YOU can say what you want about Alex Salmond, and quite possibly you have over recent weeks, but his push to get the voting age lowered seems a pretty sensible one to me.

More and more, this age boundary seems like an outdated obstruction for lots of people who have plenty to add to the debate over which direction our country should be heading in.

Many people aged 16 or 17 are very politically aware and engaged. Not all, of course, but then plenty of the 18+ electorate didn’t care enough to actually get out and vote in 2010.

And frankly, I have met too many adults of all ages who probably shouldn’t be allowed to eat their breakfast unsupervised, much less cast a vote. I know that everyone has the right to fill in their ballot paper and should certainly use it - but there are plenty of teenagers out there I’d trust to fill in a ballot paper over all too many fully fledged ‘grown-ups’.

One of the hottest topics of the last election was the subject of university fees - which will have a direct effect on many 16 year olds. By the time another five year term has been and gone, a lot of them will be in their final year at uni - so why shouldn’t they have their say?

And it seems a trifle arrogant that, while a 16 year old can marry, a 17 year old can learn to drive (surely a privilege that comes with more responsibility attached to it than any other given the danger involved - not that you would realise it from the countless morons, young and old, roaring through our streets, risking lives and ramping up the insurance bills for the all the other youngsters who don’t drive like lobotomised chimpanzees. Sorry, that’s probably a column for a different time that has just veered off course at great speed and crashed through the wall of this one), they are unable to have any say on who will be determining the policies that will so closely affect them in the early stages of adulthood.

And this week has proved our party leaders can still make the sort of schoolboy errors that any number of teenagers, savvy to modern technology and the needs of classroom presentations, would not fall victim to.

One can only imagine the string of expletives that must have scorched through David Cameron's mind when he realised his comments to former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg about Her Majesty's purringly positive reaction to the referendum result got picked up by a film crew (still at least he avoided calling anyone a bigot; Gordon Brown must still be kicking himself for that one). It will certainly make his next meeting with the Queen pretty awkward.

And while it may be an impressive high-wire feat to memorize an hour-long party conference speech, it becomes enormously less impressive when you forget key chunks of it during your moment in the spotlight and come unceremoniously thudding down to earth. Of such moments are laughing stocks made - enter Ed Milliband stage left on Tuesday. It certainly makes his already dicey credibility as the next leader of our nation seem a little more, well, dicey.

The point is, if the two men who will battle for control of our nation next May are capable of such cringe-inducing, Homer Simpson-esque ‘D’oh!’ moments (complete, you would hope, with well deserved slaps to their forehead), who is anyone to think that the average 16-year-old doesn’t have the wherewithal to put a cross on their ballot paper in a sensible and considered way?