"I don't agree with giving 16/17 year olds the vote. Some of them are level-headed, but have little experience of life. They will still be guided by their teachers."


Well now, let's take a little look at this. Nigel, a Tory, doesn't want 16-year-olds to vote and gives us a vacuous reason as to why not. The real reason that Tories like Nigel don't want 16-year-olds to vote is that they know that 16-year-olds on the whole are very unlikely to vote Tory (what's more, they're far more likely to be remainers). Not only that, but they'd vote in droves because of the sheer novelty of just having been accorded the privilege. Dig into any Tory's expressed viewpoint and you will find self-interest at the core of it. Nigel feels uneasy that 16-year-olds will be under the influence of teachers. Presumably, Nigel thinks that teachers, on the whole, are a scruffy bunch of rabid leftie revolutionaries. So he doesn't trust their influence. Yet he has nothing to say about the influence on voters of the gutter mass media, four-fifths of whom are virulently anti-Corbyn, who routinely reproduce Boris's lies and who routinely mangle news and right-wing sentiment together to propagandise. Well I ask you, who do trust more to have useful and honest influence, the Sun/Daily Mail (try Richard Littlejohn some time), or a body of qualified, professional, carefully-selected teachers who are subjected to constant appraisal?

There's definitely a debate to be had about what the voting age should be. Personally, I'm in favour of lowering it, but I sort of agreed that trying to bring it in yesterday would have appeared to be vexatious. What I vehemently disagree with is that EU citizens who live, work and pay taxes here shouldn't be allowed the vote. That's an outrageous injustice in m'humble and I would have liked to see that one discussed. Had it been a successful amendment it would have severely delayed the election, but in my view that would have been justified. Again, of course, one expects that most of the 3.4 million would not be Tory voters...