Researcher Blogs

In the context of declining voter turnout in recent UK elections, the notion of increasing the franchise to those aged 16 and 17 has gained prominence. Notable voices prosecuting this agenda include Julie Morgan MP – through her Voting Age Reduction Bill, presented to Parliament in December 2007 – and the Votes at 16 campaign (http://www.votesat16.org.uk/).

However, there are several overriding flaws with the argument to reduce the voting age.

‘Different rights at different ages’

Votes at 16 argue that the law on responsibilities allocated to young people is inconsistent – in short, if 16 and 17 year olds can get married, join the armed forces, and drive a car, why can’t they vote?

However, as Philip Cowley and David Denver have argued, ultimately the inconsistency thesis still fails on a fundamental level. This is because “there is no inconsistency in arguing that different ages should apply to different spheres of activity, given that there is no logical connection between them.” In other words the right and ability to drive has no logical connection to one’s right to vote. Therefore there is no need to decide on a uniform age at which both rights can be accrued simultaneously.

‘Vote early vote often – not a solution’

Campaigners who favour a reduction in voting age stress that those who vote at a younger age are more inclined to continue to vote throughout their lives. They argue that those who are able to vote in a General Election for the first time aged 18 are more likely to vote repeatedly throughout their lives than those a year younger who fall victim to the ‘birthday lottery’ and must wait until they are 21 or even 22 to vote for the first time.

The problem is that, to quote Disraeli, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.” This is not of course to say that no statistical evidence can be used effectively, but rather that these figures are disputed amongst academics. For example, Cowley and Denver have noted that the ‘birthday lottery’ data is problematic given that it is reliant on a respondent’s ability to successfully recall whether they voted in elections over 10 years previously. It is therefore difficult at present to construct a water-tight case for the ‘vote early, vote often’ theory.

‘16 year olds are not the heirs to the suffragettes’

The UK Youth Parliament (UKYP) enlist the legacy of the suffragettes when arguing for the extension of the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds. UKYP stress that “the arguments put forward for denying 16 and 17 year olds the vote are the same as those put forward previously for denying women and working classes the right to vote.” (http://www.ukyouthparliament.org.uk/25167/16430.html).

However, the two situations are not comparable. Women would always be women and therefore, in the age of the suffragettes, would never have been allowed to vote. Comparatively, 16 and 17 year olds simply grow up and gain the franchise one or two years later. In short as a group they are not consigned to a lifetime of disenfranchisement.

It seems then that whilst one cannot argue that 16 and 17 year olds should never be allowed the vote, the case for extending the franchise has yet to be convincingly made.

If you’ve ever dropped spent chewing gum on the floor, don’t. It’s a filthy habit and cleaning up after your spearmint infused rejections is extremely costly.

You may ask why I am lecturing you on this point. Surely this isn’t a matter for people inside Westminster to pontificate on. Local authorities will doubtless find their own strategies for encouraging people to wrap it and bin it. Won’t they?

The Whitehall machine says no. At 6.23am this morning, as Russian troops made further incursions into South Ossetia, Her Majesty’s Government sent me a press release to explain that the Chewing Gum Action Group was firmly on the errant chewers’ case. The Group is supporting 15 local authorities with special posters and “assistance with wider activities designed to promote a behaviour change among gum litterers.” 29 local authorities had applied for this help but 14 of them hadn’t quite made the grade, so only 15 qualify “ to run individual month-long chewing gum litter awareness and education campaigns between August and November.”

What had the 14 also-rans done to deserve exclusion from the scheme? And just how dire is the chewing gum situation in Barking & Dagenham, Blackpool, Croydon (Business Improvement District), Cambridge, Doncaster, Enfield, Middlesbrough, Mole Valley, Nottingham, Borough of Poole, Rushmoor, Test Valley, Wigan, Wolverhampton and Worcester that they qualified for urgent central Government intervention?

In the first half of the twentieth century, local authorities in Britain were responsible for running great public utilities: sewage, gas and public transport. Today, they have to request a ring-fenced handout just to get a bit of chewing gum off the pavements. What next – the confetti task force, the opal fruit tsar, the snotty-tissue pathfinder scheme?

Never fear. Defra reassures editors in their notes that “local authorities that have not been selected for paid-for campaigns can still use campaign materials.” What a relief!

Alex Davies is Parliamentary Assistant to Lord Tyler

Westminster seemed to exhale last week, after a flurry of pre-recess activity stumbled to an end. Many of the researcher contingent were to be found absorbing the kind hospitality of ePolitix, and an almost equal number enjoying a hearty breakfast in the Terrace Cafeteria the following morning. This is the time in the recess when people profess lofty aspirations to start root and branch reform of the filing system, analyse apparently opaque parliamentary answers and start a raft of new campaigns. Yet in the first instance the palpable slowdown in the Westminster village seems infectious.

For most of us who work here, recess is not a holiday, but it is a break from the constant churn of life in Parliament; there’s rarely any coming in to a stack of emails which demand an immediate response, or any journalists beating a path to our doors for quotes and briefings. The real vacation, though, is for ministers – not from the business of government, but from scrutiny of it.

Though all the media guff is about who will take their bucket and spade to Southwold for their hols, and who’s selling out by daring to holiday abroad, the big story of the recess is that government continues, whether Parliament sits or not.

A quick look around government department websites reveals that all sorts of things are still happening: Ivan Lewis has appointed a new national director for learning disabilities; Kitty Ussher has appointed a new member of the Financial Services Authority; there is a new high commissioner of Zambia; one of the largest ever tri-service (Army, Navy and Air Force) military training exercises has taken place in preparation for another deployment to Helmand province; the Land Registry has announced that house prices have fallen; and the fire services have been awarded £80m of government funding for specialist emergency ‘resilience’ equipment.

That was all just on Monday. And on Tuesday, Harriet Harman announced major plans to reform murder laws. Whether the proposals are good or bad, it cannot be right that nothing from announcements about overnight bridgework at Pinxton, Derbyshire, (a release from the Highways Agency) to the costly collapse of the Doha trade round can be subject to proper parliamentary scrutiny until October.

Oh, and by the way, the prime minister’s premiership is teetering on the brink. Though it appears unlikely the Labour Party will organise its putsch with sufficient speed, he could in theory at least be replaced without Parliament so much as meeting.

Unusually for the House of Commons, this is not a flaw we endure simply because we always have. Robin Cook rightly instituted September sittings, and when I first worked in Parliament four years ago, MPs returned for two weeks prior to the party conferences. The sky didn’t fall in as traditionalists were given to suggest but there was an immense amount of grumbling by the Parliament-should-be-run-for-its-members brigade. Some MPs complained that the place was like a ‘building site’ in September because of annual works programmes. Perhaps they don’t appreciate that staff remain in the building among those works every year.

Jack Straw rightly introduced the opportunity to ask written questions in September, and MPs will doubtless take advantage, but that is simply no substitute for the rigorous scrutiny given to ministers on the floor of the House or in select committees.

From within, we know people here are still working, and that MPs may well be working harder in their constituencies than they would be here. But Parliament is its own worst enemy if it doesn’t realise that this lengthy recess feeds a corrosive (and inaccurate) public perception of politicians as lazy and self-serving.

For late July, August and September, ministers get to choose what to publicise and what not, what to promote in the media and what to bury. The public rightly expects Parliament to put a stop to all that by putting a spotlight on the government’s features and failings. A bit of sunshine should not deter us.

Alex Davies is parliamentary assistant to Liberal Democrat peer Lord Tyler

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Following last year’s success, ePolitix.com in association with the British Retail Consortium threw another end of term celebration for MPs’ staff on 22nd July. Held in the stunning Westminster Abbey Gardens, the scene was set for a sophisticated evening dedicated to those who work hard to support our elected representatives and their constituents.

Deputy Leader of the House, Helen Goodman MP, praised the efforts of researchers. She said the expenses row had perhaps led to a few misperceptions that working for an MP was equal to a life of luxury and in actual fact it is pretty jolly hard.

The hard work was over for another day at least and stories of packing off MPs to their constituency offices for the summer recess were absorbed by the warm evening air.

Thanks to all the sponsors, Cobra for the beer, perfectly iced-off, Diageo for the Pimms and trimmings, Penfolds for the Wine, the Wine and Spirit Trade Association and our partners the British Retail Consortium who all helped make the night possible.

We should also say thank you to the Canon of the Abbey for providing a location comparable even to the Commons terrace; not to mention a big thank you to everyone who came on the night. See you next year!

Sitting down to a Sunday roast recently, I felt ethically and environmentally virtuous - my British grown and harvested green beans being the epitome of environmentally friendly eating…or so I thought…

The goal of reducing the ‘food miles’ of the produce we eat is certainly a laudable one, but as an excellent recent article in the Observer warned, things are not always as simple as they seem.

Take for example the humble green beans from my roast dinner. The packaging assured me that this product had never been air-freighted anywhere – allowing me to cloak myself in the warming comfort that my small act of defiance would reap environmental dividends for our planet. But the extent to which a product is environmentally friendly cannot be based on the miles which those goods have travelled. Compare my British beans with Kenyan beans. The Kenyan produce has been flown in to the UK admittedly, yet it was sewn, nurtured and reaped in a far more environmentally friendly way – manually picked and avoiding oil-based fertilisers.

Moving on to desert…surely the hearty British apples in my apple crumble must be ethically and environmentally superior to their New Zeeland counterparts? Wrong again! As the BBC Food website’s helpful guide indicates, the British apple harvest runs from September to October, meaning my British apples have been chill stored, requiring large amounts of energy. This means that once a certain amounts of months have passed, it would be more environmentally friendly to eat newly picked apples flown in from New Zeeland.

All this indicates that, as DEFRA note “a single indicator based on total food kilometres is an inadequate measure of sustainability” (for the full report see: http://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/reports/foodmiles/execsumm.pdf).

This points to a wider message about fighting the urgently pressing threat of climate change – it must be done in an intelligent and considered way that at all costs avoids self-congratulatory token gestures. Only then can real progress be made.