Rubbish. It was in the manifesto and the bill will go through Parliament. It WILL happen but not just because Starmer says so. It's long established Parliamentary procedure. Which rabbit hole have you been down?
If they'd had the vote in the 2016 we might have avoided the last 9 years of fruitless Brexit bitterness.
This. I also think there's a benefit in incentivising parties to pay more attention to the interests of the younger demographic, which tend to be easily overlooked.
The youngsters are far more switched on to global warming and net zero, and rightly so. Which will definitely be a problem for Deform and the Conservatives who still advocate fossil fuels
I agree....on one of our social media pages it's clear a lot of those banging the drum for Reform are young.
Cymru (Senedd) - 16-17 year olds have been able to vote since 2020 - but not allowed to vote for Westminster MP's. Don't think we should consider how 16-17 year olds would vote before deciding if its a good idea to enfranchise them. They should have the vote.
Possibly, but then no more so than the Tories were doing when they introduced id criteria for elections but failed to allow comprehensive id's where those ids belonged to younger voters. Rees-Mogg admitted as much if you look it up. So, yes, there may be an attempt to manipulate votes but the Tories have done it themselves. Nothing wrong with slagging Labour off but be honest with yourself and slag the Tories off too.
It's quite simple if you're old enough to work and pay taxes you're old enough to help decide who gets to spend those taxes and what it's spent on.
I'm really torn by this. I'm really for 16 and 17 year olds having rhe vote and people engaging with politics from a younger age. But on the other hand its pretty blatant gerrymandering, partixularly when its gone so quiet on PR now that it would work in the oppositions favour.
According to an ITV poll last night: 33% would vote Labour 20% Reform UK 18% Greens 12% Liberal Democrats 10% Conservatives
I think the fact that it was a manifesto pledge has to be considered to be at the very least mitigation. I appreciate that these things all get wrapped up in a huge bundle of other policies, but it's not an entirely unreasonable argument that people voted for it.
It would only be gerrymandering if they were also to be lowering the maximum age to get rid of the reform voting pensioner generation.