LONDON (AP) — There has been a mixed reaction in Britain to the government’s announcement that it will lower the voting age from 18 to 16 before the next national election.
The Labour Party administration says it’s part of a package of changes to strengthen British democracy and help restore trust in politics. The opposition says it’s a power-grab by the left.
Experts say it’s complicated, with mixed evidence about how lowering the voting age affects democracy and election outcomes.
Britain’s voting age last fell in 1969, when the U.K. became one of the first major democracies to lower it from 21 to 18. Many other countries, including the United States, followed suit within a few years.
Now the government says it will lower the threshold to 16 by the time the next general election is held, likely in 2029. That will bring the whole country into line with Scotland and Wales, which have semiautonomous governments and already let 16- and 17-year-olds vote in local and regional elections.
A handful of other countries currently have a voting age of 16, including Austria, Brazil and Ecuador. A few European Union countries, including Belgium, Germany and Malta, allow 16-year-olds to vote in elections to the European Parliament.
Supporters argue that 16-year-olds in Britain can work and pay taxes, so should be allowed to vote.
“If you pay in, you should have the opportunity to say what you want your money spent on,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said.
Pro-democracy organizations welcomed the lower age, and a move toward automatic voter registration, saying it would help increase voting rates. Turnout in the 2024 election was 59.7%, the lowest level in more than two decades.
The age change is part of a package of electoral reforms that includes tightening campaign financing rules and broadening the range of documents that can be used as identification at polling stations.
Supporters argue it will increase democratic participation by getting teenagers into the habit of voting at a time when most are still in school.
“Younger people who are in full-time education and often still live at home can make for better, more engaged first-time voters compared with 18- to 20-year-olds, who often experience their first election in a highly transitory phase of their lives,” Christine Huebner, a social scientist at the University of Sheffield who has studied youth voting, wrote in The Guardian.
Opponents argue that 16- and 17-year-olds should not be given the vote because in most ways they are not considered adults.
“Why does this government think a 16-year-old can vote but not be allowed to buy a lottery ticket, an alcoholic drink, marry, or go to war, or even stand in the elections they’re voting in?” Conservative lawmaker Paul Holmes asked Thursday in the House of Commons.
Mark Goodwin, a senior lecturer in politics at Coventry University, agreed the move could seem paradoxical, because “socially, if anything, we’re moving in the opposite direction.”
“Increasingly the age of majority, the age at which you become a fully capable and responsible adult, is moving more towards 18,” he said.
The government’s political opponents on the right argue that Labour hopes to benefit from 1.5 million new potential young voters who generally lean to the left.
Nigel Farage, leader of the hard-right party Reform UK, said Labour was trying to “rig the system.” Conservative former foreign secretary James Cleverly said the government had cynically announced the change because it is “tanking in the polls.”
Experts say enfranchising 16- and 17-year-olds is unlikely to dramatically change election results, because they are a relatively small group with diverse views. And it’s far from clear that Labour will reap most of the benefits of a bigger youth vote.
U.K. politics, long dominated by Labour and the Conservatives, is becoming increasingly fragmented. Polling suggests younger voters lean left, but they are split among several parties including Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats. Farage's embrace of TikTok has built his brand with youth, and Reform has some support among young men.
Goodwin said that in many parts of the world, “young people are abandoning the center-left in droves.
“And in many cases, they’re lending their support to parties of the populist right, or challenger parties, outsider parties, independents, more alternative parties," he said.
“If it is a cynical ploy to get more Labour votes, there’s certainly an element of risk about where those votes would ultimately be cast.”
FILE - Boxes of votes are emptied ready to be counted for the British Parliamentary constituency of Holborn and St Pancras where the Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is standing for election, in London, Thursday, July 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)
FILE - A woman walks past a temporary polling station near Wimbledon, London, Thursday, July 4, 2024. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali, File)
The U.S. government admitted Wednesday that the actions of an air traffic controller and Army helicopter pilot played a role in causing the collision last January between an airliner and a Black Hawk near the nation's capital, killing 67 people.
It was the deadliest crash on American soil in more than two decades.
The official response to the first lawsuit filed by one of the victims’ families said that the government is liable in the crash partly because the air traffic controller violated procedures about when to rely on pilots to maintain visual separation that night. Plus, the filing said, the Army helicopter pilots' “failure to maintain vigilance so as to see and avoid” the airline jet makes the government liable.
But the filing suggested that others, including the pilots of the jet and the airlines, may also have played a role. The lawsuit also blamed American Airlines and its regional partner, PSA Airlines, for roles in the crash, but those airlines have filed motions to dismiss.
And the government denied that any air traffic controllers or officials at the Federal Aviation Administration or Army were negligent.
At least 28 bodies were pulled from the icy waters of the Potomac River after the helicopter collided with the American Airlines regional jet while it was landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport in northern Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C., officials said. The plane carried 60 passengers and four crew members, and three soldiers were aboard the helicopter.
Robert Clifford, one of the attorneys for the family of victim Casey Crafton, said the government admitted “the Army’s responsibility for the needless loss of life” and the FAA’s failure to follow air traffic control procedures while “rightfully” acknowledging others –- American Airlines and PSA Airlines -– also contributed to the deaths.
The families of the victims “remain deeply saddened and anchored in the grief caused by this tragic loss of life,” he said.
The government's lawyers said in the filing that “the United States admits that it owed a duty of care to plaintiffs, which it breached, thereby proximately causing the tragic accident.”
An American spokesman declined to comment on the filing, but in the airline's motion to dismiss, American said "plaintiffs’ proper legal recourse is not against American. It is against the United States government ... The Court should therefore dismiss American from this lawsuit.” The airline said that since the crash it has focused on supporting the families of the victims.
The National Transportation Safety Board will release its report on the cause of the crash early next year, but investigators have already highlighted a number of factors that contributed, including the helicopter flying 78 feet higher (24 meters) than the 200-foot (61-meter) limit on a route that allowed only scant separation between planes landing on Reagan's secondary runway and helicopters passing below. Plus, the NTSB said, the FAA failed to recognize the dangers around the busy airport even after 85 near misses in the three years before the crash.
The government admitted in its filing that the United States “was on notice of certain near-miss events between its Army-operated Black Hawk helicopters and aircraft traffic transiting in and around helicopter routes 1 and 4” around Washington.
Before the collision, the controller twice asked the helicopter pilots whether they had the jet in sight, and the pilots said they did and asked for visual separation approval so they could use their own eyes to maintain distance. FAA officials acknowledged at the NTSB’s investigative hearings that the controllers at Reagan had become overly reliant on the use of visual separation. That’s a practice the agency has since ended.
Witnesses told the NTSB that they have serious questions about how well the helicopter crew could spot the plane while wearing night vision goggles and whether the pilots were even looking in the right spot.
Investigators have said the helicopter pilots might not have realized how high they were because the barometric altimeter they were relying on was reading 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30 meters) lower than the altitude registered by the flight data recorder.
The crash victims included a group of elite young figure skaters, their parents and coaches who had just attended a competition in Wichita, Kansas, and four union steamfitters from the Washington area.
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FILE - Attorney Bob Clifford speaks during a news conference regarding the Jan. 29, 2025, mid-air collision between American Eagle flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopter, at the National Press Club, Sept. 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr., File)
FILE - National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy speaks during the NTSB fact-finding hearing on the DCA midair collision accident, at the National Transportation and Safety Board boardroom, July 30, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr., File)
