It looks as if Gordon is chasing 16-year-olds again. The new prime minister wants to put lowering the voting age to 16 back on the agenda. This comes as no surprise. Gordon Brown was supportive of the Power inquiry, headed by the Labour peer Helena Kennedy, which included recommendations for a reduction in the voting age to tackle youth disengagement.

Not only is he listening to the Arctic Monkeys, Brown is also keen to listen to the kids’ opinions. As chancellor he argued that government grants to local authorities would be accompanied by a requirement to consult children and young people on policy and provision. In his recent constitutional statement, he wanted “to hear from young people themselves, whether lowering that age would increase participation in the political process”.

If you are 16 this must all seem rather flattering. The most important man in the country wants to hear your views, apparently. But before the nation’s teenagers get carried away, the reality is that these proposals are actually cynical and patronising.

In the first place, trying to tackle youth disengagement merely by gerrymandering the demographics reduces suffrage to a numbers game. Ironically, this sends a powerful antipolitics message to youngsters – implying that political engagement counts far less than the quantity of votes. It also avoids confronting the real reasons why so many young people who already have the vote abstain in droves.

It’s said that involving young people earlier in the process will get them hooked. The Power inquiry argued that reducing the voting age would be one way of reducing the many thousands of “deliberately excluded” young people and thus increase the likelihood of their “taking part in political and democratic debate”.

And what debates are the young being invited to join? Adult politics is hardly the home of a vigorous contest between competing visions of the good society. Instead of inspiring future generations with conviction politics, today’s ideology-lite politicians merely offer the process of engagement.

In truth, the debate about lowering the voting age is very much an adult-inspired attempt at injecting some new life into a tired political system. Today’s political elite are obsessed with the gap between themselves and a seemingly apathetic electorate. In a desperate attempt to connect, they are prepared to degrade democracy just to gain a vote of approval.

The most vigorous supporters of the Votes at 16 coalition set up before the last election are not youngsters, but organisations like the Liberal Democrats, the Green party, the Scottish National party, Plaid Cymru, Charter 88 and the Electoral Reform Society. This suggests that young people are being used as a stage army for adult ends.

It has become de rigueur for every policy gathering to have a “youth” speaker on the platform. Invariably this youth voice is greeted with rapturous applause, irrespective of what it has said. In truth, congratulating young people indiscriminately insults their intelligence; patting them on the back not for what they say, but just because they are young.

Undoubtedly, 16-year-olds can sometimes be insightful. But let’s be honest, more often they are likely to be banal because of their immaturity. That is youth’s prerogative. The real problem lies in the fawning way that adult policy makers hang on their every word.

Proposals to lower the voting age make a mockery of democratic sophistication. Maturity and an ability to consider opposing ideas are not the normal characteristics of the average angst-ridden and narcissistic 16-year-old. Undoubtedly, some young people are wise and some adults are immature, but the principle of upholding objective deliberation is important.

Confusingly, the government increasingly legislates for teenagers to be seen as children. The legal age to buy cigarettes has just been raised from 16 to 18. Any adult working with 17-year-olds now has to have a criminal records check; and at the end of his tenure as education secretary, Alan Johnson announced that 16 to 18-year-olds will be forced to stay in education or training or face fixed-penalty fines. So now we have a government actively extending childhood dependence until 18, while proposing that same age group should be allowed to vote.

Some supporters of reform assert that today’s 16-year-olds are indeed politically literate because compulsory citizenship lessons for all 11 to 16-year-olds have prepared them for the challenges of the ballot box. Brown himself has linked any idea of lowering the voting age to a commitment to ever more citizenship training. This is worrying if you consider the endless Ofsted reports which regularly criticise the paucity of citizenship teaching and the fact that most pupils see citizenship as a Mickey Mouse subject.

The main problem about linking the citizenship classes with voting is that it erodes the democratic notion of the voter as an independent actor, because the one thing school rightly denies its pupils is total autonomy.

The authors of the Power report worry that if 16-year-old school leavers wait a few years until they can vote, the so-called gains of formal citizenship education will be lost. However, if pupils are so dependent on being taught to vote and being told what is important to vote for – as citizenship education does – the teachers’ political influence has undue weight. We should be cautious of an argument that suggests educational indoctrination might succeed where political argument has failed.

Even though it is debatable whether 16-year-olds are politically developed enough to vote, they are inevitably “sussed” about craven adult attention.

Initially they may be won over by ingratiating politicians, but they will quickly become bored by sycophantic adults telling them what it’s assumed they want to hear. It is still the case that the young secretly admire those in authority who are “grown-up”, who show indifference to teenage whims and preoccupations and are immersed in the much more compelling world of adult pursuits.

So, Gordon, if you are as serious as you claim, stop stalking teenagers. Simply say something that they might find worth listening to and give them some political ideas worth growing up to vote for.

Claire Fox is director of the Institute of Ideas. India Knight is away

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