Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

As I said in my intervention on the hon. Lady, she has not thought through her argument. She has tried to make two different arguments for her amendment, and they do not really make sense. Her argument that people who will be voting at the next general election, on 7 May 2015, should have a say in the referendum would imply logically that people who are 14 next year—four years before the election—should be able to vote in the referendum too. Even she, with her campaign to lower the voting age to 16, has not proposed that, because she knows perfectly well that a proposal to allow 14-year-olds to vote would get laughed out of court, even by those who propose lowering the voting age to 16. The hon. Lady'sargument does not stack up or make any sense. If we take her argument to its logical conclusion—picking up on the point made about a new voting system kicking in in perpetuity—we should enfranchise everybody alive today, because at some point in the future they will be voting in a general election based on the voting system bought in by the referendum next year. That simply does not make any sense. So we have adopted the usual position in this country, which is that to be able to vote in an election, one must be an adult, which in our system means being 18.