Prompted by this:
The gist of the question is this: not only is the average age of an MP around the 50 mark, but there are very few MPs under the age of 30. This situation is contrasted with that in the past, say 100 years ago, when there were often 100 or so MPs in that category.
Funnily enough, I've just been reading the Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England (of which, no doubt, more anon). The point is made that because life expectancies were low and the period of vigorous life so much shorter than today, it was common for mighty responsibilities to be assumed at very young ages. The example of Edward III declaring war on the Scots and leading an army into battle at the age of 20 is given. No doubt the fact that power so often stemmed from birth rather than success in bureaucratic infighting accentuated this tendency.
One doesn't need to go back as far as the Middle Ages. The President of the United States, for instance, is constitutionally bound to be at least 35 years old. Stanley Fish argued that an age that would today be more consistent with the original intentions of the framers of the US Constitution would be 50, given increasing longevity. So no Barack Obama, no JFK, no Bill Clinton. Incidentally, Mr. Fish was making a point about the nature of law rather than age. And we are quite happy, I think, that the age has not been increased; but neither is there any pressure for it to be reduced.
Coming back to the MPs, I think the point is this. We live in an society which is not only on average much older than those of the past but in one that continues to age rapidly. To demand younger MPs would be to make them unrepresentative of much of the population. And, in a time when the perceived lack of life experience of MPs is increasingly decried, it would seem perverse to increase the problem. In fact, what is incomprehensible to me is that the voting age itself should have come down from the age of 21 to 18 with talk of it coming down to 16. No MPs under 30 and no voters under 30 either! Let's make the most of the wealth of age and experience available to us and leave the young to the gaining of wisdom, rather than depriving them of their youth.
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