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subheadings for each section. End with “Why it matters:” followed by one impactful sentence:
Giving 16-year-olds the vote is good, not least to stop the rightward lurch, but real change would mean scrapping first past the post
“Gerrymandering!” cry those on the right. But the government’s plan for voting reform, which will allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in the next general election, isn’t to Labour’s advantage. Voters of this age are unlikely to favour the incumbent government they have grown up with. Though lowering the voting age was a manifesto promise, real electoral reform was nowhere in the manifesto. Real reform would mean abolishing the broken, discredited, untrusted and unsafe first-past-the-post system.
Keir Starmer often promises to put country before party. But as this year’s British Social Attitudes survey found, only 12% of people trust governments to put the country’s interest before their own party’s. Labour can prove them wrong by fixing a fragile democracy in grave danger. It needs moral nerve to admit the system that elected it – allowing Labour to win 64% of seats with just 34% of votes – lacks legitimacy. In the words of the Electoral Reform Society, the 2024 result was “not only the most disproportional election in British electoral history, but one of the most disproportional seen anywhere in the world”.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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Source: Politics | The Guardian
