Steerpike Steerpike

Nicola Sturgeon’s adolescent troubles

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

After the Derek Mackay scandal, you’d have thought the SNP would want to distance itself from 16 year-olds. Far from it, it seems, for the bairns of tomorrow are central to Nicola Sturgeon’s ambitions today. Support for independence is flagging. The public sector services are creaking. Calls for an investigation into the ferries fiasco are growing. So, if you are First Minister, how do you regain the initiative?  

The answer, apparently, is to let kids become MSPs too. For this weekend, the SNP unveiled their latest constitutional wheeze: reducing the minimum age of election candidacy from 18 at present to just 16 for Scottish parliament and local council elections. 

The move would bring it into line with the voting age for those elections, despite people still having to be 18 or over to vote in a general election. The plans would allow those under 18 to become MSPs at the next Scottish parliament election in 2026 and councillors at the local election due to be held the following year. 

Leaving aside the question of whether devolved authorities ought to have the right to grant such constitutional change, the proposal seems to be yet another example of the SNP project trying to accumulate political capital for an eventual independence vote rather than expending it on meaningful policy initiatives.

It would also mean people who are too young to learn to drive, get married without parental consent or drink alcohol would be able to help run the country. A teenage MSP would walk out of the voting lobby into Holyrood, to be denied service at the bar, before being required to take a taxi or public transport home to their constituency. Ironically, there’s a chance they’d be older than both some members of both the UK and Scottish ‘youth’ parliaments, the latter of which caters up to 25-year-olds. 

They’d also be exposed to the vitriol and venom of the whole toxic Scottish independence debate, with all its trolling, death threats, hatchet jobs and online abuse.

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