Votes at 16 gave politicians the chance to show they are down with the kids

Never work with children or politicians.

Whether it is a 14-year-old asking Nick Clegg to execute Katie Hopkins, or a toddler losing the will to live during a photo appearance with David Cameron, politicians always take a risk in dealing with young people.

The trouble is, with the debate over lowering the voting age back on the agenda, they have little choice.

First, the Scottish Parliament pushed through plans to give 16 and 17-year-olds the vote in Scottish national and local elections.

RELATED CONTENT

Parliamentary sketch: Jacob Rees-Mogg, John Bercow, and a game of musical chairs

Election sketch: How politics broke its promise

David Cameron’s new fight against extremism

Introducing the vote, John Swinney said: “The bill builds on the outstanding success of the participation of 16 and 17-year-olds in the referendum. It extends that opportunity to elections under this Parliament’s control, which will give younger people a stronger stake in our democracy.”

John Pentland followed to highlight the inconsistencies in the way 16 and 17-year-olds are treated. He said: “They can join the army, they can get married, they can work full time, and they can even fly a glider, so it is absurd to exclude 16 and 17-year-olds from voting.”

Now, as arguments for getting the vote go, “no tax without representation” is probably more common than Pentland’s “no gliders without representation” approach. How often do 17-year-olds rent gliders? And when did that become the measure of responsibility?

But then, who knows. Maybe Pentland knows something we don’t. Have we really lost touch with youth so much that, believing them to be hanging around outside shopping centres messing around on smart phones, they are in fact patrolling the air in swarms of gliders?

Depending on how high they are gliding we wouldn’t even know. They could be up there right now, watching us voting from above with envious eyes, slowly and surely drawing their plans against us.

So while young people cheered the Scottish Government plans – largely from hundreds of feet up in the sky – there does remain some opposition on the ground, largely from those concerned that giving 16 and 17-year-olds the vote would risk recognising them as people.

And teenagers can, of course, be ill-informed. But the question should be whether they are any less informed than anyone else.

Try this test. Pick a teenager at random and they may know little about politics, but pick an adult at random and they could turn out to be Boris Johnson. And if dozing off during debates was a problem in politics there would be no House of Lords.

But while the vote moved forward in the Scottish Parliament, attempts to convince the UK Government to lower the voting age in the EU referendum appear to have stalled.

One obstacle is the idea under-18s would not have enough life experience to make an informed decision on politics. There would be a real danger they would be too jacked up on legal highs (now illegal legal highs) to know what Cameron means when he claims “the vast majority of people who are setting off into the Mediterranean are not asylum seekers, but people seeking a better life.”

Though at least watching from an aerial position they would be aware of the problem.

Eurosceptic John Redwood, meanwhile, opposed the idea on the basis that young people are not interested in politics, describing politically engaged 16 and 17-year-olds as “another myth put about by pro-Europeans”.

The mythical argument is certainly a bold one. After all, it is one thing to label an animal no one has ever seen as mythical, and another to say it about a group which is actively lobbying you to widen suffrage.

Can unicorns rent gliders? These are the questions.

But if young people were not politically motivated to take control over decisions away from politicians like Redwood before hearing that sort of reasoning, they probably will be afterwards.

Campaigners could learn from this. Instead of collecting signatures and pointing to the countless examples when widening participation in democracy turned out to be really quite a good thing, just send John Redwood around the country to explain to young people how they are like Bigfoot.

And while 17-year-olds will not be able to vote because they do not have enough experience of the issue, EU citizens in the UK will also be banned, presumably for having too much.

You will really need a very specific level of experience in order to participate.

And the SNP, Labour, Greens and Lib Dems are not happy. Angus Robertson, writing in The Guardian, said: “David Cameron has a responsibility to help ensure it can be an enriching and open debate.”

Allowing 16 and 17-year-olds to vote should be part of that, he said, because, “Young people are our future.”

This is a nice sentiment, but if young people are the future, why would we let them vote in the present? That is probably more of an argument against the vote than for it, given it would create all sorts of time-travel issues.

Also, unless time is not linear, surely it would mean voting twice, once in the future and once in the present? It is all very tense.

Robertson may be good on constitutional issues, but he’s clearly never seen Back to the Future.

But it doesn’t matter anyway, because young people don’t travel in time. They travel in gliders.