A Wordsmith Post
In 1969 Peter Carver was 25 years old and a lobby correspondent in the House of Commons. This meant he was an accredited journalist sitting on the bench above the Speaker’s chair at the other end of the Stranger’s Gallery.
Peter had left school at 15 and become a cub reporter on the Croydon Advertiser. At some point he became politicised to the extent that he became a protester. I can recall in 1960 when he came home for the night during an Aldermaston march during the peak of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament days. He brought his banner with him which my mother hastily hid in a broom cupboard out of sight of our dad. On another occasion he came home for the night after being outside Wandsworth prison protesting the hanging of the last man to be hanged in London. That was in 1960. It was not until 1965 that capital punishment was banned in the UK. That was under a Labour Government led by Harold Wilson.
Peter was well schooled in protest and moral outrage. He was an activist and soon became a member of the Labour Party. At some point he gave up his newspaper job and worked for a political organisation in Sheffield. Later in the mid 1960’s he returned home to live for a short while and he successfully landed what was to be his most important job, reporting Parliament, for a press agency.
His task was to write weekly articles on parliamentary matters for provincial newspapers. Some might have been syndicated to several papers and others might have been tailor made to reflect the reporting needs for a specific paper. One such syndicated article is this which appeared in the Coventry Evening Telegraph in August 1969.
It was all about the effects of giving the vote to people at the age of 18 which was being debated in 1969. Until this time, the minimum age for voting was 21. However, 50 years earlier it was only men at 21 who could vote. Women had to be at least 30 years old. The universal age of 21 for men and women was introduced in 1928.
Here was Peter, in 1969, outlining some of the debate and its implications, for the universal age to be reduced to 18 which became legislation that year.
Most People had fixed ideas about votes at 18 during the debate that preceded legislation. Those in favour put the stock case for the teenagers – old enough to serve in the Forces or in prison, old enough to join political parties and make contracts. So why not old enough to vote?
The opponents put the only real case against the change: they’re too young.
This echoes much of the debate that occurred in the run up to changes in Scottish legislation that reduced the voting age even further to 16. That was passed in 2015 and in the following year all political parties in Scotland were targeting those who would be 16 in the 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections.
Inevitably the parties will make some kind of overt play for the teenage vote – and the public relations men could, in the process, tighten up their hold on the democratic process.
That was his view 57 years ago. I would love to have been able to discuss Peter’s views on how the internet has taken that comment to a new level with many politicians adopting TikTok and other platforms to get their message and influence across to the electorate.
The Tories must be considered as having an initial advantage they have the better youth organization in the Young Conservatives- Labour still tends to treat its Young Socialists like teenage lepers.
I remember Peter’s influence on my political awakening in 1963 when I also joined him in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and later the Peace in Vietnam Campaign. This led to him encouraging me to join the Labour Party but he warned me to always be aware of the Young Socialists because he felt that locally in Reigate and Redhill, they were a group of Trotskyist ‘entryists’ to the party. Even at a tender age before I got the vote at the age of 21, Peter was giving me good advice that has proved right over the decades.
Lowering the voting age is significant for two reasons. It admits to the voting bazaar a whole new class of customers on whom very little consumer research in this field has been carried out. And, having seen how profitable the business seems to be, there will be those who will wish to “open shop” themselves. The first aspect will be given priority by the parties. Parliament has decided to establish a new section of voters with their own special interests. The voice of the 18-25’s will now become increasingly important. It will have to be listened to unless MPs are prepared to risk alienating large pockets of support.
There is now good research to show that the impact of lowering the voting age to 16 in Scotland has led to a greater electoral turnout of teenagers, sustained voting patterns into their 20’s, particularly as a result of the school curriculum on civic responsibility in Scotland.
And that brings us to the sort of question record book compilers are waiting to be answered. When, for example, do we see our first 18-year-old MP?
To date, we have not yet seen our first 18-year-old MP, but we have seen our youngest ever MP. That accolade goes to Mhairi Black who entered the House of Commons in 2015 when she was 20 years old and remained there until 2024, representing the Scottish National Party.
The new legislation in 1969 to lower the voting age to 18 came into practice the following year. In 1970 Harold Wilson’s Labour government lost to Edward Heath and the Conservatives. Legislation brought in by a progressive Wilson government gave teenagers their first taste of democracy.
Of course, it does not stop there. With the evidence in Scotland and Wales, reducing the voting age to 16 has been putting pressure on the UK Government to follow suit. It has always been a commitment by the present government. However, with echoes of 1969, the Conservatives and Reform are against it using similar arguments as before – they are just too young. Prime Minister, Keir Starmer has simplified the argument for the reduction. “If you are old enough to go to work and pay taxes, you are old enough to have a say in how they are spent.”
Legislation has not been passed yet but hopefully experience in Scotland and Wales and research from the past ten years will help its path. At the age of 16 in 1963 I was an ardent protester. My first vote in a general election was in 1970 when I was 23 years old, two years after my 21st birthday, but teenagers five years younger than me were also able to vote that year.
(Article by Peter Carver from the Coventry Evening Telegraph 1969, courtesy of National Newspaper Archive)
I came across this piece today which resonated on the reason for maintaining this blog.
Essentially, we humans are storytellers. Telling the stories of other people is an act of remembrance. Repeating our memories of a person keeps them alive. They do not decay, cat in a box like, into a known form, but are maintained in the histories of them. It involves us in their lives. The tales of their significance is cathartic not just for us, but for those around us as well. Stories are nothing but the sharing of experiences that we might not have actually been present for, but the renewed pathways of words in the air are the only things that give us new perspectives. The ability to create new anecdotes does not end with losing the path of a person.
An excerpt from the Pirate Ben and his latest post on Substack. https://thebarracks.substack.com/
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