I've never been persuaded that steadily lowering the voting age has done much, either for politics or for young people
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'The evidence is that teenagers have little experience on which to base exercise of their civic duty.' Photograph: Jon Super/AP
As the conference season ends and real life resumes for the political class, I see that votes at 16 are back on the agenda because David Cameron is reported to have conceded Alex Salmond's demand that Scottish 16- and 17-year-olds should get their say on Scotland's future in the promised independence referendum of 2014.
I assume the first minister has concluded he will benefit because young people are always keener than their boring elders to try something new and exciting – sky-diving, veganism, crack cocaine.
I hope Cameron has made a similar study, it would be careless if he hadn't, because the evidence is mixed. The SNP has a lot of young support, but some polls I've seen suggest they might draw back from the straight yes/no choice on independence which now seems likely to be offered without a soft devo/max middle option. Young voters tend to vote much as older voters do, say polling experts.
OK. But should we be giving votes at 16 anyway, regardless of those low calculations, is it right in principle? A quick glance at the Wiki crib confirms that the debate has been going on in many countries since the voting age was widely reduced from 21 a generation ago. The British parliament has debated it at several levels – and generally said no. So far in the EU only Austria, in 2007, has done the deed.
I rarely like to miss this opportunity to be sensible – or reactionary, as my fan club puts it. It's always seemed to me that voting is a cherished privilege that we disdain at our peril. People like Ken Livingstone who say "if voting changed anything they'd ban it" show themselves up to be shallow cynics. Ken's own career has changed quite a lot.
But I've never been persuaded that steadily lowering the voting age (the Danes have debated giving votes at birth, but cast by parents during childhood!) has done much, either for politics or for young people. It's a bit like constitutional reform for its own sake, a progressive panacea, which often sidesteps whatever the real problem is.
Why not? Because the evidence is that teenagers have both more pressing worries – exams, boyfriends, football, zits – and little experience on which to base exercise of their civic duty. Clearly they think so too because their voting levels are significantly lower – 39% in 2001, 37% in 2005 in the 18 to 24 cohort – than they are among the wrinklies.
That's bothering because young people are our future and many of them are currently having a tough time in the jobs and higher education markets, different from the tough times their parents and grandparents may have had, but clearly tough. The future is uncertain too – because of Asia's rise as well as Europe's assorted stumbles – as Cameron rightly reminded us all this week.
All sorts of gimmicks have been tried – text voting, longer voting hours, ballot boxes in supermarkets – to raise turnout, without much success. That's not surprising, is it? Politicians promise too much, they even talk about making "an offer", and are both egged on and incessantly abused by the media for perceived shortcomings, true and false.
It's an unhealthy atmosphere, one in which young people are most vulnerable because they lack the experience to sort out the fluff from the substance which is – hopefully – part of growing up. The Lib Dems enjoyed a surge of young support in 2010 which rapidly fell away when they joined the coalition and signed up for £9,000-a-year tuition fees.
Nick Clegg knew he couldn't sustain the party's previous position, but foolishly signed the anti-fees pledge. In Scotland and Wales, more egalitarian than England, the decision went the other way. How financially viable it turns out to be remains to be seen. There have been rumblings this month from Scotland's auditing community. Real life is usually more about hard choices than soft options, but that's a learned conclusion. Some kids know it intuitively, others learn more slowly.
At a time when the non-voting habit, civil disengagement, is creeping upwards towards 30 (the age when people became settled into careers, mortgages and voting), I see little point in making the turnout figures even worse by inviting 16-year-olds to join an election party most of them won't want to attend.
I know there's a lot of enthusiasm for single issue politics and a lot wrong with mainstream representational politics whose job it is to knit the idealistic bits together and make policies that actually work in the real world.
But that sort of real politics makes a bigger effort to engage voters than the press, which has its own oligarchical agenda, routinely concedes. In the mix there's also a lot wrong with voter attitudes and with the civic irresponsibility of the media, which nurtures public disdain day in and out.
At the very least we should have a nationwide debate before casually conceding an important point in an effort to appease – or outfox – the SNP. Besides, the record suggests that fiddling the franchise often rebounds on the fiddlers, as it did when Harold Wilson lowered the vote from 21 to 18 in 1970. Serves him right.