same candidate, according to research by Christine Huebner at the University of Sheffield, which is a shame. But expect to see candidates hastening to canvass in schools, not just old people’s homes – with promises to the young, not just the old.
That’s why this matters. It should be a symbol and a signal of intent to focus policy on the young, who have lost out so badly in the austerity years – with education funding and Sure Start cut, and the education maintenance allowance for poorer sixth formers abolished. Meanwhile, during Covid, the young were sacrificed in school closures to save the old from dying. As the old revel in triple-locked pensions and freedom passes regardless of income, families with children are the poorest.
Much more should be done to ensure that the old who are poor claim their pension credit, but it is uphill work persuading the old as a cohort how privileged we have been all our lives: born into an NHS created for us, staying on longer in comprehensive schools, vast expansion of (free) universities and colleges, a time of massive housebuilding and public investment in libraries, leisure centres and sports. I once gave a talk on a cruise ship explaining to my generation how lucky we were compared with the young – and I feared I’d get thrown overboard in their fury. Look at the young with their lattes and avocado toast, they said; those lazy moaners and snowflakes – “we never had mobile phones in our day”. Politically, shifting significant resources and power from the old (who vote) to young (who don’t much) is risky.
Why 16? David Runciman, a professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, suggests voting at age six, which I like. But it might be more politically saleable to give parents caring for children a double vote on their behalf to tilt the electoral arithmetic in a rapidly ageing population: the fertility rate in England and Wales fell to a record low in 2024, to 1.44 children per woman, when it takes 2.1 just to maintain the population. Innovation, rebellion, new ideas, trends and fashions rarely come from the old: stagnation and decay beckon if nostalgia for a world 50 years ago dominates education policy. Even if there were every encouragement for parenthood – housing, free good nurseries, parenting subsidies and, above all, a sense of welcoming children – we would need to rethink attitudes towards welcoming young migrants to keep our population renewed. Jim Ratcliffe’s decrepit complaint about a Britain “colonised by immigrants” let Labour thump back with resounding repudiations.
The young, of course, overwhelmingly back votes at 16, but they are remarkably humble: in August 2025, 46% said they felt informed enough about politics to vote in a general election, while the same proportion said they did not feel informed enough (8% were unsure).
They ought to know about the depths of adult ignorance: the majority are disastrously wrong in their estimates on crime (78% of people polled think it’s rising when it fell 90% in the last three decades), benefits (many think most goes to the jobless when most goes to pensioners) or how incomes are distributed (extreme inequality is often grossly underestimated).
A new school curriculum, out in 2027, will bring in the kind of citizenship education with critical thinking at its core taught brilliantly in some schools, but barely at all in most, killed off by Michael Gove when he dropped it from his Ebacc. Accompanying sixth formers to the polling station could give them a habit for life: this is a chance for them to become the most democratically minded generation. Expect a reverse ferret from the right, who can hardly go into the next election still opposing votes at 16.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
