There are good reasons to give 16 year olds the vote. That they might pay tax is not one of them.

Earlier this week Kier Starmer, soon to be the UK’s 5th prime minister in 5 years, explained why he wants to give 16 year olds in the UK the vote. It is, he says, not about what most people think is it - nailing down a left leaning cohort to keep him in government long term. Instead, it is all about tax and about being fair to those who are forced to pay it. If you pay tax,” he says, “you should be allowed to to say what you think your tax should be spent on, so we say votes for 16 year olds and 17 year olds.” He might regret this explanation. It’s quite stupid. And it opens up all sorts of conversations that I suspect he would rather not have. It’s stupid because its is perfectly obvious that the very act of it being possible that you might earn money and have to pay tax has no relationship whatsoever to being 16. What of the 14 year old kids delivering newspapers? They might not earn enough to pay income tax. But every trip to buy a a bag of Haribo or a new hoodie will come with VAT. Do they get to vote? Do child actors, underage models and those sweet babies in nappy advertisements? And how about trust fund children? Sure, their relations have avoided some tax for them by shovelling their assets into trusts, but trusts are still obliged to pay an inheritance charge of 6% of the value of their assets every ten years. Special votes for the kids of the rich? Under Starmer’s rules, maybe. Next up, non citizens. At the moment you have to be a citizen of the UK, Ireland or a qualifying Commonwealth citizen to vote in a parliamentary election. Under Starmer’s definition anyone who pays tax should surely be able to vote - including even the 37,000 or so non doms he so disapproves of (and appears to be encouraging to leave the UK super sharpish). He’s got a lot of rules to change when he is prime minister. But this sort of stupid is just the beginning of the problem with Labour’s justification for changing the law around eligibility. 

The next problematic bit is that, go on about no taxation without representation for too long and someone might ask if it works the other way around as well. If you don’t pay any tax in the UK do you get to say what other people’s taxes are spent on? The first answer to this is that everyone pays tax one way or another. The UK comes with such a long list of taxes and sort of taxes that it is hard to imagine many get through an average day without paying at least one. A few: income tax, national insurance, VAT, capital gains tax, fuel duty, insurance premium tax, landfill tax, air passenger duty, alcohol duty. You get the idea. The second is that this list is irrelevatn. It isn’t about paying tax. It is about paying net tax - ie putting in more than you take out. And not that many UK citizens pay net tax. In 2022, on numbers from the Office of National Statistics,  around 54% of the population lived in households that received more in benefits than they paid in taxes. Count the state pension as a benefit (which I am afraid it is) and some 89.2% of those living in retired households were net benefit recipients. 46% of non retired people were. Think about it like this. In 2022/23 the UK government spent around £1200 billion (45% of GDP!) or £17,000 per person? Did you pay £17,000 in tax last year? And enough to cover your kids too? If you did not, someone else must have picked up some of your share (debt would have picked up some too). That’s fine. Better than fine.  It’s how progressive democracies work. But the logical extension of Starmer’s argument is that you shouldn’t get to vote until you’ve upped your game. All those retirees drawing pensions and overloading the NHS? No vote for them. 

Some things are best left unsaid. That in the UK the idea that it is paying tax that entitles you to representation was probably one of those things. 

There are some very good reasons to enfranchise 16 and 17 year olds. It can give the young “civic confidence,” incentivise them (and their parents and schools) to engage with the political system and (crucially) and create a voting habit early on, Make your first vote early with some parental and school support and there is some evidence that you will be more likely to vote in your later teens and twenties. In 2014 16 and 17 year olds were allowed to vote in the Scottish Independence referendum. 75% of them did (over 20 percentage points more than voted in the 18-24 year old group) and 97% of those voters said they intended to vote again. That’s good for overall turn out and therefore democracy. As an aside, Starmer might note that the young don’t always vote as politicians expect: much of the chat around the Scottish referendum was about how the young would swing it for the nationalists. Instead a clear majority of them voted to stay in the UK (with its Conservative government firmly in place). https://academic.oup.com/pa/article/74/3/563/6320902. He might also have seen the chart doing the rounds at the moment which shows that 16 and 17 year old boys are in the UK would be just as likely to vote Reform as Labour at the moment (around 35%). Girl are slightly more likely to vote with Labour - but well over 30% of them still fancy the Greens over Kier. Who is in power also matters to the young. They don’t stay young: anyone 16 in July will be stuck with the next government until they are at least 20. It is possible to make excellent arguments for enfranchising kids. However that they might or might not pay tax is definitely not one of them.