WHERE Wales leads, shall we in England choose to follow? I’m not talking about the forthcoming rugby Six Nations championships, but the decision by the Welsh government to allow 16 and 17-year-olds to vote in some elections.

The Welsh proposals, announced this week, will give over-16s the right to vote in council elections, along with foreign nationals legally resident in the country. In addition, the government wants to pilot new voting methods – such as digital voting, and polling booths in supermarkets, leisure centres and railway stations – to reflect people’s “busy lives”.

Hmm. Are people really too “busy” to get to a polling station once in a while? I know we’ve had a recent flood of elections and referenda here in Britain – but even at the going rate, it’s barely more than once a year. Are we really expected to buy into the idea that people need the convenience of casting a vote while they’re buying their carrots?

Alun Davies, the Welsh cabinet secretary for local government and public services, said this week that the proposed move is to boost the number of registered electors, as well as making it easier for people to cast their votes. “We must do more to make the process more attractive, welcoming and transparent,” he said, while adding that too many people, particularly the young, are “disengaged” from the political process.

All of which is very interesting, if nothing exactly new, as Scottish 16- and 17-year-olds are already allowed to vote in Scottish elections. So will English youngsters soon be joining their newly-enfranchised peers – and can we envisage a time in the near future when 16 becomes the age of enfranchisement for general elections in the UK? Mr Davies claims that the young are “disengaged” from politics – but I wonder if that is really the case. It may well be that, rather than being disengaged, the majority of those under-18 teens are simply “not yet engaged”. Until a person has a stake in society on their own terms (for example, being employed and paying tax – or simply not living at home under their parents’ rules and regimes), “engagement” with politics is almost literally a purely academic construct.

Certainly, there are many teenagers who are enthused enough about the political process to tear themselves away from their smartphones and to channel their thoughts into Brexit, international aid and matters of a fiscal nature. Their enthusiasm is to be both nurtured and applauded. But that is hardly enough in itself to justify lowering the voting age to 16.

Interestingly, in the same week as the announcement from Wales, the so-called “youthquake” which delivered Labour’s, er, third election defeat in a row has been exposed as a myth, by the British Election Study. The group’s research revealed that while Labour increased its support among younger voters (and the party’s slick and successful social media campaign team played an absolute blinder in order to achieve this), turnout at last year’s election was similar to what it was at the 2015 election and “it could even have gone down”, according to one of the report’s authors.

Rather than making it easy for younger people to vote (and why not go the whole hog and employ election officials to turn up at teenagers’ houses – not before 2pm, though – to ask them who they would like to vote for?), surely we should be addressing why so many people over the age of 18 are disengaged with the political process.

We live in the most fascinating and fast-changing political times of recent history. I have just finished Tim Shipman’s latest weighty tome Fall Out – A Year of Political Mayhem, which is so stuffed with drama that the reader has to keep reminding himself that this isn’t a work of fiction. Yet millions of voters simply can’t be bothered to go out and vote. While the turnout at last year’s snap election was the highest for 25 years, with 32 million votes cast out of a possible 47 million, that’s still 15 million adults who simply chose not to vote.

Of course, it would be naive to expect voter turnout approaching 100 per cent (that only happens in the most corrupt of corrupt states), but we should certainly be doing more to engage the already-enfranchised, before we rush to add increasing numbers of “disengaged” voters into the process.

Lowering the voting age has long been a popular aim of Labour and the Lib Dems, largely because younger voters with relatively little life experience tend to lean towards socialist views. I feel sure the day will soon come when England does indeed follow in the footsteps of our Scottish and Welsh neighbours by enfranchising people aged 16. After all, as the old trope goes, if you’re old enough to get married surely you’re old enough to vote. But if and when we do, let’s at least expect them to do the democratic process the courtesy of actually getting themselves to a polling station to vote.

Choosing your next prime minister in view of the vegetable section of a supermarket? Perish the thought...