Votes for Six-Year-Olds: Could Child Suffrage Revive Democracy? (David Runciman)

**John Burn-Murdoch** (0:00)
Hi, I'm John Burn-Murdoch. Usually, I'm a columnist and chief data reporter at the Financial Times, but next week, I'll be your host on Radical. I'm going to be talking to Derek Gow, who's a British farmer, conservationist and rewilder. For a long time, Derek's been making the case for reintroducing animal species into the areas they used to roam. But now, he's moving from talking the talk to walking the walk, and has decided to do something about it himself.
On his farm in Devon, Derek's been breeding animals that were once indigenous to Britain, but in lots of cases have now been extinct here for centuries. The aim is to inspire the people in charge to go further and faster on releasing these species into the British wild and raise awareness of all of this among the rest of us. Think wild boar, beavers, even wild cats like the lynx, all being reared on Derek's farm with the goal that one day soon these species will again roam freely across our fields, forests and waterways. If you can roam across a waterway, that is.
Now Derek's project is controversial. It's definitely radical and needless to say, not everyone loves it. Some farming and animal rights groups have been up in arms. They're worried about safety, environmental impact, even whether this is actually legal. So there's a lot to get into and we would love for you to join in the conversation with your radical questions for Derek.
If you do have a question on this fascinating topic, please leave us a WhatsApp voice note on plus 443301239480, or you can email us on radical at bbc.co.uk. Now on with this week's episode.

**Sophia Smith Galer** (1:50)
Hello and welcome to Radical, conversations about the underlying forces reshaping our world and the radical ideas that could define the future. I'm Sophia Smith Galer, an author and journalist, and I'm here presenting Radical this week. Today we're talking about an idea that, to a lot of you I'm sure, might sound utterly mad. You will no doubt be aware of the debate around lowering the voting age in the UK to 16, but my guest this week wants to lower it even further. And by some way, he wants to lower it to six. You heard that right. Six years old. This idea was first proposed eight years ago by my guest today, David Runciman. He's an expert on politics, an honorary professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, where he taught for many years, and he's now a full-time podcaster exploring the history of ideas on his podcast, Past, Present, Future.
But David is here to argue that this idea isn't actually anywhere near as radical as it sounds. He thinks this huge change to the electorate would be part of a sensible rebalancing of our politics, that he says has come to favour the old over the young as our society has aged and that it's the perfect expression of the principle of universal suffrage that we claim to observe. He also argues that this huge extension of the vote might just be the kind of shot in the arm that our stale and fractious democracy needs.
Other people, of course, have some questions. As always on this podcast, we'll go into it with an open mind and a critical lens. So with that in mind, I hope you enjoy my conversation with David Runciman.
David, thank you so much for joining us on Radical.

**David Runciman** (3:45)
It's a pleasure.

**Sophia Smith Galer** (3:46)
Remind us what the voting age currently is and sort of quite how significant a difference this would be.

**David Runciman** (3:53)
Okay, that would be a big difference. It's 18 in England. It's 16 in Scotland for Scottish elections.
There is a move to lower it to 16 for the whole of the UK. That's quite controversial. People get quite agitated sometimes about lowering the voting age from 18 to 16

**Sophia Smith Galer** (4:13)
And you want to be more controversial and lower it to 6

**David Runciman** (4:15)
Yeah, I mean, I'm completely aware that for most people, 6 isn't just a bit further down the path from 18 to 16 6, I know this, sounds like lunacy.

**Sophia Smith Galer** (4:26)
Where did this idea begin?

**David Runciman** (4:28)
So actually, genuinely, it began because 6 and 16 sound quite like each other. I was giving a talk to sixth formers who wanted to come and study at Cambridge, where I used to teach, and there were questions at the end. And often sixth formers would say, do you think the voting age should be lowered to 16?
And as a throwaway line, I said, I would lower it to 6 And they all laughed as though I'd said something that was obviously a joke.