The Labour Party, the Nationalist Party’s youth organisation and Alternattiva Demokratika have found something on which to agree: that 16-year-olds should be allowed to vote in local council elections. The Labour Party appears to wish to take this further. From what Joseph Muscat has said, it seems that local councils will be used as a sort of trial run for general elections. He thinks that 16-year-olds see him as young and hip, and will rush to vote for him. I hate to disabuse him of the notion, but I clearly remember thinking at 16 that people of 20 were over the hill.

The news has been greeted with general scepticism by the parents of 16-year-olds, for a variety of reasons that ranges from knowing what 16-year-olds are actually like to understanding that at 16 they don’t give a flying monkey’s about local councils and nor should they do so. After all, plenty of adults don’t give a flying monkey’s about local councils, and I am one of them. With the exciting and interesting lives that 16-year-olds lead today, I can’t imagine them poring over the list of teachers and middle managers and clerks – one grey face after another – presented to them at the polling-booth and thinking how lucky they are to have the vote and how it’s what they’ve been waiting for all their lives.

Being 16 is all about having fun, in between the trials of examinations. Some of the more sour grown-ups may gripe about it, but they’re just envious people who want kids to have a hard time as well. The last thing you need at that age is to have politics foisted upon you, as all those of my generation know only too well. We could have done without it, thank you very much. There is plenty of time for the concerns of adult life when you are actually an adult, but there seems to be a conspiracy afoot to force the very young into a life of far greater responsibility than they need or even want.

Frank Psaila, spokesman for the Nationalist Party’s youth organisation, wrote that it is unacceptable for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds not to have the vote when they work and pay tax. His general drift was that there should be no taxation without representation. Allow me to turn that argument around. What is truly unacceptable is that 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds pay tax. They don’t earn that much, and there is strong justification for allowing them a tax holiday until they turn 18. It’s bad enough that they are not still in education or training at that age, which means that they are likely to stay in low-level jobs for the rest of their lives. So to reverse Mr Psaila’s argument: rather than saying that 16-year-olds should have the vote because they pay tax, what we should be saying is that 16-year-olds shouldn’t pay tax because they don’t have the vote. But you wouldn’t expect a politician to think of it that way, would you?

Paying tax isn’t necessarily a justification for getting the vote, in any case. Plenty of non-Maltese live and pay tax here without being able to vote in general elections.

If we are going to argue that 16-year-olds are little different to 18-year-olds (they’re definitely not, as anyone who recently had some at home knows), then we might as well take the case all the way and argue for a lowering of the age of maturity to 16. Why not, if 16-year-olds are like 18-year-olds? If they are going to get the vote, then they might as well get a driving licence (but they won’t find anyone to insure them), and be fully emancipated to enter into contracts without their parents’ knowledge or consent (but that means they are left to fend for themselves when it all goes haywire; after all, they’re adults). And go on, let’s start publishing the names of those who are under 18 and who are being prosecuted. Why not, if they’re old enough to vote?

Some people dragged in the fact that 16-year-olds can marry, so they should vote. That is another argument that has to be turned on its head. Sixteen-year-olds should not be allowed to marry. The very idea of somebody making such a decision at that age is obscene. The provision in our law, which allows 16-year-olds to enter into a contract of marriage with the express permission of their parents, is an archaism. It is a legacy of the days when pregnancy outside wedlock led to a shotgun marriage, because having a child while unmarried was a shocking disgrace that ruined a girl’s life. That provision in the law was driven by the need to protect pregnant girls from social disgrace. We don’t need it anymore. Let’s scrap it immediately. No 16-year-old is capable of deciding who she (for it is usually a she) wants to spend the rest of her life with.

I really couldn’t be bothered either way if 16-year-olds get the vote. To my mind, a more pertinent question is: why? Why give the vote to 16-year-olds? It’s not as though they’ve asked for it. It’s not even as though they want it. When the news reporters went to the student organisations to ask them what they think, the general consensus was pretty much “Thanks, but no thanks.”

“At 16, you don’t really know what you like in life, let alone who to vote for,” one 16-year-old said, adding that people his age would just solve the quandary by copying their parents. Or deliberately doing the opposite of what their parents do and say, I might add, this being exactly what so-called sweet 16 is all about.

The president of the Junior College Students Council made the interesting point that giving the vote to 16-year-olds is like giving additional votes to their parents. It looks like this particular 16-year-old is more intelligent and insightful than the politicians. He has been the only one to point out so far – though not in as many words – that there is an essential, fundamental and all-important link between emancipation and the vote. When you have the vote but not legal autonomy (until you are 18 you cannot have control over your affairs and your parents are responsible for you), your vote is actually an extension of somebody else’s. That is why, historically, the burning issue of votes for women was intrinsically bound up with the emancipation of women from the legal control of their husbands or fathers.

You would think that with all that needs to be done in this country, the political parties would have found something else to be getting on with.

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The National Council for the Maltese Language has dealt with the varying spellings of 300 Maltese words and has laid down the law, in a notice published in The Government Gazette, as to their official spelling. A committee of 11 academics spent long hours and even days in conference, discussing whether we would be permitted to spell the word for August as “Awissu” or “Awwissu”. They decided on the latter. The committee will now turn its attention to the spelling of English words that have entered the vernacular (Spakxin, anyone? Rawndebawt?), and also to 500 phonetic variants.

I seem to be missing something with this last one. Differences in pronunciation that are due to dialect shouldn’t make for differences in spelling. Scouse is about as different as you can get from what is literally the Queen’s English, but whatever the differences between the way a Liverpudlian pronounces “bread” and the way Prince Charles does, it’s still spelt b-r-e-a-d. I hope we are not going to create any problems on this score, because all this fluffing around with language is tedious enough as it is.

The upshot of it all is that we now have our very own language police. We have been told that though the official spellings have “come into effect immediately”, we have been granted a three-year changeover period in which “to comply”. If we don’t comply, we will be put in the stocks and pelted with copies of Anton Buttigieg’s poetry books and Guze Aquilina’s dictionary.

While I admire all this dedication to lending some sort of order to the language – something to which Samuel Johnson dedicated himself with the English language three centuries ago – there is something ever so slightly insufferable about the bossy-boots tone of some of the more nitpicking diktats. There are some which I just can’t understand, and others which I won’t be obeying, like the rather odd decision to treat north, south, east and west as proper nouns by capitalising them even when they don’t form part of the name of a place or a region.

The most interesting thing about all this is the vast gulf between the professors debating the spelling of “skont” or “skond” and the people actually out here speaking Maltese. The common myth is that it’s only the tal-pepe people with their Inglizati who speak Maltese badly, when it’s not so much that they speak the language badly as that they don’t know how to speak it at all, or in a very limited way. The reality is that most of those who are butchering and mangling Maltese are the ones who speak nothing but. This is not surprising, because the inability to speak anything but Maltese is usually associated with a poor level of education, and that in turn generally means unsound grammar, contorted syntax and slipshod use of vocabulary. I’ve noticed that people who speak only Maltese rarely speak with care and precision. So much attention, much of it scathing, has been paid to the tal-pepe speakers of English that no attention at all has been given to those who speak Maltese as their mother tongue, and who speak it really badly. There seems to be general agreement that anybody who is a native speaker of Maltese is OK and in the clear, even if this person can’t string a simple sentence together.

While we fluff around with “karozza” or “karrozza” (now there’s a conundrum) and “lembuba” or “lenbuba”, people are becoming increasingly incomprehensible.

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