Quote:
Originally Posted by Guy
A 'poll' I read in the news indicated 18-24 year olds voting remain was around 70%
Around 10 million didnt vote. Are we disappointed with them too?
|
In my opinion the vote should start at the age of 25.
Originally government was setup so that taxes could be collected and spent on public projects which eventually included a welfare state. As a tax payer you then have the democratic right to determine what your tax is spent on, so we have political parties and members of governments etc to sort this out. As youngsters (who we now encourage to go to school and study into early twenties if possible) not paying tax yet, I thus fail to see why they should have any mandate because of the lack of knowledge and financial contribution. This simple bit of history/information about government was not even taught clearly at my high school. History lessons were in fact atrocious when I look back (I was educated at VWO in Netherlands which you needed at the time to get into university). It was all about kings and queens from the Middle Ages and nothing about history of democracy, philosophy, art, geography/country borders or recent war or anything as such. I hope it is not the same now in UK schools.
Many young people I reckon simply do not know that the EU is a very recent project derived from trade, to prevent another war with Germany and only includes just over 50% of the countries located in Europe, and has 5 presidents, most of which are very bad at speaking English.
Yes I think a common language is important. After all we communicate in English too on this forum
and reckon most of the people from abroad on here speak and write far better English than those guys who earn €100.000s per year and can't even be bothered to take some English lessons.