Clever people often believe that their cleverness gives them the right to control other people. Nowhere is this more manifest than in nanny state Britain.
So fixated was Public Health England on shielding us from our own bad decisions that when an infectious disease arrived on our shores the quango was woefully unprepared. Junk food advertising bans were prioritised over protecting us against an epidemic.
And so determined are politicians to insulate us from hardship that they attempt to regulate anything that moves.
Arguably the most troubling recent development concerns the tacit raising of the age of majority. Since 1969 it has been accepted that we are treated as adults by law from 18. The age had broadly trended down over the years. Until 1970, for instance, you had to be 21 to vote. There are still outliers – the age of consent is 16, giving blood 17, you cannot rent a car until 21 – but the law has generally coalesced around 18 as the age when people possess the physical and mental maturity to make their own choices.
Yet this is now being unwound. The gambling white paper announced on Thursday proposed enhanced checks on the finances of the under-25s amid concern they are unable to regulate their impulses and make rational decisions. It’s been recommended that stakes should be limited to a maximum of between £2 and £4 for online slot machines. A recent government review – perhaps inspired by New Zealand’s law prohibiting anyone born after 2008 from ever buying tobacco – recommended increasing the age at which someone can buy cigarettes by a year annually until they are outlawed. We’d be left in the absurd situation where a 45 year old can buy cigarettes but a 44 year old cannot. But in the end, the prohibitionists would get their way.
And next month, transport minister Richard Holden will consider a ban on new drivers under the age of 25 carrying young passengers in their vehicles. This is a bad policy whichever way you look at it. Around a fifth of all mothers of newborns are 24 and under: would they be blocked from ferrying their children around? The age group is responsible for fewer collisions than the over-85s, indicating that the policy is not driven by safety concerns. And it will edge us closer towards a ‘papers please’ society, with all passengers required to carry ID at all times on the off-chance an overzealous officer pulls them over.
We’re in danger of creating a two-tier society whereby those in their late teens have fewer rights than older people. And infantilisation will beget infantilisation. If under-25s are viewed as teenagers, they will be treated as such. More activities – alcohol is the obvious next step on a slippery slope – will be placed beyond their reach. And if young people aren’t responsible enough to spend money, why expect them to earn it? Already, you have to be in some form of education or training until 18, with some MPs eager to raise the official school leaving age from 16.
How can young people be expected to shoulder the responsibility of homeownership when they can’t take a road trip with friends, or gamble, or smoke? What a neat get-out-of-jail-free card that would hand to a government which has stubbornly refused to address our housing crisis.
There is a glaring inconsistency at the heart of this emerging generational division. Many of those who favour limiting the activities of the under-25s are the very same individuals who support lowering the voting age to 16. Labour’s shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, for instance, is keen to copy the Kiwis’ cigarette law. Yet in 2016, and again in 2022, he voted in favour of reducing the voting age to 16.
Too much ground has been lost to killjoy nannies over 13 years of Conservative government. Our political elite is obsessed with output, rather than outcomes, and judges success by the number of laws introduced rather than whether those laws are effective. Furthermore, little attention is paid anymore to the competing claims of freedom and safety, and whether they have been adequately balanced. The benefits of regulation are an easy sell: fewer young people losing money on slot machines. But the unintended consequences are an afterthought: prohibition will force addicts onto an unregulated black market.
Look at what people have done by the age of 25 in the past. Bill Gates had set up Microsoft. Albert Einstein had written key papers. William Pitt the Younger was running the country (and then there’s Alexander the Great, who had conquered half the known world). Treating people as children when they are at their most creative, and often unencumbered, phase of life is wrong. No state, however benevolent, can eliminate risk from our lives. But it can eliminate enjoyment in pursuit of it.
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