Is compulsory voting the only way to involve the young?

Two swallows don’t make a summer – but it’s interesting that two influential columnists on the Conservative Home website, Tim Montgomerie and Peter Hoskin, have been making encouraging noises about the notion of introducing compulsory voting in Britain.

Montgomerie, the former editor of Conservative Home and now a Times columnist, was reacting to a private member’s bill presented by the veteran left-wing Labour MP David Winnick which advocates that voting be a civic obligation.

At the last general election, 16 million potential voters failed to take part on polling day, and a disproportionate number of them were 18 to 24-year-olds. In Australia, where voting has been compulsory since 1924, turnout is 93 per cent.

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“I’m not comfortable recommending any kind of compulsion,” Montgomerie wrote in The Times. “But I’m much more uncomfortable at the prospect of Britain becoming some sort of gerontocracy where older (and richer) people decide who is in power. This is a much greater social evil.”

That's because “a skewed electorate produces skewed public policy”, as Montgomerie puts it. Older people are more likely to vote so the politcal parties woo them. “That’s one big reason why austerity has fallen so disproportionately on younger people with families.”

The basic state pension rises by at least 2.5 per cent a year while “younger, poorer working families have their tax credits cut. Many will pay higher taxes to ensure rich pensioners become richer still.”

The same inequity is also seen in housing. “Older people who already own homes are more likely to vote. We end up with nimbyism, inadequate house-building and the most ridiculous property prices in Europe,” says Montgomerie.

In the Commons, the 81-year-old Winnick said everyone who cared about democracy should be worried that those who don’t vote will outnumber those voting for any single party in the general election.

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He does not want to make voting itself compulsory – but he does wants it to be a legal obligation to visit the ballot station on polling day. There, you could either ask for a ballot paper or explain to the clerk that you don’t wish to vote.

Winnick’s bill has no chance of becoming law - but it should get more politicians discussing the serious issue of low turnout among young voters.

This is Peter Hoskin’s main concern. Like Montgomerie he’s not comfortable about compulsory voting - “There’s something weird and un-British about the idea,” he wrote for Conservative Home – but he is drawn by the arguments in a report titled Divided Democracy produced by the Left think-tank IPPR.

This shows a gap of more than 20 per cent between turnout figures for 18 to 24-year-olds and the national average. “Unsurprisingly,” writes Hoskin, “it’s voters over 40, and particularly over 65, who push that average up.”

Hoskin supports IPPR’s halfway-house proposal “that voting be made compulsory, at pain of a fine, for first-time voters only. This makes sense because voting is what they call ‘habit forming’; once people pop to the ballot box they just can’t stop.”

Labour’s prescription is votes at 16 - strongly advocated by the shadow justice secretary Sadiq Khan, who will most likely be in charge of electoral reform if Labour win on 7 May.

Khan told The Independent earlier this month that it was part of a package to make voting easier for the young, with polling stations set up in secondary schools, on-the-day voting registration and perhaps online polling.

“Why do elections take place on a Thursday? Why do you have to go to a cold church hall to cast your vote? Why can’t you vote by the web? Why can’t you have same-day registration? You can get a mortgage in a day – why can’t you do the same with voting registration? If the concern is fraud, we can address that.”

Khan also supported Montgomerie’s point about policies being skewed towards those more likely to vote.

“If you’ve got a candidate with an hour to spare and a choice to go to an old people’s home or a sixth-form college, 99 per cent of campaign managers will say you’ve got to go to the old people’s home,” said Khan. “That’s because 94 per cent of them are on the register and 77 per cent of them will vote. That is not true of the younger generation.”

Don Brind tweets at twitter.com/brinddon