Article

Character

Comment

Mental Health

Politics

4 August 2025

4 min read

Why reducing the voting age is a mistake

Adolescence should be a safe space to be a bit daft

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A band and audience are back lit against a stage.

Let it out.

Kylie Paz on Unsplash

The haunting book of Ecclesiastes carries these memorable words:

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to weep, and a time to laugh

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak

They came to mind recently when reading of the UK government’s plan to reduce the minimum voting age to 16. Now I understand why this government might want to do this. Lowering the voting age has proved popular in other places such as Scotland. Some well brought up 16-year-olds are mature beyond their years, show an interest in politics, and are smart, articulate people. And, of course, younger people tend to be more inclined to vote for left-leaning parties like Labour. It makes electoral sense.

But does it make generational sense?

Adolescence is a time when we try out being grown-up for a while. Mid-teenagers are no longer children, but they are not yet fully adult. They are in the process of spreading their wings, most of them still at school, living at home under their parents’ roofs, not yet fully responsible for their own time, income, life choices and so on. They can’t legally buy alcohol, fireworks or drive a car. Yet they can buy a pet or a lottery ticket. It’s a kind of middling time, not one thing nor the other.

And rightly so. Adolescence is a time for a certain controlled irresponsibility. We all look back with embarrassment on things we did in our teenage years. A few years ago, I watched a cricketer called Ollie Robinson make his debut for England at Lords. The best day of his life turned into the worst when some journalist desperate for a story dug up some semi-racist tweets he had posted several years before as a teenager. Some say he has never recovered, as he struggled with the media attention into his life, and has not played international cricket for over two years. We all said stupid things when we were 16 and that should be expected and forgiven as what they were – immature posturing, attempts to work out who we are in the big world, testing the water of the adult world before we dive in. Adolescence should be a safe space to be a bit daft, to get some things wrong and some things right. Hopefully we learn from our mistakes and our successes and grow up a bit through them.

The attempt to make 16-years olds politically responsible seems to encroach upon that safe space. It risks skewing an important stage of growing up. And this seems to be a modern trend.

Teenage years are a vital period enabling us to grow into mature adults, learning to become responsible over time.

In the past, 21 was the age when people legally became adults, being given the ‘key to the door’, trusted to come in and out of the house independently of parents. Yet that has shifted within living memory. The legal age of adulthood was reduced to 18 in 1969.

Jonathan Haidt recently complained that we are seeing “the complete rewiring of childhood.” The childhood of mammals, he claimed, involves rough and tumble play, chasing games, activities that develop adult skills. In recent times, he says, we have put into the pockets of children and young teenagers, a video arcade, a porn theatre, a gambling casino, and access to every TV station. The result of indiscriminate access to smartphones has been the loss of what we recognise as childhood and its replacement by gazing at screens all day long.

This shift to the voting age is also part of the drift to politicise everything. Everything becomes political, from your artistic tastes, to gender differences, to the food you eat, to family relationships. If politics is everything then surely everyone affected by it must vote? Yet politics has its limits. Politicians can only do so much. They can try to fix the economy, close loopholes that let harmful behaviour flourish, organise life a little better for most of us. They cannot fix the human heart, get us to love our neighbours or teach us gratitude, humility, faith, or what to worship – the most important choice of our lives.

Not everything is political, but everything is spiritual. Everything moulds us in some way, shaping us into the people we become over time, like plasticene in the hands of a child. Teenage years are a vital period enabling us to grow into mature adults, learning to become responsible over time, being given leeway to develop our moral senses and to work out our opinions as we encounter the wider world.

There is indeed a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to choose, and a time to play; a time to be an adult and a time to be child. Perhaps we should respect the times and seasons of life a little better, letting teenagers be teenagers and not expecting them to become adult too quickly. Most will hopefully have many years to vote if they live long healthy lives. The distinctions of time and the delicate, slow process of maturity need to be respected. We erode them at our peril.

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Article

Comment

Justice

Trauma

10 February 2025

4 min read

Can life go on after wicked acts of violence?

We can fulfill the law in more ways that just the legal sense.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A montage shows three people, an older man, a young man and young woman.

Ian Coates, Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar.

Family handout.

It’s an all too human instinct to seek vengeance against psychopathic killers, especially those murderers of children and youngsters. If we’re honest, we can all feel a primal urge to “get our hands on them”, to inflict, in retribution, the pain, death and suffering that they delivered on their victims and their families.

That must be why, shortly after his sentencing, the murderer of the three little girls at a dance class in Southport - Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King – was reported to have been beaten to a pulp by fellow prisoners. It went momentarily viral with the help of the likes of former support-actor Laurence Fox, who writes in short sentences because he thinks in them, claiming he’d heard it “on the grapevine”.

The story was only slightly undermined by such giants of investigative reporting getting the jail where the convicted prisoner is incarcerated entirely wrong.

It’s a kind of wishful thinking, if a herd can be said to think. It’s also why we have a rule of law in what we aspire to call a civilised country. It’s there to bring such perpetrators to justice, while ensuring that justice isn’t impaired by the wholly understandable desire of victims’ families to tear their killers to pieces and the knuckle-dragging, social-media lynch mob who think they know what justice looks like.

Hard for anyone to know how to respond to this. It’s perhaps particularly challenging, for fear of being intrusive and trite, to see how a religious faith can respond. But I want to have a go. And to avoid those charges of hand-wringing solipsism, I won’t speak of hope and love and life in this context, which so often feels like throwing a handful of seeds into a raging storm.

Rather, I think I want to ask what fulfilment of the law might look like. The full 240-page report into the killing In Nottingham in June 2023 by a paranoid schizophrenic of two 19-year-old students, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and separately a 65-year-old man, Ian Coates, has been published. Not unnaturally, the headline theme has been that the killer “got away with murder” through a series of chaotic failings by the NHS, in its discharges of its patient into the community, in its absent risk management and failures to medicate him adequately.

Culpability for these crimes is a powerful driving force. But there’s something else going on here. After the report’s publication, the two young victims’ mothers, Sinead O’Malley-Kumar and Emma Webber, went on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for an extended interview. And, yes, of course they share a campaigning spirit to change the health system so that this kind of tragedy is less likely to happen again. But Emma said that they’re “not witch-hunting with pitchforks” and Sinead observed with crystal clarity that “systems are made up of people”. This was about human as well as systemic change.

The go-to journalistic word here is “dignity” and, yes, these two mothers have it in bucket-loads. But, as I say, there’s something else. Struggling to identify it, I come up with the phrase that life goes on – and not in its platitudinous sense of bucking up and getting on with what’s left to us. There’s a feeling of continuation, not just of ending, dreadful as those endings are for families.

Asked by interviewer Anita Rani (who, in passing, was first class) what sustained them, where their strength came from, Emma answered in a heartbeat “Barnaby”, adding quickly in a heartbreaking throwaway: “It’s that invisible umbilical cord.” Similarly, Sinead said she was strengthened on a “bad day” by the knowledge that she was “doing it for Grace.”

They know, absolutely, that they can’t change what happened, but they’re there for each other. And not just these two mothers. Bereaved parents from Southport have been in touch, as they said, in “awful solidarity.”

A solidarity unconfined to this dreadful cadre of the violently bereaved. When these two mothers visited Nottingham for a vigil for their lost children, they expected “maybe 50” to turn up. In the event, there were “thousands and thousands” in Market Square. One of the two said simply: “There’s more good than bad out there.” Life goes on. Again, not in the sense of pulling your boots up and making the best of it, but in the sense of acknowledging that this is not all there is, that we’re working towards something infinitely better.

I think that’s what fulfilling the law might mean. Not solely changes to human systems, but changes in humanity. And perhaps that makes some sense of the gospel line: “I’m come not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it.” Not just to fulfil prophecy; not just to improve legal processes, but to fulfil the immutable laws of humanity for which these two mothers – and so many others around them – work so tirelessly.

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