Daily catch-up: Ed Miliband’s unpopular policies on votes at 16, climate change and hashtags

Plus a Great Historical Irony of Our Age

1. Ed Miliband was on a young people’s programme, Leaders Live (Michael Deacon sketched it here), yesterday, and repeated his pledge to lower the voting age to 16. I don’t agree with it. You can fight for your country, get married, get a job and pay taxes at 16, say the displacement activists. No, you can’t. You can join the Army at 16 but you aren’t allowed in combat until 18. You can get married only with parents’ permission. And the Labour government raised the education-leaving age to 18.

If you parrot “No taxation without representation” then give the vote to seven-year-olds, who pay VAT on their sweets.

There is an excellent chapter in the superb book, Sex, Lies and the Ballot Box, on the paradox of an unpopular policy that seems inevitable. Opinion polls show that most people think the voting age should stay at 18. But votes at 16 is popular with the sort of audiences Miliband faced yesterday, and it wouldn't cost anything.

Most curious of all is that most young people themselves don’t agree with it. A Sky News survey of 16-24-year-olds in August found they opposed it by 61 per cent to 30 per cent (page 54). The survey interviewed only 160 16- and 17-year-olds, and they opposed it by 49 per cent to 41 per cent. That is not a statistically significant margin, but all the other evidence suggests that young people think the same as older people, but a bit less so.

2. You would think that climate change would be Miliband’s Mastermind special subject, as he was Energy and Climate Change Secretary in the last government. But he made a howler in a speech last month to the Green Alliance, which was celebrating its 35th anniversary. “I have to say speaking to this audience feels a lot like coming home,” he told them, before going on to list three lessons, the third of which was “around the European Union”:

“There can be no ambiguity about our place in the European Union if we are to tackle climate change. We are two per cent of global emissions; the EU is 20 per cent of global emissions.”

This is not the case. The EU is responsible for 11 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions (page 11). Lesson four, I would suggest, is “around” getting your facts right.

3. Sad to report that the hashtag #CameronMustGo has ceased, after about two weeks, to trend (that is, be used a lot) on Twitter in the UK. This will come as a disappointment to Miliband’s shadow cabinet adviser, Jon Trickett. Presumably it means that David Cameron may now stay.

4. Only 13 years late with this one, but Jake Goretzki’s is point worth making:

“Going all hissy and pedantic about Americans and ‘War on Terror’? It’s a figure of speech, dear. Like ‘War on Want’ and ‘Reclaim the Night’.”

5. More evidence for the great historical irony of the referendum on changing the voting system in 2011. The Conservatives should have voted for the Alternative Vote, while the Liberal Democrats should have voted against (they will save more of their seats because of the X-voting system). The Ashcroft poll yesterday suggested the Tories could have gained four per cent of the vote under AV, because they would have gained a fifth (net) of UKIP voters’ second preferences:

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6. And finally, thanks to Chris Heaton-Harris for this:

Have you been hit with a rhythm stick?

You could be entitled to compensation with a personal Ian Dury claim.