The voting age in the United Kingdom should be lowered to 16 years.

I agree on the OAPs being problem in regard to questions of pension budgets and that is something that concerns me, however to the question of 16 year olds and voting; school really is a propaganda factory for left wing parties, I remember one of my teachers at school running around shouting like a lunatic after the socialists/labour won the election. "without school teachers a pupil cannot gain information about the left wing parties" - I really dispute this, school teachers are generally of pretty average intelligence and will give you all sorts of silly, half-baked ideas. Most of these people have not had a 'real' job, they tend to go from school -> university -> struggle to get a career -> retrain as teachers. At least that is what all the ones i know did - VERY FEW people plan on becoming a school teacher. These people aren't very well informed and shouldn't be giving advice on politics. I know this is sad because ideally those who teach kids should be the best, most highly paid of amongst us; but they aren't unfortunately. When i went to University (18-21) that was when i actually first started to learn important stuff about politics, although i went to a good one so I was lucky and i dont know if most Universities or most degrees would teach you anything more. I did business and it was kind of a side issue we covered. You are better off at least having some decent experience of work before voting, not even University is sufficient, so that would take most people up to what 23? When I left Uni and worked for the first time I realised how much better work is compared to what I thought it was, I was really dreading having to work for some company - I largely blame the education system for this and the media which has certain biases about how horrible work is - i guess artist types don't fit in to the corporate world either. I thought work would be full of nasty people and bosses would be horrible to deal with - this is completely untrue, at least when doing a skilled job (not part time or low skilled work you do at uni). People who work at companies are generally better people than people who work at government institutions - the fact that people at a government place think they cant be fired makes a lot of them behave unprofessional/unkindly, or it attracts more of this kind of person im not sure exactly. Imagine if your parents or you could fire your teacher, they would stop giving you attitude wouldn't they? Theres actually a country where this happens in Europe i forget which. When you start to see how more inefficient and crappy government institutions can be or how good companies can be (this is just one example) it changes your attitudes to politics. Another example, at school you might think illegal immigrants should be allowed to work in the country and then when you try to get a job you find that its difficult because of the foreigners coming over and working for half what you wanted - you needed to be in the jobs market to understand the issue better. All kinds of experiences like that need to be had before you can develop rounded views on issues. So all this sort of knowledge you cant acquire from school in fact teachers will confuse you with their warped perception of reality thats why 16 is not sufficient. If it were to happen I would think governments would find it easier to buy their way in to power by making stupid promises or re-selling policies which failed in the past but 16 year olds didn't know this happened because they were not around.