Occasionally you’ll hear people voicing or agreeing with the the idea that anyone in their 60s or older should be stopped from voting. I first heard it from a person complaining that Brexit was the fault of old people voting leave and it was all right for them because they wouldn’t have to live with the consequences of their actions. A stance that assumes that anyone 60 or over who voted leave on 23 June 2016 would be dead on or shortly after 31 January 2020, negates the vote of those 60 and over who voted Remain and smacks of sour grapes because Leave won.
Now I hear this idea aired in general political talk. The theory appears to be based on 3 misconceptions; all older people are doddering fools unplugged from the realities of and who don’t understand the issues of modern life, they vote the wrong way (not the way the speaker voted) and are going to be dead soon anyway.
It is a theory that exposes the disconnect happening in the minds of people who claim to believe in equality and a fairer society but don’t know what that really means.
A 90 year old today would have seen and been part of the world battling and defeating an attempt to create a world wide fascist dictatorship. For them it was the end of empire and the beginning of commonwealth. They are the generation that voted for a post war Labour government and became the guinea pigs for the great socialist experiment including nationalisation of industry and the creation of the NHS.
Someone in their 80s would have been a child when South Africa began it’s decades long pursuit of apartheid policy and lived to see it’s demise 46 years later. They would have been a first hand witness to or more poignantly could have been a member of the Windrush Generation. They would have been a teenager when a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama refused to give up her bus seat because she was black.
People in their 70s would have seen the passing of the first Race Relations Act. As the second wave of feminist activism began they may have read Betty Friedan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique’ questioning the idea that women could only be happy as wives and mothers while the first contraceptive pills became available, if only to married women. To them the strike at the Ford Dagenham plant in 1968 is not just a cute idea for a film and musical but the engine for change that brought about the Equal Pay Act of 1970 that made separate pay scales based on gender illegal.
Today someone in their 60s is still working, semi retired or just retired. Their youth would have been filled with the budding ideals of equality in housing, education, employment, provision of service and opportunity as the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and Race Relations Act 1976 came into law. They will also remember the work to rule strikes, three day week, brown outs, black outs and ultimately the Winter of Discontent and the the rise of Margaret Thatcher.
This attack does a great disservice to the generations who have seen more upheaval and change in society and civil rights than the people who voice this opinion can comprehend. They watched as the Iron Curtain came down, learned Civil Defence drills in the case of nuclear attack then watched as the Iron Curtain raised again. These are the generations where homosexuality was decriminalised and abortion was legalised.
Throughout the decades these are the people who witnessed, feared, voted, marched and campaigned against the old order in hopes of creating a fairer world. They are the men and women who appear in those old photographs in flared trousers and headbands at protests and pickets. They are also the bright youths decamping to the Isle of Wight and a field in the middle of Somerset for the new phenomenon of the music festival, when Glastonbury was part of the counterculture revolution.
In 2018 we celebrated 100 years since women in the United Kingdom won the right to vote. It would take two more years in America and fifty four for Switzerland to catch up as the last European country to give women voting rights in 1972.
You only have to look at the pictures of the lines of people in 1994 waiting to vote in the first free elections in South Africa after the fall of Apartheid to see what it means to finally have a right that has been denied to you. In Australia the indigenous people were disallowed the vote or had their right to vote restricted until the mid 20th century. The Inuit of Canada were disenfranchised until 1950 and it wasn’t till the 1960s that the First Nations People could vote freely without fear of losing their status as native people.
Now, as we feel like we can pat ourselves on the back for gaining some traction on political discrimination based on racism and sexism a new prejudice rears it’s ugly head, ageism. It’s as if some people need to create a group to target,a bullseye for their bigotry. If nothing else they should consider some of the people they suggest should have the right to vote taken away; Joan Bakewell, John Simpson, Professor Robert Winston, Professor Mary Beard, Karl Jenkins, Nigel Kennedy, Vanessa Redgrave, Ian McKellan and a man considered to be a national treasure David Attenborough.
It is hard to believe that in the 21st century in a country that exported the idea of parliamentary democracy around the world there are still people who don’t understand the basic principle of Universal Suffrage. That a citizen should be free to vote regardless of gender, income, employment status, property ownership, colour, ethnicity, political or religious belief and this civil right should not be withheld on the whim of bigots.
Jo Woodward 