Youth Demand. Even for a pressure group, that’s one hell of a self-regarding name. First lesson of government and politics should have warned them off that. The language of industrial disputes: management always offers, the workers demand. Framing it that way places the unions at an empathic disadvantage. So Youth Demand, do they? For a bunch of students they don’t seem to have paid attention in class.
And demand what exactly? If they had been around in 2016, they could have demanded their lot got out of bed and then the good guys wouldn’t have been stuffed by Nigel Farage and his mates. Anyway, the youth will be able to do a lot less demanding and a lot more sharing in the democratic process once the government gets its way. Sir Keir Starmer is insistent he will lower the voting age to 16, which is going down very badly with the type of people who would rather have it raised to 60.
You’ll find them on all the good message boards, outraged. The teenage brain isn’t sufficiently developed, apparently. No experience of life, of keeping a job, paying a bill. Many wish to see the voting age elevated, not dropped. And who are these sages? Septuagenarians, octogenarians. The age range that gave us Brexit, Reform, Liz Truss, all the greatest triumphs of the past ten years. What about the newest Brexit bonus, eh? A 10 per cent better deal on tariffs than Europe, for a whole week. Well worth it, I’d say.
So can we not do a deal? Raise voting entry at one end, lower it at the other? Hell, I’d even throw my own rights into the pot, too. By 80, here’s what I won’t be doing. Making huge ballot box judgment calls that totally screw over the young generation as they negotiate a world that no longer has me in it. A call that impacts on their job prospects, their finances, their freedom of movement but scarcely grazes me. I’ve had my time. This is theirs. Get to 80 and the average life expectancy is a year. Not even a quarter of a new government’s term. I’ll devote that to mispronouncing the names of foreign footballers and experimenting with opioids. The rest of you can run the world; see how you do.
Dire decision
And something else I won’t be trying: bringing large, predatory mammals back from extinction.
What the hell? Dire wolves? The clue’s in the name, you know. They’re wolves, and they’re dire. They’re huge. Hasn’t anyone seen Game of Thrones?
Louis CK, the comedian, claims the greatest human achievement is that we got out of the food chain. “For every other living thing, life ends by being eaten,” he says. “We’re the only ones who get to die old in a bed.” He describes the dismal nature of human existence if things had stayed as they were. Burning the toast at breakfast, bad news in the post, off to your lousy job and then, “Oh Jesus, there’s cheetahs at the train station…”
That’s what it used to be like. Nobody who was around in the time of dire wolves mourned their demise.
Barney: “Hey, Fred, guess who carked it? Dire wolves.”
Fred: “Well, yabba-dabba- f***in-doo!”
Magas on mute
Not seeing so much of Truss in her stupid Maga cap since the man whose return she celebrated crashed the economy even quicker than she did. Not much from Nigel Farage, either; and Boris Johnson’s weekly column, at the end of one of the most seismic weeks for global economics, decided to address a three-week-old television show instead. Next week, Donald Trump will invade China and he’ll review the Gavin and Stacey Christmas special.
What we are hearing quite a lot about, though, is Trump’s third term. Now that even the slowest understand that what he says is not so different from what he is going to do, the idea is being taken seriously.
Good. If Trump can spin the constitution and try a third term, then Barack Obama could too. Meaning Democrats can stop worrying about trying to find a charismatic candidate and simply play their greatest hit. Bring it on, big boy.
