UK to lower voting age to 16 in general elections
The ruling Labour Party pledged to lower the age from 18 ahead of winning power last year. It is among several planned changes to the democratic system.
Some argue Britain's democracy is "in crisis", in particular due to low turnout.
The voting age change is contentious, however, with critics previously arguing it is self-serving as newly-enfranchised teenagers are seen as more likely to support centre-left Labour.
"I think it's really important that 16- and 17-year-olds have the vote, because they are old enough to go out to work, they are old enough to pay taxes, so (they) pay in," Prime Minister Keir Starmer said.
"And I think if you pay in, you should have the opportunity to say what you want your money spent on, which way the government should go," Starmer added.
The government will have to bring legislation before parliament, where it has a comfortable majority, to make the changes.
Only a small number of countries allow 16-year-olds to vote in national elections, according to online databases.
They include Austria the first EU country to lower the voting age to 16 in 2007 as well as Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and Cuba.
- 'Democracy in crisis ' -
Labour ministers insist the change is intended to "modernise our democracy", while aligning general elections with the existing voting age for elections for the devolved regional parliaments in Scotland and Wales.
Other planned changes include introducing automated voter registration which is already used in Australia and Canada and making UK-issued bank cards an accepted form of ID at polling stations.
It follows changes to the electoral law introduced by the previous Conservative government which required voters to show a photo ID. The Electoral Commission found that rule led to around 750,000 people not voting in last year's election.
Harry Quilter-Pinner, executive director of the Institute For Public Policy Research think tank, called the changes "the biggest reform to our electoral system since 1969", when the voting age was lowered to 18.
He noted lowering the voting age and introducing automated voter registration could add 9.5 million more people to the voter rolls.
"Our democracy is in crisis, and we risk reaching a tipping point where politics loses its legitimacy," he added, backing the changes.
The main Conservative opposition however accused Labour of inconsistency as 16- and 17-year-olds will still not be able to stand as election candidates, buy lottery tickets or alcohol or get married.
"This is a brazen attempt by the Labour Party whose unpopularity is scaring them into making major constitutional changes without consultation," the party's communities spokesman Paul Holmes said.
By Joe Jackson
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Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Image: IOL West Indian psychiatrist and decolonial philosopher, Frantz Fanon, wrote that 'the Black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.' He named a violence deeper than physical domination: the psychic capture of the Black subject inside the white imaginary. In the colonial order, the Black man is not seen as a man; he is seen as a body, a phallus, a threat, an object of anxiety. The Black woman is not seen as a woman; she is seen as an overdetermined symbol, hypersexualised, violable, yet erased as a full erotic and political subject. Post-apartheid South Africa continues to move within these patterns. Two judicial sagas, ten years apart – the 2016 exposure of Judge Mabel Jansen and the current tribunal against Eastern Cape Judge President Selby Mbenenge – reveal how deeply colonial logic still shapes our public life, our media, and our institutions. In 2015, during a public debate on my Facebook page, Judge Mabel Jansen entered of her own will. She had been following my social justice feminist work for months, even inboxing me with praise. The debate she chose to join centred on a petition circulating about poor white Afrikaners begging the EU to 'repatriate' them – a discussion already thick with tensions about race, poverty, colonial grievance, and belonging. Into this space, Jansen dropped comments that landed like malfeasance. Here are her exact public statements: '99% of criminal cases I hear are of Black fathers/uncles/brothers raping children as young as five years old. Is this part of your culture? Because then you do not know the truth. And they do it to their children, sisters, nieces, and so on. Is this also attributable to white people somehow, because we take the blame for everything?' 'Fact: Black children and women are raped and abused, and beaten by Black men to an extent that is so sickening that one cannot even cope with it. And that is a fact.' 'Want to read my files: rape, rape, rape, rape of minors by Black families. It is never-ending.' 'Show me one Black woman who has not been molested herself … but culturally that is the viewpoint.' 'Apparently sex is simply to be had when required. And five years old, by the way, is old … apparently it is not regarded as rape, but the exertion of a male's right. And women allow the father to be the first.'When I answered that the majority of Black uncles, fathers, and brothers do most certainly not rape 5-year-olds, she replied, 'Oh yes, they do. 'She also inboxed me privately: 'In their culture, a woman is there to pleasure them. Period. It is seen as an absolute right, and a woman's consent is not required. 'I still have to meet a Black girl who was not raped at about 12. I am dead serious. One of her public posts also asserted that 'while white men also rape, it is not our natural way, whereas with Black men it is a way of life.'As Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks, 'The Negro is eclipsed. He has been turned into a penis. He is a penis.' Jansen's words performed this symbolic reduction: the Black man as violent phallus, the Black woman as voiceless body. For a year, I agitated for the system to act. I wrote articles, raised alarms, contacted advocates and constitutional lawyers, and lodged a formal complaint with the Judicial Service Commission (JSC). Silence. It was only when UCT activist-academic Brian Ihirwe Kamanzi shared the screenshots on Black Twitter a year later, after I drew his attention to them, that outrage ignited. The Black Lawyers Association stepped in. Organisers mobilised. Protests were staged, interviews were had, and the JSC could no longer look away. However, during this uprising, the media played a familiar game – they repeatedly referred to Gillian Schutte sharing private inboxed messages and questioned the morality of this. In short, I became the focus instead of the racist inner workings of the Judge and the fact that she presided over gender-based violence cases in her court. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ They tried valiantly to turn the focus of the protests onto my amorality in order to divert the Black organising against Jansen to me. It failed. In the JSC hearing, Jansen's defence lawyers, using this same trope in their defence, sought to discredit me, portraying me as ideologically radical, emotionally unstable, and mentally unbalanced. How a huge firm with much experience imagined this was a good defence baffled even the judges who presided over the hearing. My own attorney, Tracey Lomax, spoke eloquently to this matter. The defence strategy failed. The JSC prepared for impeachment. Jansen resigned before the process was completed – escaping formal judgment but not public disgrace. My life turned into a living hell with multiple death threats aimed at my family, men with Voortrekker beards parked outside our house every day for a week, tracking our movements, an envelope laced with poison in our post-box which attacked my husband's central nervous system for days, and plentiful murderous social media aimed at instilling a sense of instability in our daily life. The media ignored this onslaught but chose to report on Jansen's claims that her life and the life of her children were being threatened because I wanted my '15 minutes of fame'.Privacy Only Applies to Whites, Then? This political history forms the backdrop to the Mbenenge case. In the current tribunal, private WhatsApp exchanges between Judge President Selby Mbenenge and court secretary Andiswa Mengo – filled with flirtation, erotic humour, playful negotiation, and mutual pleasure – have been hauled into public spectacle as evidence of sexual misconduct. The 'privacy argument' raised to shield Jansen has been discarded without hesitation. Fanon is again essential. In the colonial imaginary, Black male sexuality is imagined as excess, danger, and violence; Black women are imagined as bodies without agency. There is no script to hold African men negotiating desire, speaking of cunnilingus, imagining female pleasure, or showing concern for mutual satisfaction. There is no space to imagine African women as agents of their own pleasure, as partners in joy, as subjects of flirtation and orgasm. This is what Fanon called the white neurosis – a psychic malaise that turns Blackness into a site of phobic fantasy. It is why, in this case, liberal white feminist discourse reproduces the same reductive gaze as Jansen's open white supremacy. Both erase the fullness of Black erotic life. Both install the same whiteness default: the monstrous Black man, the violated Black woman. Yet the messages between Mbenenge and Mengo belong to ukudlalisa ngamazwi – an idiom of wordplay, teasing, humour, and mutual consent, deeply woven into isiXhosa culture. Mengo jokes, withholds, offers, and winks. She participates. She chooses. She suggests. She enjoys. Inside the tribunal, however, Advocate Scheepers has acted not as investigator but as moral accuser, akin to the inquisitors of the 12th-century European witch-hunting inquisitions – cross-examining by assertion, visibly contemptuous when blocked from introducing irrelevant material or over-the-top suggestion, following a script familiar to those who have watched how donor feminism, legal machinery, and liberal media merge into spectacles of moral panic. This script does not rely on careful evidence. It feeds on atmosphere, insinuation, and the rapid buttressing of guilt. Judge President Selby Mbenenge has not denied his role in the mutual flirtation – he has owned his sexuality as well as acknowledged Mengo's right to pleasure without judgment or shaming language. But he has resisted. He has challenged the expansion of charges, insisted on keeping the process tied to the legal question, and unsettled the moral machinery gathering around him. He has foiled the plot to take him down through perception, even while mainstream media is working overtime to create the idea that he is guilty. As in the Jansen case, where the system worried over a white woman's privacy and reputation, then turned its disciplinary gaze onto the whistleblower, in the Mbenenge case, the system moves to discipline a Black man, stripping away the agency of a Black woman, reducing them both to spectacle. Black X and Black AgencyOutside the courtroom, however, another public reads the messages differently. Across social media, across age and gender, people laugh delightedly, joke, make memes, print T-shirts with Mengo's face and the word 'ewe' – marking her participation, her agency, her pleasure. Besides many expressing recognition of 'her gameplay,' no one is going all out to shame Mengo. In this space, indigenous language speakers understand nuance, social cues, cultural code, idioms in isiXhosa and the many languages of South know that when Mbenenge refers to isiXhosa idioms and relational behaviours, he is not harking back to some precolonial animist past as liberal media asserts. He is speaking of DNA memory – the knowledge that African life has not been entirely erased by whiteness, that Ubuntu and cultural coding still live in modern African existence. For white structural racism, this is intolerable. What it cannot understand, it cannot rationalise. What it cannot rationalise, it must sully. What it cannot sully, it must discipline. The inquisitor's grasp moves in to capture, restrain, and reimpose bondage. As Fanon warned, 'the colonised is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.' Any trace of unapologetic African intellectual and erotic agency, humour, or joy threatens this fragile white psychic order. What Machinery is at Work Here? This tribunal, then, is not only a legal proceeding; it is a political operation, where the machinery of whiteness works hand in hand with state power, NGOs, media platforms, and donor-aligned intellectuals to neutralise a judge who refused to serve colonial interests. It is no coincidence that Judge President Selby Mbenenge blocked Shell's seismic blasting along the Transkei coast, protecting ancestral marine lands from exploitation by powerful international actors. Shell (via BG International) and Impact Africa are leading the Transkei offshore exploration bid, while TotalEnergies, QatarEnergy, and Sasol have been advancing their own offshore successes further west, in the Orange Basin off South Africa's west coast. TotalEnergies and QatarEnergy recently secured significant stakes in Block 3B/4B of the Orange Basin, consolidating a major fossil fuel presence alongside Sasol's earlier partnerships. Mbenenge's ruling against Shell must be seen not merely as environmental justice but as a rare legal obstruction to a growing multinational fossil fuel push, largely headquartered in London, Paris, Doha, and Johannesburg. His landmark directives to rename Eastern Cape courts with indigenous African names also signalled a deeper dismantling of the linguistic and legal scaffolding of colonialism — a stance that may help explain why he has been targeted and discredited in other public arenas. These are decolonial interventions that have rattled both local elites and global extractive interests. And now, on Black X, we see why this moment has caught has become a symbol of a man who refuses shaming, a man who playfully, rather than patriarchally, knows his way around women's pleasure, a man whose unapologetic erotic agency defies the colonial scripts that position Black men as either dangerous or deviant. Mbenenge stands for an African masculinity that refuses containment, that speaks of mutual pleasure, that celebrates the playful, relational, and knowing erotic exchanges of African life. He insists that private flirtation is his right as much as it is Mengo's, arguing with conviction in the face of a non-Black legal team linked to an ecosystem of liberal media, ngo's, and, quite possibly intelligence think tanks, all working in tandem to remove him from his position. Together with his brilliant advocate, Muzi Sikhakhane, Mbenenge has, in many ways, put whiteness itself on trial – exposing how it moves through media headlines, NGO scripts, donor-backed moral campaigns, and institutional inquisitions. This is not the end of his story. It is the beginning of a broader political and cultural eruption – a struggle to reclaim African erotic agency, economic and environmental sovereignty, and decolonial justice. Black X will fight back. *Gillian Schutte is a filmmaker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
