My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, would like to hear views from people in other parts of the United Kingdom on the implications of this order. He is right: there are implications. You cannot compartmentalise the United Kingdom and have such drastically different franchises in different parts of it. Of course, Scotland has its own law, and we understand that there are differences and nuances, but the one area that brings everybody together is elections to our national parliament and elections to the European Parliament, and below that we have other tiers. It seems utterly unsupportable in the long term that we have this pick-and-mix process where you have a franchise here for this, a franchise here for that, and a franchise here for somewhere else. It is just nonsense.
Without getting into the merits of the voting at 16 issue—a debate I am very happy to get into and certainly some of the arguments are meritorious and others need consideration—the methodology that has been adopted in this case is indefensible. Since 2012,
and, indeed, even long before that, the Government have got Scotland completely wrong. The question was wrong and the timing was wrong. We are reacting to the tyranny of populism and nobody is thinking this through. If Alex Salmond got up and said, “15 years old”, we would be saying 15 years old today. He got his question, which was the wrong question, and everything he wanted. The logic is that if we do that, everything will go away. It will not.