Keir Starmer's plan to give 16-year-olds the vote is cynical ploy to achieve this one aim

Keir Starmer’s promise to give 16-year-olds the vote is nothing but a cynical ploy to ensure Labour stays in power for a second term no matter how disastrously it runs the county during its first. It does nothing to benefit young people. The only people it will benefit will be to the Labour Party to give them a bigger majority.

So this isn’t just a cynical ploy – it’s also an anti-democratic one. The Party knows 16-year-olds are never going to vote Tory because, at that age, life is all about ideologies, not realities. But I’m sorry, if a 16 year old can’t leave home, get married, can’t fight in the army and doesn’t pay taxes, then why should he/she be able to vote?

If they were, you’d have politically inexperienced teens who’ve never paid any tax yet who have a say in how those taxes are spent and distributed. And have you noticed it’s never 16-year-olds who are out on the streets screaming for the vote because they feel disenfranchised. It’s always 45-year-old-plus Labour politicians (and Guardian readers and doddery Labour peers) who want it because they want Labour in power at any cost.

I heard one teacher say wearily this week that he wouldn’t trust most 16-year-olds to cross the road, never mind vote, and he’s right.

Can you remember back when you were 16 – we didn’t know or care about politics. We wanted to party, have fun, snog people we shouldn’t, pass a few exams.

We weren’t head down dissecting the ramifications of Government policies.

And if Labour are depending upon 16-year-olds to ramp up a bigger majority – think again. Come election day most of them won’t bother to turn out. The only way they’ll get their backside to the polling station is if Labour lay on buses and refreshments and instructions on where to put their cross. And, of course, I wouldn’t put that past Labour to do exactly that.

Rishi Sunak is offering young people something much more tangible with his plan to bring back a national service of sorts. Yes, the policy should have been properly thought out before it was announced as it’s had parents up and down the land screaming that their babies are not going to be trained for war.

But, actually, this was a bold plan from Sunak. He’s not talking about the old-style military service. He’s proposing youngsters be given a choice between a full time year-long course or one weekend every month volunteering in their community and helping out with the NHS, learning about fire and rescue services, logistics, cyber defence.

And what’s wrong with that? Surely it’s better than young people taking a gap year off to do beggar all (except maybe spend their parents cash) before they decide what to do with their lives? We have a whole generation of young people now who are totally out of touch with their communities because they spend so much time glued to screens, cut-off from the world by their headphones and surgically attached to their smartphones.

How much better would this scheme be for them? It could transform lives, open up opportunities they’d never thought about. And if it came to pass I predict the “mental health” anxieties of many young people would magically disappear if they were actively engaged in being made to feel they were helping their country and their community

And this scheme WOULD instil responsibility towards both country and community whilst creating structure, discipline, routine where, for some young people, there might not be any.

Also this kind of national service would create a sense of national identity and belonging. And people need to feel that that because one day their country and their way of life may come under threat and need protecting. Surely, this National Service idea has to be better than aimless 18-year-olds serving up coffees at Pret or worse – doing nothing at all.

Some of the young people I talked to this week thought it was a fantastic plan.

They loved the idea of helping the NHS, of getting to know about charities and emergency services. And of course I get why some parents are fearful about their kids doing any kind of national service. No parent wants to think about their child going off to war.

But what do they think would happen if, God forbid, there WAS another war – with Russia or China? Conscription would become a state-mandated necessity and we will need a big strong Army because the one we currently have is nowhere near big enough.

We can’t stick our heads in the sand and pretend there’s never going to be another war. Just look at Ukraine and Bosnia, before that.

A form of conscription has worked hugely successfully in Norway for the last three decades. Every 18 year old is “interviewed” for conscription but only 17 per cent are chosen and so it's seen as a big honour – a bit like being chosen for Oxbridge.

People in Norway compete to be chosen for the military. Even the country’s Princess Ingrid Alexandra is doing her military service in an Engineering Battalion.

Now Sweden is reinstating conscription while Denmark conscripts fit young men over 18 years to do four months of military service. Yet people here are behaving like Sunak has suggested something barbaric. It’s the opposite – done right it could be change young lives for the better. It’s just a pity the PM chose to throw out this policy before it had been properly thought through and could have been presented to people in such a way as not to scare the bejesus out of them.