To be honest 16 year olds should be able to vote.
That’s the age you can leave school, get a job, join the army, get a passport (without consent), drive a car. For most things you are considered an adult.
But fundamentally if you are old enough to be paying taxes, you should have a way of saying how those taxes are spent.
A bit incendiary but should people be allowed to vote once they retire?
People on the left “Starmer won’t raise taxes to pay for public services, the bastard”
People on the right “Starmer is going to raise taxes to pay for public services, the bastard”
The thing is, not many people actually get to vote in a general election immediately after reaching voting age anyway.
I was lucky enough to be able to vote a few months after my 18th birthday. A school friend, who was only a few months younger than me, couldn’t vote until aged 23. In that time he had spent several years in the army, been sent to war (by a government that he wasn’t able to vote for), and was about to get married.
There has to be a cut off point, but the age at which compulsory education ends seems as good a point as any.
No taxation without representation.
That assumes that they are no longer contributing to society, which is not the case.
From afar, but 14 years is a lot. High time for a change. The Tories haven’t been good.
Labour won’t have the resources to do much in the short term, but sensible governance and an end to corruption will be a big improvement.
Covid hit the world but the Tories did not manage it well. Brexit was a disaster and put the whole country in a lower bracket in terms of its standing in the world.
14 years is a long time. Things are worse. Labour needs 2 terms by which time we will see the impact. But the sense I have is they will open the cupboard and find it is bare, so moving the levers around to shape society will be hard to do.
The biggest thing I would do is look for a way to undo Brexit, now that the public has better information.
That wasn’t my take. It was more from the point of view of self interest. Yes the old have experience but the world is very different through the eyes for a 16 year old vs through the prescription lenses and cataract ridden eyes of a 66 year old.
p.s. just to add, everyone contributes to society. From children in Chile to billionaires in Beijing but at some point, interests diverge. The right to vote and voting is not the only way contributions can be made.
What about those that fake it till they make it?
100% this.
To anyone saying they are all the same, you have forgotten what normal Government looks like. It doesn’t look like funnelling hundreds of billions towards your mates, while keeping the proles in a froth about immigrants and woke fucking lanyards.
Yeh, fucking right we should!
If I ran a massive company I’d have more money that I’d ever need and would be more than happy to pay high taxes to support those less fortunate.
Is this a joke?
Guessing you work for somebody else currently?
Seen mention of it a few times as a possibility , but twice now in the past few days.
The BBC have already decided they want Labour, because they probably already been promised bumper relief to the licence fee crisis. They been running love seat photos of Rayner staring at Keir, with a backdrop of ‘change’ banners.
Get this into relief.
Angela Rayner v Dmitri Medvedev 
Sunak has today announced he is going to bring back National Service, and I have announced he can go and fuck himself.
Businesses don’t run in a vacuum. They need roads and rail. They need infrastructure and utilities. They need workers who are educated by a school system and kept healthy by the NHS.
Anyone who runs a business should be happy to pay a reasonable rate of tax.
A business with a turnover that makes it interesting will be paying the following, in no particular order:
VAT
Corporation Tax
Business Rates
NIC
Etc etc etc. Oh and providing employment for people, exactly what we want to encourage. I guess if you’ve never run a business, you just don’t see the huge tax burden you get when you put your first step on the rung.