'We've got to get this right' on lowering voting age, Lord Blunkett tells LBC

Speaking to LBC's Natasha Devon, Lord Blunkett has warned that "our democracy is right on the edge, and we've got to get this right" after the government announced plans earlier this week to lower the voting age to 16 across the UK before the next general election.

He warned of "real danger" across the democratic world as "old institutions are being trashed" and "constitutions are being undermined."

It comes after Lord Blunkett, writing in The i Paper on Thursday, said that extending the right to vote to 16 and 17 year old called for a system to help young people understand the responsibility.

Asked by LBC'S Natasha Devon what such a system might look like, Lord Blunkett, who served as Education and Employment Secretary from 1997 to 2001, said: "It looks like stepping up the Citizenship and Democracy programme, which I started over 20 years ago and has been taught in many secondary schools, but by no means all."

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The former Labour MP said improved teaching of citizenship and democracy in schools would be "transformational in terms of the young people knowing not just the institutions and the system and the process, but also looking out for what's happening on social media, the dangers of false untruths and the way in which we're being attacked from outside the country online."

Asked about concerns that extending the vote to 16 and 17-year-olds could leave teachers vulnerable to accusations of bias, Lord Blunkett said that a process to avoid bias had been worked out "25 years ago" and that "we would just need to dust that down and make sure that everyone's clear that this will be inspected by Ofsted, that the materials that are used will be very clearly vetted, that this should be an all-party approach as it was 25 years ago." He said "any blips in the system" would be caught by regular inspections.

Lord Blunkett, who is a trained teacher, said one of the things he learned from his time as a teacher was that "you try and push your views down the throats of young or old, and they'll react to it. So people who do try and peddle their own politics are making a very big mistake."

He warned that many headteachers and teachers are not currently equipped to teach children about voting.

"They know how to vote, they know what voting is all about, but they don't have the intricacies of being able to teach it," he said.

"And I think media literacy alongside political literacy, which is what citizenship and democracy teaching is about, alongside financial literacy, because that's another element that we're all concerned about.

"Get this right and you'll have a new generation who not only know what they're talking about, but can carry that responsibility forward. And once they've voted, all the evidence is that they'll vote again."

Lord Blunkett also said he believed smaller parties like the Green Party and Reform UK would be more likely to benefit from the lowering of the voting age than Labour or the Conservatives.

"It's probably going to benefit the Greens and to some extent Reform, because young men are being attracted to Reform more, than it will be the more traditional Labour and Conservative parties."

"But that's not the point. The point is to equip young people to make their minds up, to critically think, to be able to challenge intelligently and in a socially acceptable way."