Marriage at 18 complicates the case for votes at 16

The law is expected to be changed to raise the age of marriage from 16 to 18, while opposition parties want the voting age to go in the opposite direction, writes John Rentoul

The former home secretary could bring a bill to the Commons this week (BBC)

The government intends to change the law to raise the age of marriage from 16 to 18. This may be done through a private member’s bill to be brought in by Sajid Javid, the former home secretary, this week.

Javid argues that the current law, which allows children aged 16 and 17 to marry with their parents’ consent, allows them to be “pushed into such serious and life-changing commitments before they are ready”.

This is an important change, and widely supported, which also has consequences for other questions of how society defines adulthood. In particular, it complicates the argument for lowering the voting age to 16, which has already happened for elections to the Scottish parliament and the Welsh Senedd, and which is supported for UK elections by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.

Campaigners for votes at 16 will say that voting and marrying are different things, and there is no reason why the age should be the same for both. Which is fine, except that it has not been what they have argued for decades. One of the arguments for votes at 16 has been inconsistency: if you can get married at 16, fight for your country at 16 and pay taxes at 16, why can’t you vote at 16?

One by one, those arguments are falling away. Under-18s have not been allowed in combat roles in the armed forces for some time, while the school-leaving age has, in effect, been raised to 18 as all young people are expected to be in some form of education and training until that age.

Indeed, the social consensus on everything but voting is moving in the opposite direction. Only last week a group of MPs called for the age at which people are allowed to buy cigarettes to be raised from 18 to 21.

So the argument for lowering the voting age has to be why voting is different from all the other characteristics of adulthood, not why it is the same. That means some urgent rethinking and an emergency U-turn among its advocates.

No doubt the opposition parties can come up with new arguments – perhaps about the advantages of political education and the early inculcation of the habit of voting. But they will need to do so quickly, because otherwise they might leave the impression that they have been advocating votes at 16 simply because it would give them a political advantage.

After all, it never occurred to the Scottish National Party, when it added 16 and 17-year-olds to the franchise for the Scottish independence referendum, that young people were more likely to support independence, did it?

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator