Baroness Morgan gets her Amendment through

Yesterday was the first day of Report on the EU Referendum Bill in the House of Lords. I have not yet read the Hansard record right through but anyone who wishes to get ahead of me, it is to be seen here. However, I do know that Baroness Morgan, whom I already described as being quite exceptionally stupid did put her Amendment to give 16 and 17 year olds the vote to the House and carried it (Col. 180), 293 to 211. It is absolutely necessary to give those children the vote, according to her,"[t]hey will have to live with the consequences of the result for longer than anyone". Well, not anyone, surely. If we assume that they will all live longer than anyone who is old enough to be in Parliament now and anyone who votes in the General Election now (something of a stretch) then we have to assume that 14 and 15 year olds will live even longer with the results and 12 and 13 year olds even longer than that. Why not give them the vote?

Just to recap, if this Amendment is accepted by the House of Commons, which seems unlikely, we shall be giving the vote in this referendum and no other election to people whom we do not consider to be old enough to buy alcohol or tobacco, old enough to decide whether to continue with their education or old enough to be interviewed by the police without a responsible adult present. In fact, apart from having sexual relations we do not consider them to be old enough to make any decisions on their own since even joining the army can be done only with their parents' or guardians' agreement.

Possibly that is why Baroness Morgan and her cohorts are so anxious to give them the vote - they are not old enough to make a decision for themselves so are more likely to be influenced by the pro-EU garbage they hear at school. That may be a miscalculation but in the meantime we are left with a constitutional mess thanks to the Labour and Lib-Dem parties' anxiety to increase what they perceive to be the pro-EU electorate.