For once, I can speak without being labelled Labour or Nationalist, because both parties (and some minor ones) are in agreement that the voting age should be lowered to 16. That means that the political class is united about an issue. The political class only unites when there is gain.
Sixteen-year-olds are still in a formative stage. I taught for a lifetime at Junior College and knew that this gave me the last chance to instil values in still-plastic minds. I always tried to give my students a sense of altruism, of seeing things from another person’s point of view.
I tried to teach them that it is better to give than to receive, that people are not walking wallets, that family is an institution, that you have to work hard to gain, that being good is not insurance, but being good is essential, in spite of it all.
I spoke of honesty being the best policy and that respect is an investment. Some still thank me for that. I managed to do that because their minds were still receptive. But suppose I was ill-intentioned. If I was successful, to a modest extent, with young people, the chances are that a person with a hidden agenda would have been even more so.
I do not wish to see the minds of children ravished by rapacious vote-grabbers and by Pied Pipers
The political class has the knowledge of ages and knows that young people are easily mesmerised with baubles. While with the aged the veins have hardened, the young are pliable and will make gods of those who give them ‘a good time’. Unlike the aged, they play their game just one move ahead. This is why they are vulnerable. Exploitable.
Vulnerable and exploitable are not nice words. They imply that a cunning person is using a naive one for his own ends, and that is exactly why all political parties are being so ‘generous’ with 16-year-olds. It’s because there is a lot for them in it.
They are the modern Pied Pipers, leading children to the glass mountain. Please do not think that they are being ‘enlightened’, ‘munificent’, ‘modernist’ or ‘liberal’; they have their eyes on easy votes. Of course, they have the cunning, but not the wisdom.
More voters means more pressure, and the young are vociferous, uncontrollable and pressing. Promise a kid something and they will not rest until you give it. With the aged, you play for time until they die. The politician dies before the 16-year-old voter, and the demands of this voter will be quite florid.
Lowering the drinking age, liberalising drugs, lowering the licensing age, ‘exotic’ housing demands… the world’s edge is the limit. They will simply concentrate on their needs and be oblivious to what is really possible or what is in the national interest. They will take care of ‘number one’.
Today’s young people (of course, not all of them) are very good at taking care of number one. Probably, I am in a minority of one on this. But that does not prove me wrong.
Politicians are a species: you are either born a politician or you aren’t, and the genetics are uniform, no matter the party. We cannot live without them, and many of them do an awful lot of good in spite of adversity, but a great lot of them are not worth a whisper, again no matter the party. Some actually cause harm and alarm.
I am always suspicious when politicians agree. But this idea of extending the plebiscite to 16-year-olds is beyond suspicion. Their votes are so easy. Baubles, bangles and beads are what the Europeans used to rape the Americas, and baubles, bangles and beads are what the politicians will use to bewitch the young in the isles of Calypso.
I do not wish to see the minds of children ravished by rapacious vote-grabbers, by Pied Pipers. They will sow discord in families, split friendships, encourage bullying and foster and extend existing divisions.
But they, the politicians, will discover that in this rodeo, they got a bucking horse.
Leave them kids alone.
Charles Caruana Carabez is a member of the National Commission for Further and Higher Education and director of studies at an English language school.