Representation of the People (Young People’s Enfranchisement) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2022-01-28
Topic: Civil Rights
Kishwer Falkner (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I start by paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. He has been utterly consistent over the years in his attempts to move electoral law in this direction. However, I do not think that repeated attempts at something necessarily imply their soundness. I am surprised that someone as committed as he is to the UK’s international affairs has said so little about the UK’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This recognises that individuals are children until they reach the age of 18 The recognition that young people are defined as children is the foundation of our thinking about them when we wish to keep them out of harm’s way, particularly in conflict. In the late 1990s, I worked for the late Baroness Williams of Crosby in her attempts to prevent children from joining the Army. Her campaigning was rewarded in 2000 by the then Labour Government, who signed and implemented the optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to "take every feasible step to ensure that children below the age of 18 years do not take part in hostilities" I hope that the noble Lord will not propose that we remove parental permission to allow children to join the Army after he has given them votes. However, the logic of his argument will inevitably take us there. If you can vote and stand for elected office at 16, it logically follows that you would stand—at this point no one has disputed that. I find it hard to understand how you could vote for elected office but be barred from standing for it. If that were to happen, as I argue would be the next step, then it would be an obscenity if you yourself were to call on others to make the ultimate sacrifice but would not lead from the front in doing so yourself. A child deciding to send an older man or woman into war does not fit with my moral compass, I am afraid I also want to argue a general point—one picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere—that, before we move to a system whereby we decide to lower the age of voting, we need to think about the rights agenda as a comprehensive whole. I refer to the legal fragmentation that exists when we consider someone a "child" for the purpose of considering their status as a rights-bearing individual, as opposed to when we sanction them for wrongdoing. This framework overall is confused and irrational, and requires a comprehensive rethink across the board I personally consider it an abuse by the state to continue to hold to an age of criminal responsibility of 10, on the one hand, with all the irreversible damage that it will do to a child, while denying them full employment rights until they are 18. Not only do we deny them employment rights, but we detract from their rights by having different categories of minimum wage, as if a strapping 17 year-old in a warehouse is somehow less capable of stacking shelves than a 44 year-old However, employment rights are perhaps a debate for another day; I will stick to this one. I want to highlight some of the other inconsistencies and confusion of who is and who is not a child for the purposes of this legislation, something which the supporters of the Bill might wish to consider. The Gambling Act prohibits those under the age of 18 from gambling or placing a bet in a casino or betting shop. If we can vote at 16, and thus, as I argue, stand as a candidate at 16, surely we ought to be able to take a flutter on an election result at 16. Moreover, we have moved the minimum age for participation in National Lottery games from 16 to 18 since last year; I understand that that was a Labour amendment. The direction of travel when we look at contemporary harms, rightly, is to move the age upwards, not downwards The Children and Families Act 2014 was concerned with the health effects of smoking, and banned smoking by adults when children under 18 were present in a car. In this case, the state was expected to infringe on the Article 8 rights—respect for a private life, family life and so on—to protect the health of "children" under 18. In the same space, on health, the parties opposite are all over the place, wanting a ban on the sale of tobacco products to under 21 year-olds; I think that is the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. One gets the sense that, instead of defending the autonomy and choices available to young people, there is a lack of proportion in these kinds of policies. On this one, I would have thought that young people needed education on the harmful effects of substances, not bans under the guise of "protection of childhood" while we move selectively to change the definition of childhood in the Bill When thinking about young people as rights-holders and duty-bearers, we as lawmakers still have some way to go. I want to talk in more positive terms of what we might do to engage young people in participating as active citizens; voting is only one criterion of that, sheet anchor though it might be. As we become a more "rights-bearing" society, while simultaneously becoming more litigious, it is increasingly obvious that citizens have a rather patchy understanding of their rights. Citizenship education, which is a relatively recent innovation in this country, introduced to the curriculum 20 years ago, is still rather inadequate One of the reasons why society is so polarised is because people have very different understandings of what is and is not within the law. One area that we see a lot of is a lack of public understanding around discrimination, harassment and victimisation. Another is the boundary between freedom of expression and what is referred to as hate speech. These issues create friction and contestation every day, day in and day out My point is that before we can make voters out of our citizens, we need to share some basic concepts about the duties that they owe to one another that go along with the rights that they will exercise. One 16 year-old will be very different in maturity from another, but if they have both benefited from better knowledge of the public square then they will be better equipped to live well together in it. Voting is simply one component of that democracy. I applaud the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for his determination but I suggest that his efforts to improve our democracy would bear more fruit if we spent more energy on changing the culture of politics rather than the processes of its manifestation.