Let children vote?!?

Rather than being lowered to 16, the voting age should be raised to at least 25. This seems like an unassailable idea, based on empirical evidence and common sense.

Grown-up decisions must be made by grownups. However, those same people who’d laugh at the idea of letting 16-year-olds dispose of their family budget believe that the youngsters are amply qualified to make potentially vital decisions for the whole country.

Rather than being told to do number one and go to bed, children will soon be told they can stay up until they decide who should govern us. Voting is their inalienable right, and somehow our franchise is woefully incomplete without them.

Shadow (meaning next) Home Secretary Diane Abbott, whose claim to fame is mainly based on her past cohabiting with Jeremy Corbyn and posing nude for his friends, certainly thinks so.

“I believe in votes at 16,” she declared recently. “If you’re old enough to fight for your country, you’re old enough to vote.”

Diane was widely mocked for not knowing that soldiers can’t be selected for combat until they’re 18, and this indeed is a lamentable lacuna in our next Home Secretary’s education. Yet few argued against the essence of her argument, or its logic.

Few noticed that the erstwhile beauty’s statement is an out-and-out non sequitur. My usual counterargument is that 16-year-olds can play professional football, but they can’t manage a professional football team. And if, by some mad oversight, one were allowed to do so, the team would be playing pub football next season.

Then again, I consider the source and crack an indulgent, avuncular smile. I suspect that posing nude for Jeremy’s friends just may be the most intelligent thing Diane has ever done or said.

Yet apparently the Tory MP Dominic Raab agrees with her: he believes puberty is a sufficient qualification, and I thought he was a reasonable, Brexit-voting young man.

I suggest Dominic and other paedocrats read Golding’s Lord of the Flies or, if they prefer a shorter statistical account to a longer fictional one, the recent poll published in The Washington Times. They’ll know exactly what to expect when children get the vote, which is to say power.

The survey asked 2,300 ‘millennials’ (those aged 16 and 17), whether they’d prefer to live in a socialist, communist or fascist nation rather than a capitalist one.

The poll was flawed because the right end of the political spectrum was identified by a Marxist term, as if liberal movement of capital were fully synonymous with political goodness. It isn’t, as anyone who knows anything about today’s China can confirm.

But ‘capitalism’ is widely used shorthand, and of course many Americans do see it – rather than, say, the rule of law, limited power of the state, Christian virtue or keeping the US equivalents of Diane Abbott from government – as the most inclusive single-word term.

Be that as it may, a landslide majority of 58 per cent opted for one of the three awful systems, with socialism leading the other two by a wide margin. Do you understand now why the Left are so passionate about expanding the franchise?

Their thinking is the same as it was when Tony Blair cynically enlarged the voting population by inviting a million Muslims into the country. He and his jolly friends knew they’d benefit from any expansion of the franchise beyond the small core of Her Majesty’s subjects who may vote responsibly.

Why the nice Mr Raab supports this frankly subversive idea is less immediately obvious, but then one must consider the generally low grade of human material out of which our governments are constructed. This observation is genuinely cross-party, and it applies just about everywhere.

Granted, a similar poll in Britain might yield different results, but somehow one doubts it. Hearing grown-ups almost invariably talk infantile, inane, illiterate rubbish whenever politics comes up makes one shudder at the thought of their children choosing our governments.

Incidentally, the same poll showed a wide admiration for communist icons. Thus 31 per cent had a favourable view of Che Guevara, 32 per cent of Karl Marx, 23 per cent of Lenin and 19 per cent of Mao.

Incomprehensibly, Stalin polled a mere six per cent, and my friend Vlad Putin is going to hear about this. His propaganda machine must have stalled at some point. I told you to put me in charge of RT, Vlad: American youngsters would now think Stalin was the best friend the West ever had.

Raising the voting age wouldn’t prevent a catastrophe (such as Diane Abbott as Home Secretary and her ex-paramour as PM), but it might delay its advent. Lowering it, however, is guaranteed to hasten a catastrophe so much that even wrinklies like me may see it in their lifetime.

Perish the thought.