TOM UTLEY: What will teenagers vote for in Scottish Parliament?

TOM UTLEY: What will teenagers vote for in Scottish Parliament? A ban on all lessons before lunchtime?

As we waited yesterday morning for our train — which arrived miraculously on time, despite the best efforts of Mick ‘the Grinch’ Lynch and his RMT to spoil everyone’s Christmas — commuters at my local station were treated to a long and helpful announcement over the platform loudspeakers.  

During the current spell of freezing weather, we were told, a substance known as ice was liable to form on station platforms (I’m paraphrasing, because my fingers were too numb with cold to take a shorthand note). 

Now, the thing to remember about ice, apparently — or so the recorded voice informed us — is that it can be slippery underfoot. We were therefore urged to take particular care when walking, lest we should lose our footing. 

Well, who would have thought it? I’d been wondering why my feet had kept slipping on the pavement on my way down the hill to the station, and now I had the answer. I pass on this information as a service to those of you who may have missed this or the countless similar announcements all over the land. 

The Scottish Government has suggested that children themselves should be allowed to make the laws that govern the rest of us (file image)

But that’s enough leaden irony from me. We’ve all grown so used to being infantilised in this way that most of us merely roll our eyes, grit our teeth and sigh when we’re advised to wear extra layers of clothing and shut the windows to keep warm; switch off appliances and turn down the heating to save energy; or carry water to drink when the weather is blisteringly hot. 

To be fair to Network Rail, which is responsible for maintaining stations, no doubt it feels obliged by fatuous health and safety laws to issue these nannying warnings about the dangers of ice, so as to weaken any claims for compensation by customers careless or unlucky enough to fall over on their platforms. Politicians must therefore accept much of the blame. 

But not content with English MPs’ habit of passing laws that treat us all like children, the Scottish Government has now gone one step further, suggesting that children themselves should be allowed to make the laws that govern the rest of us. 

I’m thinking of this week’s consultation document, issued by Nicola Sturgeon’s administration, which proposes that the minimum age of candidates for Holyrood elections should be cut from 18 to 16 — younger than the qualifying age for membership of a national parliament anywhere else in the world.

The idea, we’re told, is to honour a pledge in the SNP-Green coalition agreement to ‘promote active participation in elections by under-represented groups’. 

The document also suggests that asylum-seekers should be permitted to stand for the Scottish Parliament, although it acknowledges that this might mean costly by-elections if successful candidates are subsequently deported. The document is frank, too, about some of the difficulties that might arise from allowing teenagers, not yet fully grown, to sit as MSPs or even government ministers. Not unreasonably, it points out that membership of the parliament, which sits from 2.30pm on Mondays until 12.30pm on Fridays, could disrupt a successful candidate’s education.

(‘Sorry, miss, I’ll have to miss double maths this afternoon, because I have to vote on the Mandatory Registration of External Defibrillators (Scotland) Bill . . . Oh, and please, miss, what’s an external defibrillator?’)

The document also raises concerns that vulnerable young people might have to stay in Edinburgh hotels during the week, away from their parents, if their homes happen to be beyond commuting distance from Holyrood.

Call me an old curmudgeon, if you must, but I would have thought the very idea that MSPs might still need their mummies and daddies to look after them would suggest they’re probably not mature enough to pass laws for their parents to obey.

Yet George Adam, the SNP’s parliamentary business minister, appears to have few such qualms. Though he admits that lowering the qualifying age for Holyrood would be ‘controversial’, he writes in his introduction to the consultation: ‘A robust electoral system is fundamental to the success of Scotland being an inclusive and vibrant democracy that makes everyone feel included.’

I note, by the way, that while the Nationalists’ urge to be inclusive may embrace asylum-seekers from all over the world, it doesn’t extend as far as my Scottish-born wife who, like so many of her fellow Scots now living in England, would dearly like a say in any future referendum on the Union that means so much to her.

As for 16-year-old MSPs, I’ve been wondering what laws they might wish to pass if they were admitted to Holyrood.

I suppose possibilities might include lowering the legal minimum age for all sorts of other activities, such as drinking alcohol in pubs, driving on public roads, gambling and watching pornographic films (though nowadays there can’t be many teenagers who have never seen one).

Meanwhile, wags at my local suggest teenage MSPs might want to make school lessons optional before lunchtime, so as to give them time to drag themselves out of bed.

They also predict parliamentary debates might descend into monosyllabic grunting from the boys, or shrieks from the girls of: ‘I’m, like, OMG, that’s so unfair!!!!’

But I’m not so sure. I reckon the sort of teenagers who might be attracted by the idea of standing for parliament would be not at all typical of their generation.

I suspect they’d be highly articulate and serious-minded (plenty such teenagers exist; think of the young Greta Thunberg, or those teachers’ pets who always won the school debating competition, and you’ll understand the type I have in mind).

No, my fear is not that they would behave frivolously, but rather that their complete inexperience of the pressures of adult life — earning a wage, managing a family budget, paying taxes, etc — would make them wholly unqualified to grasp the full implications of the laws they would be called upon to judge.

If everything in their past has been provided for them by good old mum and dad — from the food they eat and the clothes they wear, to holidays and pocket money — how can they be expected fully to understand the plight of those who have to foot the bill for politicians’ Utopian schemes?

Indeed, it’s no wonder that the Greens, in particular — with their fantastically expensive dreams of a carbon-free economy — are dead keen on offering parliamentary seats to the very young. After all, children these days are bombarded with environmentalist propaganda at school, where they are taught not so much how to think, which used to be considered the point of education, as what to think.

Catch them before they have to pay those green taxes, and it’s no wonder if they see the issue as one-sided.

Of course, you may argue that plenty of politicians of all parties, north and south of the border, appear to believe in a magic money tree — a belief that was reinforced by the Westminster Government’s wild profligacy with borrowed cash during the pandemic.

I like to think, however, that the markets’ reaction to Kwasi Kwarteng’s ill-fated mini-budget may have begun to convince the few adults among them that if such a tree ever existed, its branches have long since been stripped bare.

Now, more than ever since the nightmare years of the 1970s, the UK is crying out for grown-up legislators with the experience of real life necessary to make grown-up decisions. In short, the sort of people who know that ice can be slippery, excess regulation stifles growth and debt can lead to bankruptcy, without any need of recorded announcements to tell them so.  

Aren’t these, rather than schoolchildren the under-represented group whose services every parliament and local authority in the country most urgently needs?

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