Sixteen- and 17-year-olds could be given the right to vote if Labour wins the general election, Keir Starmer has confirmed.
“If you can work, if you can pay tax, if you can serve in your armed forces, then you ought to be able to vote,” the Labour leader said while campaigning at a football ground in the West Midlands.
His comment suggested that a pledge to extend the franchise to younger voters is likely to appear in Labour’s manifesto. Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, said the policy document was ready to be published.
Labour has been considering whether to give 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote for at least a year. The move would add about 1.5 million people to the electorate. The voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1969.
Scotland and Wales have already allowed 16- and 17-year-olds voting rights for local and devolved parliamentary elections.
According to psephologists, younger people are significantly more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, but are also less likely to turn out on polling day.
Starmer was campaigning on Saturday at the Stafford Rangers FC stadium, the latest football ground at which the Labour leader has appeared in recent weeks. Earlier in the week, he kicked off his election campaign at Gillingham FC in Kent.
The pattern was an attempt to pitch himself as a “man of the people”, according to the BBC political journalist and commentator Laura Kuenssberg. Starmer was projecting the message: “If I wasn’t trying to be prime minister, I’d be here having a pint and maybe kicking a ball around,” she said in a podcast.
It is the latest move by the Labour leader to attempt to put distance between himself and Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, who has been criticised for being out of touch with the electorate during his premiership.
On Saturday, a Sunak ally was forced to deny suggestions the prime minister was “taking the day off” after a faltering start to the general election campaign. Labour’s Jonathan Ashworth accused Sunak of “hiding away in his mansion”.
The Guardian had been told by three sources that the prime minister was to spend the day at home amid Conservative jitters about the party’s prospects and the shock announcement by Michael Gove that he would not stand for re-election.
Bim Afolami, the Treasury minister, said Sunak would be on the campaign trail, telling Sky News: “I don’t know what he’s got planned but I know he’s campaigning in Yorkshire today.”
Early in the day, Sunak had a breakfast meeting with local veterans at a Wetherspoon’s in Northallerton in his Richmond constituency. He joked about the state of his suit after his rain-drenched announcement of the election date in Downing Street on Wednesday, and said he was “pumped up” about the next six weeks.
But a further blow was dealt when Home Office figures showed a record number of people arriving in the UK on small boats since the start of the year. An increase in arrivals on Friday took the total so far for 2024 to 10,170. The comparable figure for 2023 was 7,326.
Sunak has claimed the government was on track to “stop the boats”, one of his key goals as the UK gears up for a general election on 4 July, and that the intention to put migrants on planes to Rwanda is having a deterrent effect. Since calling the election, he has said no planes will take off before votes are cast.
Both Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, and Rachel Reeves, his Labour counterpart, highlighted the need to lower taxes for working people. Hunt focused on high earners, saying they were disincentivised by “distortions in the tax system”, which would be corrected if the Tories won another term.
In an interview with the Telegraph, he also described inheritance tax as “pernicious” and “profoundly anti-Conservative”, but he refused to say a promise to cut it would be included in the Tories’ election manifesto. “I hope it’s something that over time a Conservative government would be able to look at,” he said.
Rachel Reeves also said she wants taxes on working people to be lower, and promised never to “play fast and loose” with public finances. She said she intended to lead the “most pro-business Treasury in our history”.
In a direct appeal to Tory voters via an article for the Daily Mail – given front page treatment by the right-wing paper – Reeves attacked the Conservatives’ economic record over the past 14 years. “No one is going to give a box of matches back to the arsonists who burnt the house down,” she wrote.
Her first step would be “to deliver economic stability with tough spending rules so we can grow our economy and keep taxes, inflation and mortgages as low as possible”, she wrote. “I do not believe you can tax and spend your way to growth, and I didn’t come into politics to raise taxes on working people. Indeed, I want them to be lower.”
