Anthony Wells links to a rather good site warning against a further lowering of the voting age. Phil Cowley of Votes for Adults agrees with almost the whole of the world that sixteen is too young an age for people to be voting, and in one short pdf document effectively scrutinises the arguments offered in favour, most of which have superficial appeal but make less and less sense the more they are examined.

The most common is the glib "If you can get married at 16, join the army at 16 ... then why can't you vote", which falls apart under the most cursory examination. Only in Gretna Green, Scotland can one marry before 18 without parental consent, and just a fraction of one per cent of under-18s do marry. Equally, military training in the army begins at 16, but that is to prepare people for combat at the age of 18. While they are given fitness training and taught how to operate as a combat unit, 16 year old boys and girls are not sent to Basra or Londonderry to keep the peace. Every example given applies to a small minority of under-18s, and all seem to be prone to exceptional circumstances that actually prove that the law already recognises a distinct difference between the responsibilities of 16- and 18-year olds in these areas, too.

And as Phil further notes, there is nothing at all odd about setting different ages for different things.

There is nothing inherently illogical in setting different qualifying ages for different things and just because some rights are acquired at 16 (like the right to have consensual sex) this does not necessarily imply that an unrelated right (like that to vote) should also be granted at the same age. Rather than ask ourselves at what age people should acquire a package of rights and responsibilities we should ask what would be the appropriate age for the activity concerned. In that case, it is perfectly understandable that different ages would apply in different areas.

Exactly. Asking rhetorically "If I can leave school at 16, why can't I vote?" as if it is some sort of trump card is no more an argument-winner than "If I can do a paper-round at 13, why can't I pilot a helicopter?". You can't for the obvious reason that different tasks and responsibilities require different levels of maturity and skill.

Perhaps the overwhelming case as far as I am concerned is the rather politically incorrect one made in different ways by two thoughtful lefties, Richard Dawkins and Oliver Kamm: the typical young mind is just not as well equipped to consider political questions properly. Dawkins delves into the scientific support for this, but Oliver Kamm's less technical reasons ought to ring so many bells of recognition.

Not all the things we value - liberty, equity, solidarity, security - are compatible with each other. In economics - and self-evident though it sounds, the principle is rarely acknowledged in discussions of public policy - scarcity is an inherent part of the human condition. Devoting revenues from taxpayers (for government has no money of its own) to environmental protection means the same money can't be devoted to school textbooks. We therefore, in politics and economics, make trade-offs.

Children don't have the conceptual equipment to grasp this. They want only good things; it would be unnatural if they didn't. Children who imagine that's a political stance, however, ought not to be flattered. They want peace, and don't see that war to overthrow a bellicose tyrant is sometimes preferable. They want forgiveness of Third World debt, and don't see that developing countries' cost of capital would thereby rise and damage the living standards of the poor. They want to protect the Earth, and don't see that global controls on pollution make it harder for the Third World to lift itself out of poverty, or that environmental protection is a preference, to be assessed in terms of its benefits and costs relative to other public goods, and not a moral imperative.

... Talk to a child who is politically engaged, and you'll find an unbounded belief in the capacity of government to effect any change, resolve any conflict and produce any amount of money (which in the last case is, I suppose, literally true if you're concerned only with nominal values rather than inflation-adjusted ones).

Of course, this all depends at what age level one defines a child. My own experience suggests we are if anything already too generous on this point. In my university class last year, I sat and listened to a debate on tuition and top-up fees and heard a discussion that followed uncannily just the line of thinking described above. The proper question - given that university lecturers demand a salary and classroom equipment must be purchased, who ought to pay the cost? - was replaced by an unthinking assertion of government's ability to provide 'free' education and of the tight-fistedness of those in office who choose not to. Government was not an imperfect arbiter between competing claims but some sort of Scrooge-like hoarder, refusing to give any of its money to obviously worthy causes. All of these people were students of politics, and all of them were of voting age, but their attitudes are typical on every campus in the country - if not the world.

Young people have a natural disposition towards extremism and utopian nonsense, a point demonstrated by teenagers at every left-wing demonstration assuring you that England's communist revolution is just around the corner, and by the foul fervency of those revolutionary students in 1930s Germany and 1960s America who wrecked campus libraries by burning book after book that they were too bigoted to read. In democratic, electoral politics, it is this separation from prosaic reality that motivates the disproportionate support from young people for those parties whose mindsets are, to put it politely, somewhat less in tune with political facts - the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the SNP et al. Unsurprisingly, as Phil Cowley notes, it is these same parties who most seek to lower the voting age once again. But to do so will only chip away further at whatever remains of the mature and responsible politics of difficult choices and the recognition that governments are limited in their fallibility and potency.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Thursday, April 08, 2004
 

America's Simon Jenkins?

I've written in the past of Pat Buchanan's odd attitude to trade and protectionism. It's an area he returns to in the latest American Conservative.

Indeed, if the issue is jobs, Republicans ought to be thrown out. For not only are they not creating them, they have no idea how to stop exporting them.

His timing was very poor.

The [US] economy added 308,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department estimated, pulling out of a pattern of tepid employment growth to clock the largest number of new jobs in a single month since April 2000.

Unfortunately for Buchanan, and fortunately for America, the Republicans are not yet listening to him on this issue.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Wednesday, April 07, 2004
 

Bloggers illustrate a timeless difference

Natalie Solent has joined the latest Google-bombing campaign. Apparently an anti-Semitic site is currently the first to appear when anyone Googles the word 'Jew', so many bloggers are linking to the word with a more neutral page in its place. What is interesting is that this campaign has been going on some time, and Natalie is the first person I have seen to do her bit who is not firmly of the left. No doubt my decidedly provincial choice of political blogs has given me a somewhat skewered picture, but I do believe this is just the sort of thing for which the left seems to have a greater affinity, a point just reflected in the dominance they have had over the campaign so far. They really are better at wearing the ribbons and badges, chanting the slogans and marching on the demonstrations.

Of course, the reasons for this are themselves as open to political controversy as anything else. If you're of the left, it's obviously because lefties really are more concerned for their fellow man: more selfless, more generous, more thoughtful and more willing to do their bit for a good cause and help out however they can. If you're right-leaning, it's because the left has always excelled at futile gestures and misplaced generalised concern, ever-willing to sign petitions about the Middle East and boycott African foods even as nearby communities collapse, submerged in the crime to which these same liberals are at best indifferent.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Tuesday, April 06, 2004
 

REVIEW: The Great Speeches - Margaret Thatcher

When it was announced that a three-CD set of Margaret Thatcher's speeches was to be released, a number of bloggers linked to me, noting how much I would want it. Of course, they were right, and I bought a copy as soon as I found out I hadn't won the Guardian Backbencher competition with it as the prize. You can do the same from Amazon or Politicos.

A set of speeches is a difficult thing to review, except generally. Certainly, it's a comprehensive set, spanning forty years of the subject's life and lasting three and a half hours. The first CD has short clips, ranging from thirty seconds to seven minutes, the second mostly longer speeches - including quarter-hour extracts from her 1989 and 1990 addresses to the Conservative Party Conference - and the third her fantastic thirty-three minute response to the motion of confidence leveled at her government on the day she resigned, a speech to the Falklanders shortly after the war ended - exclusive to the CD - and a few other little bits. You can read the full list of fifty-five clips at the Politicos site.

The collection is enjoyable, and one can learn a fair bit about Thatcher herself, recent British political history, and oratory generally from listening. There are some great moments, most of all her off-the-cuff comments. When her speech to the 1980 Conservative Party Conference is interrupted by rowdy protestors, she fires back, to the delight of the audience: "Never mind, it's wet outside - I expect they wanted to come in. You can't blame them: it's always better where the Tories are!". My favourite clip was from an April 1983 statement on inflation to the House of Commons, when the ridiculous Denis Healey heckled that her suspected plans for a June election in fact proved a desire to 'cut and run'. "Oh, the Right Honourable Gentleman is afraid of an election is he? Really?", Thatcher shouts back with such force. "Fraid, frightened, frit! Couldn't take it! Couldn't stand it! Oh-ho, if I was going to cut and run I'd have gone after the Falklands. Frightened! Frightened! Inflation is lower than it has been for thirteen years; a record the Right Honourable Gentleman couldn't begin to touch." The first few times I listened to this I sat literally open-mouthed at her beautiful aggression.

Other moments are also revealing. The first two clips are from 1961, and listening to them before any from her time in office shows amongst other things just how much difference was made by Mrs Thatcher heeding her advisors' suggestion that she lower her voice. In the second she could almost be impersonating the Queen. The 1988 Bruges Speech, meanwhile, was so nuanced, moderate and sensible that it is almost unbelievable that it caused such a fuss or that it marked the moment when over a decade of Tory divisions on Europe began. Certainly a good three-quarters of the British public would now consider it simply the purest common sense.

The aforementioned speech to the Falkland Islanders was delivered in January 1983. Its eleven minutes are also a real treat. As she details her experiences of the war, her relief as St Georgia and then Port Stanley were taken - the former the first absolute assurance the Falklanders had that we were actually coming - the warmth of her audience and their instinctive feel for her almost Churchillian rhetoric reminds one that there were out in the South Atlantic real people, real British people, who would have been deprived of their Britishness and their liberty had the right person at the right time not shown the courage and resolve that she did.

Her 1989 Conference Address, in which she rejoices at the death of socialism in Eastern Europe, has a distinctly modern ring to it:

Imagine a Labour canvasser talking on the doorstep to those East German families when they settled in on freedom's side of the wall. "You want to keep more of the money you earn? I'm afraid that's very selfish. We shall want to tax that away. You want to earn shares in your firm? We can't have that. The state has to own your firm. You want to choose where to send your children to school? That's very divisive. You'll send your child where we tell you."

Save the reference to nationalisation, these same issues are the battlelines of British politics today, fifteen years later, and the parties take just the same positions. If this causes one to realise what an utter waste non-Thatcherite governments are, it does at least serve as a reminder that the Tories of today do now offer what she did then. Let us please continue to do so.

In a word: unmissable.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Monday, April 05, 2004
 

Leave 'granny leave' out of our legislation

So soon after introducing so much regulation in the way of maternity and even paternity leave, the iciest woman in the Cabinet is on her latest venture to make life easier for those who just don't feel like turning up to work.

Patricia Hewitt, the trade and industry secretary, will today float the idea of "granny leave" for employees who want to work fewer hours so that they can look after their parents.

Well, elderly parents do sometimes need looking after, but one wonders why it must be in work hours, and why it must be our ever more regulated and over-burdened employers who have to be forced to pay.

I am reminded of a subtle point Theodore Dalrymple (or perhaps Roger Scruton) made about the right balance of freedom and responsibilities. That if one feels it to be an important part of one's identity to wear a nose-ring all the time, that is fine - as long as you don't then expect to work behind the counter in a bank. But in this modern age we have evolved the curious idea that one has a 'right' to do these things without any negative consequences, that choosing instead the presentable girl to work in a bank is unjust discrimination.

Similarly, it seems we have now come to the conclusion that one's family responsibilities should be something not to fit one's life around, but a perfectly acceptable burden to impose on one's employer. If you need to pop to see your mother before lunch, then it's your employer who needs to work out how to cope with it, not you. Rather than you consider looking for work that begins later in the day, or permits periodic breaks, he has to look for someone else to fill in for you - while paying you both, of course. Who is he to say any different? Look after your mother? Well, it's your right!

This culture isn't only bad for businesses, and especially small businesses. First of all it must be said that this is the wrong attitude to take to one's family. A truly pro-family attitude is that one's children and others come first and that work is something to fit around that. The reverse attitude - that work is central to life and family responsibilities should be met by time squeezed from one's employer - is a very different thing. I've had people who were far from touchy-feely types tell me that they really feel they have gained from having their mother around for them in their early years, so if a mother wants to stay at home to raise her children up to school age and perhaps beyond, she has my very keen support, and in the proper family environment her husband will be able to support this arrangement by going on working as normal. But this is a commitment for a mother to make, not an employer. If looking after your loved ones comes second to your job, then it's you and not your employer who ought to adjust.

Second, one cannot help but feel that such workers' benefits are being bought more and more without a thought for economic circumstances. Like a late 1990s dotcom millionaire pondering which yacht to purchase, we impose these regulations with a mindset rather isolated from prosaic economic reality by the fairly strong growth in Britain's economy since we left the ERM. It's all very well to make employing people more of a hassle, more of a burden and much more expensive at a time like this. But we will see the true fruits of such policies if and when the economy enters a downturn. I believe it was Patricia Hewitt herself who recently warned her party conference of the dangers of following the European economic model - making things wonderfully cushy and easy for employees but as a result ensuring that those who lose their jobs find it so very difficult to get another. She was right then, and she is wrong now: the United States created more jobs in January 1999 than high-tax, high-regulation mainland Europe did in the whole of the 1990s. It's something she should have kept at the back of her mind when she was considering all the red tape she has thus far imposed on business, and something that should motivate her to dump this 'granny leave' proposal now.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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Friday, April 02, 2004
 

Providers, not parasites

ASI Blog has two good pieces on the merits of speculators and ticket touts, economic actors who are widely disparaged but who, as is shown, provide an invaluable service.

All such people do is to buy commodities in the expectation that they will fetch a higher price later. Speculation means thinking ahead to what will be demanded in the future and buying it in the hope of making a profit by providing it for people then. Touting means tickets are allocated not based entirely on who can phone a hotline fastest, but in accordance with the willingness of people to pay to attend the event in question.

If you think it is wrong that some people can make money by perceiving people's wants and needs and then meeting them, your objection is less to speculation than to the profit motive itself. And if you think it is wrong that tickets should be allocated according to people's wish to attend an event - expressed in their willingness to pay more - then your objection is less to ticket touts than to the price mechanism.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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The political pertinence of personal preference

Over at England's Sword, I ask whether moral choices and personal responsibility can be considered separately from politics:

What social conservatives recognise is that culture cannot possibly be divided from the political circumstances of a country in this way, that its impact is if anything greater than that of legislation. For a cultural conservative, the history and traditions of a country are what define the circumstances in which all political choices and all political decisions are exercised. We reject absolutely the ahistorical and ultra-rationalist belief that one can impose a set of political arrangements on any people at any point in time, and if they are at all workable then they will work irrespective of the cultural backdrop. That is why it is imperative for anyone who cares about politics also to care about culture and worry about the direction in which a society is headed.

Posted by Peter Cuthbertson | Permanent Link |

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