HOW POLITICS HIT THE PLAYGROUND
If you ever feel nauseated by the spectacle of a Ritalin-fuelled child-activist clutching a glossy placard she got from some far-left groomer, join the club. Politics should never be a game for kids, but the Marxist goon-squad will sink to any degrading depth in pursuit of power. If perverting children can help install the communist utopia, that’s just the price of progress. But, credit where it’s due, it was short-sighted greed and rampant consumerism that birthed the era of kiddie-pol. That's how the left got to create schools that double as indoctrination camps.
THE SUMMER OF SIXTY-NINE
In 1969 British children were already being actively groomed to take part in the political process. I know, because that autumn, at the age of 12, my school began training me to become a politician. I was one of a select few recruited into the debating society by a discreetly politicised English teacher. We were taught the language of polite debate, schooled in the art of public speaking, given an open invitation to join the gravy-train bound for Parliament.
The timing was significant: in April of 1969, Harold Wilson’s Labour government had lowered the UK voting age from 21 to 18. The usual explanation given for this dramatic shift was that elite politics was merely “responding to the growth of youth culture”. To this day it is falsely claimed the establishment were genuinely frightened by the popularity of radical protest movements at universities and colleges.
These reasons don’t convince. The establishment never responds to external pressure by conceding territory, unless a superior agenda is in play. Having personally experienced the consequences of Wilson’s electoral re-jig of ‘69, I can see -with the benefit of hindsight- some rather different motives behind the introduction of politics into the playground.
Once 18 year-olds were in the frame, it was only a matter of time until uppity munchkins like Greta Thunberg would be offered centre stage. It seemed comical at first, but in the blink of a polar bear’s eye we had 10 year-olds chanting for climate fascism, limitless migration, trans-rights, and whatever else the Borg decided to stuff into their empty heads. Kids, you see, are tomorrow’s gullible voters.
PERSONA NON GRETA
We are not all Gretas, however. In 1970’s Glasgow, my own teenage participation in the political bunfight made me persona non grata at pretty much any other group activity. The forerunner of today’s cancel-culture, the social exclusion of kiddie-pols was a cruel but well-deserved punishment. On reflection, it probably explains a lot about the kind of twitching, insecure neurotics who populate our governments today.
For better or worse I became a successful junior loudmouth, my political career peaking at the age of 17 with victory in the Scottish Daily Express schools debating contest. But I had learned too well. Repeated dispatch-box experiences taught me only to despise the performative sham of democracy, and to mistrust politicians of all types. I left school, Glasgow and politics behind in 1977, have never cast a vote and doubt I ever will.
Unfortunately for Scotland, the debating-society-to-Parliament pipeline was up and running, and between 1980 and 2000 I watched a selection of the second-rate rivals I used to thrash elbow their way into safe seats in Westminster. A decade later, the grim consequence was an ascendant Scottish National Party which turned a regiment of immature, half-educated twats into MPs, an embarassment from which the nation is unlikely to recover.
But fifty years on we may still wonder why -amid the swirling smoke-clouds of flower-power- was the voting age in Britain lowered so suddenly -and why by three whole years?
TEENAGE RAMPAGE
The short answer is money. In the 1960’s, Britain’s empire was in retreat and America was eagerly grabbing the role of global-superpower. Innovations and fashions from New York and California were slavishly imitated on the UK streets, with British elites pedalling fast to catch up. Snarling at the heart of this consumerist zoo was a creation which would obsess 20th century commentators the way Frankenstein’s monster terrified the Victorians. That creation was the teenager.
The entire project was a triumph of advertising, the mass-marketed image of the rebellious teen being fresh, cool and irresistible -to teenagers at least. The post-war west was being re-tooled and sweet consumerism dangling its golden fruits. Nothing on earth is easier than parting fools from their money, and in the sixties, commercial logic demanded that kids be armed with cash and provoked into spending it. On both sides of the Atlantic, tax-laws became distinctly elastic where fleecing the young was concerned...
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Ian Andrew Patrick
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