With Theresa May away in China, and the B-team on parade in the Commons, I was tempted to give this week’s Prime Minister’s Questions a miss. But I’m so glad I surrendered to the call of journalistic duty and tuned in to watch.
For what I witnessed was the hugely gratifying demolition of one of my least favourite politicians, who was defending one of the stupidest of Jeremy Corbyn’s policies (which is saying something).
Now, I was brought up to believe it’s very wrong to take pleasure in the humiliation of a fellow human being — particularly when that fellow happens to be a lady. But I think we all have to make an exception when the lady in question is Emily Thornberry, who was standing in for Mr Corbyn.
Emily Thornberry was standing in for Jeremy Corbyn at Prime Minister's Questions this week
There’s something about her insufferably patronising voice and aura of seemingly indestructible self-satisfaction that would make even the most gentlemanly of saints yearn to see her taken down a peg or two. And on Wednesday, that’s just what befell her.
Hapless
Up against her was the Prime Minister’s new understudy, David Lidington — a weedy looking chap, who had hardly crossed my radar before he was promoted in January to the job previously occupied by the hapless Damian Green (whose hand may or may not have brushed fleetingly against a young woman’s knee many years ago).
I admit I had very low expectations of this obscure 61-year-old. So, clearly, did Lady Nugee — to give Miss Thornberry her married name. Indeed, she seemed even more pleased with herself than usual when she set about bowling him a googly, obviously believing it would send his stumps flying and earn her applause from her party.
Instead of questioning him on one of the great issues of the day, such as Brexit or the collapse of the outsourcing giant Carillion — subjects on which he would be well briefed — she tried to catch him unprepared by attacking him over the Government’s refusal to reduce the voting age to 16.
Why, she wanted to know, did every party in the Commons support enfranchising schoolchildren, with the lonely exceptions of the Conservatives and the Democratic Unionists? Why was the Government opposed to forward-thinking change?
Instead of attacking the Government over the great issues of the day, Thornberry raised the issue of giving 16-year-olds the vote
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She had even dreamed up a sound-bite for the occasion, delivering it with a self-congratulatory smirk as if it were a pearl of wit worthy of Oscar Wilde. ‘They are not the coalition of chaos, Mr Speaker, they are the coalition of cavemen.’
She then sat down and waited for Mr Lidington to make a blustering fool of himself. How she (and I) misjudged him. Far from being caught on the hop, he appeared voluminously informed on the question of young people’s voting rights. He pointed out that 26 of our 27 EU partners deny the vote to under-18s, as do the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia.
‘Unless she is going to denounce all of those countries as somehow inadequate to her own particular standards,’ he went on, ‘quite honestly she should grow up and treat this subject with a greater degree of seriousness.’
As if this wasn’t enough to make Ms Thornberry look foolish, he had another argument in his armoury, more devastating still. Gently, he remarked that her own party had legislated to ban 16-year-olds from buying cigarettes, kitchen knives or fireworks — and even from using a sunbed. How could Labour now claim they were grown-up enough to vote?
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It was Ms Thornberry who was left blustering. These were ‘health and safety issues’, she said, quite separate from democratic rights. Thus, she cornered herself into defending the ludicrous proposition that while 16-year-olds are too immature to use a sunbed sensibly, they are qualified to select Her Majesty’s Government.
Laughter
Instead of the applause she had expected, she was greeted with contemptuous laughter, richly deserved. But there was one obvious truth Mr Lidington omitted to point out. Either because he was too polite, or too merciful, he failed to mention Labour’s blatantly hypocritical motive for demanding a reduction in the voting age.
Mr Corbyn and Ms Thornberry back votes for 16-year-olds not because they honestly believe school-age children have enough experience of life to weigh up political arguments and reach a mature judgment on who should govern the country. If they really thought that, any parent of grunting teenagers — and my wife and I have had four of them through our hands — could quickly put them right.
No, it is because they calculate the younger the electorate, the more likely it will be to vote Labour. After all, wasn’t Mr Corbyn’s unexpectedly strong showing in last year’s election attributed to a surge in voting by 18 to 24-year-olds — prompting the Oxford English Dictionary to declare as its word of the year ‘youthquake’, meaning a political awakening among millennial voters?
Cabinet Office Minister David Lidington, standing in for the Prime Minister, 'appeared voluminously informed on the question of young people’s voting rights'
In fact, a fascinating report this week by members of the British Election Study team, the recognised authority on the subject, suggests no such surge took place. On the contrary, the group’s face-to-face surveys show there was little change in turnout by age group between 2015 and 2017.
Young people were still much less likely to vote — no matter how enthusiastically they sang ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ at Glastonbury. When polling day came, they couldn’t be bothered. And what was true of the under 24s, I strongly suspect, would be even more so of the under-18s.
But what nobody disputes is that those younger voters who did crawl out of bed and tear themselves away from social media to get to the polling station were more likely than their elders to vote Labour.
It has always been true that the young tend to lean to the Left — as suggested by the old saying: ‘Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart; any man who is still a socialist at 40 has no head.’
But from my own experience of bringing up four bolshie boys, I would venture that this Left-wing bias has become stronger than ever — not least among the under-18s, the great majority of whom have never suffered the pain of paying taxes. As for why this should be, I reckon it has a lot to do with the Left’s takeover of education.
Young people were still much less likely to vote, no matter how enthusiastically they sang ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ at Glastonbury
Prejudices
In my own schooldays, back in the Sixties and Seventies, Conservative-voting teachers were two-a-penny. These days, there are many schools in which you’d be hard pushed to find a single Tory on the staff, while the favourite reading matter in the average common room is the Guardian.
True, some will argue that teachers and those who set the curriculum strive to keep their political views out of the classroom. But, inevitably, their personal prejudices filter through into impressionable young minds.
Why else would the head of Ofsted, in her fine speech yesterday, be so justly exercised about religious extremists in British schools, who ‘actively undermine fundamental British values’? To a lesser extent, can’t the same charge be levelled against teachers who, consciously or otherwise, feed their pupils the drip, drip, drip of Left-wing propaganda?
For example, we were taught at school to look at the history of our country with pride. As for my young, they were taught more about the sins of colonialism than the glory of the British empire — more about the evils of the slave trade than its abolition, in which Britain led the world.
I also know, from dipping into their schoolbooks, that today’s students learn far more about Martin Luther King and America’s civil rights movement than about Martin Luther and the Reformation, more about the suffragettes than the War of the Spanish Succession — and far more about the theory of man-made global warming than about the artesian wells and mountain ranges that were the stuff of my own geography lessons.
Is it any wonder that Ms Thornberry is so keen to give 16-year-olds the vote, when only the naïve, the indoctrinated — and those, like her, who never grew up — are dumb enough to swallow her boss’s half-baked Marxism?
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