The Age Of Brexit

Colin Brazier on Brexit and the youth vote:

Boris Johnson says he hasn’t seen anything like it since the weeks following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. There is, he wrote in The Daily Telegraph, a kind of “contagious mourning” in the air.

People who found themselves on the losing side in the EU referendum debate had succumbed to a kind of “hysteria”.

Whether you agree with
Mr Johnson or not, it does seem that the convulsion of defeat has prompted some observers to question — at a fundamental level — how our democracy works.

In particular, the idea that the young had their futures stolen by older voters, has gained widespread currency. Inter-generational conflict has, apparently, reached a deafening pitch. Children are not yet denouncing their parents in a Maoist attempt to eradicate the ancien regime, but there is a general grievance that the Leave vote was a baby-boomer stitch-up.

It began during the campaign itself. After a news channel interview with Lib Dem leader Tim Farron, I turned to my co-presenter and noted that he had come very close to asserting that a young vote was worth more than an old vote.

Now the campaign is over and that hint is a full-blown demand. The Guardian’s Shiv Malik, appearing on BBC Radio 4’s excellent Moral Maze, said the required remedy might be to give the young “one and a half votes”. This tilting of the franchise was necessary, he said, in a world where long-term decisions — like Brexit — had the longest effect on the young.

Will the next Conservative leader take any notice of these demands? The outgoing PM has made it clear he does not support — as the SNP does — lowering the voting age to 16. Tapering votes to curb the power of older voters is unthinkable for a Government which has courted them with generous pensions and a range of benefits which are not means-tested.

However, some Tories are deeply troubled by the current demographic settlement. In his 2010 book The Pinch, David ‘Two-Brains’ Willetts, wondered if social cohesion would suffer because of inter-generational unfairness. The arguments are now well-worn. Anyone over 50 enjoyed cheap housing and higher education, effectively cross-subsidised by those lower down the age distribution.

But another Tory MP, Jesse Norman, offers another way of looking at the relationship between age and entitlement, in his 2013 book about the great Anglo-Irish political theorist Edmund Burke. 

Norman explored Burke’s idea that politics is a contract between the past, present and future generations. In Willetts’ world, the old have a duty to the young — in their lifetime. In Burke’s view, that responsibility extends to the dead and the unborn.

Whose analysis might help us find a path to generational fairness? I would argue that both do. There is, as Willetts contends, a prime facie case that lies behind the current indignation about inter-generational unfairness. But any solution

must include a nod to the Burkean tradition that no-one group — the young, for instance — can monopolise the franchise.

That is a new idea in itself. For millennia, societies worked on the basis that with age came wisdom. Decisions fell to those who had experience, and experience was hard won.

The key lesson of gerontology is that living to a ripe old age took strength and good fortune. To be aged was to be lucky — and scarce. Now it is normal and it is the young who are, increasingly, in short supply.

So, at least until the demographics stabilise, we have to game the system, tinker with the franchise so the interests of the young generation (and unborn generations) are not overlooked. And yet this must be done in a way that does not reverse the fundamental notion that experience yields sagacity. The old cannot be punished simply by dint of being older.

One potential answer is to remove all age-related exclusions on the franchise. Give everyone — including children — the vote. But vest it in the hands of those who have, speaking generally, demonstrably proven they care about the next generation.

Parents.

All children under the age of 18 would get the ballot — to be exercised by a parent or guardian. If those parents held different political views (not unknown in the EU referendum and certainly in many other elections) then they would lose their proxy status and the child’s vote would be voided.

We are accustomed to the state acting in loco parentis. It’s a satisfying — if improbable — idea that parents might play a fuller role as guardians of the state.