My past self rebukes my present self for saying this, but there is one thing that Labour let slip over the last few days that the Tories would do well to seize upon. <\/p>\n
On October 28th Labour submitted “wrecking amendments” to the bill that authorised the election that would have extended the franchise to sixteen and seventeen year olds, and also to EU citizens.<\/p>\n
Nothing came of it. The two amendments were not selected<\/a> for debate by the Deputy Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, on the grounds that they were not relevant to the motion. In normal times one would have assumed that of course amendments proposing major constitutional changes would not be permitted to be tacked on to another bill as an afterthought, but in the last days of the era of John Bercow there is no “of course” about it. He might well have seen votes for sixteen year olds and foreigners as his last gift to the nation. Fortunately his deputy was in the Speaker’s chair on this occasion.<\/p>\n The proposal to give the vote to 16-17 year olds was an obvious ploy to gather the votes of da yoof while they still know little of the world beyond what their teachers have told them. I would imagine that the sight of Labour advocating this arouses more weariness than outrage. Votes for foreigners is a different matter. Although the mainstream media lost interest as soon as it was clear that the Deputy Speaker would not allow the amendments, my subjective impression is that to many ordinary people the news that Labour apparently wants to add around three million<\/a> non-citizens to the electoral roll almost eclipsed the news about the date of the election.<\/p>\n I may be wrong about this. I was abroad for the last week and did not spend much time on the internet. Thus what I did see might have been too small a sample from which to draw conclusions. On the other hand, perhaps the fact that I was only skim-reading allowed me to see the spike in anger more clearly. I was not in a position to collect hyperlinks, but, trust me, a lot of people saw this in terms of Labour wanting to replace<\/em> its former voters. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My past self rebukes my present self for saying this, but there is one thing that Labour let slip over the last few days that the Tories would do well to seize upon. On October 28th Labour submitted “wrecking amendments” to the bill that authorised the election that would have extended the franchise to sixteen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34,25,8,26],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=690"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":702,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/690\/revisions\/702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatrealignment.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}