At the age of 16, you can with consent go out to work, fight for your country, become a company director — and pay taxes for the privilege of doing all three. What you can’t do is vote on how those taxes are spent.

Today in the House of Commons, Labour MP Jim McMahon is trying to change that with a Private Members’ Bill that would change the law and give the 1.5 million 16- and 17-year-olds in the country the vote. The Tory Government will probably succeed in blocking it, using obscure procedural tricks. But that would be a mistake for our democracy and their party. For this paper makes a prediction: the voting age will be reduced to 16 at some point in this Parliament.

The first rule of politics is learning to count, and the Government doesn’t have the numbers to stop it. And rightly so, because the arguments made against reducing the voting age don’t stack up. First we’re told that 16- and 17-year-olds should be in school, not voting booths. The reason Theresa May gives for opposing change is that “we expect people to continue in education or training”.

That’s true, we do — and it’s a good thing that most 16- and 17-year-olds are in school. But it’s also true that we want most 18- and 19-year-old voters to continue learning and training, which is why the Government has expanded apprenticeships and made student loans more generous.It’s perfectly possible to learn and vote at the same time, indeed you might argue that we should be encouraging people to do both throughout their lives.

Patronising tone

Then young people are told, in a rather patronising tone, that they can’t handle big questions about the future of the country. Yet one of the exciting features of our age is that more and more young people are engaged in the discussion about that future. Three years ago the House of Commons entrusted 16- and 17-year olds in Scotland with the biggest question of all: should their nation separate from the UK? Many Tory backwoodsmen said no, but they were overruled.

It’s a shame they weren’t overruled on the European referendum too. For as Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Conservative leader, wrote afterwards, “the democratic effect turned out to be entirely positive” in Scotland’s referendum. Ninety per cent of these newly enfranchised young citizens registered to vote. Their engagement and interest electrified the referendum campaign.

By polling day, Ms Davidson says, “no one was arguing that extending the franchise had been a mistake”. That is why the law was changed north of the border and 16 and 17-year-olds now vote in all Scottish local and Holyrood elections. It is only elections to Westminster where, like their counterparts across the UK, they are told to stay at home while — ironically — their school is turned into a polling station.

Finally, there is the real reason Downing Street opposes the lower voting age but dare not say it — they think young people won’t vote for them. That is entirely defeatist and depressing. As Damian Green, Mr May’s beleaguered deputy, noted when he backed lowering the voting age: the Conservative Party “seldom prospers” when it “appears to reject the world around it”. So we are finding out.

Strong Conservative leaders, from Benjamin Disraeli to Stanley Baldwin, backed the extension of the franchise in their day because they anticipated the inevitable, led the change and had the confidence to see they could reap the electoral dividend. Votes at 16 are coming in the next couple of years. That’s good news for our democracy. This paper supports it. We will see whether this Tory leadership has the wherewithal to see more than a few days ahead, and get on the right side of history. The omens are not good.