My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 143, which has received such wholesome support from other Members of Your Lordships’ House. I can sum it up in four words: no taxation without representation.
I do not suggest for one moment that other contributions are not valid. The clause says nothing on that. I do not suggest anything to the wider debate; that has been well laid out. It is a clause set out in extremely simple terms on an incredibly specific point: the disfranchised 16 to 18-year-olds who currently can work and go to war cannot vote for how those taxes are spent and cannot vote for the Government who send them to war. Nothing more, nothing less than that.
I do not decry wider issues; it is simply a point on that specific group of people which is currently disfranchised. The Minister may wish to consider one possible solution: taking the 16 to 18-year-olds out of taxation completely. Amendment 143 offers an alternative solution, where they can be represented. I accept entirely the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, on the complexities in previous years, but what one can now do with digital tax and real-time tax data would overcome those points. It is a simple amendment for a specific group of people, and a cry which has gone through democracies for centuries: no taxation without representation.