Lord Brady of Altrincham (Con)

My Lords, my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead spoke about the dangers of crypto assets hiding the identity of people making donations to political parties. It is a very important point and it does beg a question that I hope the Minister can answer later and perhaps bring more clarity to in Committee: at what point do non-crypto assets that are derived from crypto assets become acceptable and where will the legislation bite in that regard? I do not have any clear idea of that now and I hope we will gain some clarity later on. The only other point I will make about the funding of political parties in relation to the Bill is to raise a concern about the application of retrospective restrictions. I echo my noble friend Lady O’Neill in my concern about this: especially, as she said, if it might be seen to be targeting a particular political party—and especially, I might add, a particular political party that enjoys building a narrative of victimhood and wanting to suggest that the establishment is constantly out to get it. There is a serious danger in that approach. I want to register my strong opposition to the extension of the vote to certain children: 16 and 17 year-olds. My noble friend earlier made the point that there is no demand, and participation is already very low among 18 to 25 year-olds; I think it is about 20% lower than in the population as a whole. It is not as though people at these very young ages are clamouring to be given the vote. My concern, though, is about the growing inconsistency in our approach as a country and in the Government’s approach to ages of majority. At what point are people considered to be adult citizens able to make their own decisions and choices in life? We already think that 16 and 17 year-olds are too young to be allowed to decide that they want to leave school. They are too young to be allowed to serve in our Armed Forces. Perhaps the most egregious inconsistency of all came in the Tobacco and Vapes Act that we recently passed, where we even moved to the point of raising the age at which people are allowed to buy tobacco by a year every year, which is a wholly novel approach to these matters. Smoking tobacco now with the restrictions already in place is harmful mostly to the smoker; voting can damage the interests of everyone. The choice of a voting age is necessarily arbitrary, but I would argue strongly that it should be consistent. Wherever we fix the age, it should be that point where people are considered able to exercise their own judgment. There are many different points where you could fix the age. We know that the human brain is not fully developed until about the age of 25, so maybe that would be a sensible place to do it, but I suppose it would be a very significant reduction in the existing franchise. The age of 18 has been accepted for a long time. It is a reasonable compromise, and it is a point where people are likely to be able to exercise their judgment as necessary. I fully accept the point from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. Many of us were quite politically engaged at the age of 16—I suspect that we were slightly odd—but it is a minority of people of the age of 16 or 17 who are that politically engaged, that interested and that keen to exercise their democratic franchise. I think it is a big mistake to go down that route. We should look again to establish a single point where we consider a citizen as an adult able to make their own choices and decide their own future. At the moment, we seem to be diverging in all sorts of directions on this issue. I do not think it serves well to assault the very concept of an adult citizen.