"What it means to be young has shifted over time"

As the government moves forward with plans to lower the voting age to 16, JULIE V GOTTLIEB examines previous changes to the age of suffrage - from Victorian democratic reforms to the dawn of the teenager

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Trudy Sellick rose before dawn on 12 March 1970. An audio typist, she was keen to complete a most important task before starting work. So by 7am she was waiting for the doors to open at her local polling station for the by-election in Bridgwater, Somerset.

That moment is notable not just for her dedication to democracy, but because it was her 18th birthday that morning — and she became the first British teenager to cast a vote in a parliamentary election. “I wanted to be the first 18-year-old in the country to vote,” she said, “and got up early to make sure.”

The teenage vote is again making headlines. Keir Starmer’s Labour government is moving to lower the voting age to 16 before the next general election, in a bid to break the cycle of political disengagement and voter apathy. (The voting age is already 16 in local council elections in Scotland and Wales, and in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd.) As outlined by the student-led Vote16 campaign, the aim is to “rebuild trust between young people and political institutions”.

This is, then, a good moment to reflect on the historical considerations, controversies and points of consensus about when citizens are mature enough to exercise their democratic right and fulfil the responsibilities of citizenship. Is it a sound political calculation for Gen X and Gen Y legislators to mobilise Gen Z and Generation Alpha voters? Or does history suggest it may be a political gamble?

This issue was the focal point of the Representation of the People Act 1969, which made the UK the first major democracy to lower the voting age from 21 to 18. In the campaign leading up to the 1969 reform, as historian Adrian Bingham has argued, age seems to have overtaken class and gender as the key social divide in British politics”.

Reforming acts