British youth looking into the abyss of EU-less future
Younger generations had most to gain by staying in Europe
For all the societal fault lines the Disunited Kingdom revealed in the harsh morning after — North versus South, English versus Scot, urban versus rural, moneyed versus not — none gaped more cruelly than the gobsmacked anguish of the young.
To be millennial or younger in the U.K. today is to be staring at an unwanted, world-shrinking Brexit delivered by their addled grandparents. Close to three-quarters of the very people who will live longest with the consequences of Britain’s coming divorce from Europe wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
They are, in a word, devastated. And they raged, digitally. As you would expect, aghast at what many viewed as a decision bordering on filicide.
One especially well-travelled tweet put it this way: “I’m not giving up my seat to the elderly anymore. Eye for an eye.”
Another — this too went viral — was the horrified synopsis of a 25-year-old Londoner working in Florence as a research associate. Posting only as “Nicholas” on the bottom of a Financial Times story, he itemized what he saw as the multiple tragedies of Brexit.
“The younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries,” wrote Nicholas, later identified by Buzzfeed as Nicholas Barrett.
“We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors.”
Time used to be on their side. Just a few more years, U.K. demographers projected, and the faded memories of an empire that helped steer elderly Britons toward Brexit would die away. The young — Britain’s component of the outward-looking, globalist, digital natives on whom our interconnected, interdependent future lies — would inherit all.
Now they’re feeling more like alternate universe victims of the fabled “death panels” that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin imagined out of whole cloth as the hidden agenda of Obamacare. Except these were “life panels” — Britain’s most aged citizens, many in their final years, redrawing the world smaller, likely for decades to come.
In the avalanche of research on what Britons want, one study last week plugged pension data into a forecast not only of preference by age but also average lifespan. It projected that Britain’s youngest voters, 18-24, would endure the consequences for an average of 69 years. Those 65 and older, on average, will be gone in 16.
Beyond anger, frustrations erupted among British teens that as recently as last year thought enfranchised democracy might soon include them. A 2015 bid to lower the voting age to 16, backed by Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, looked to have a chance — until the government shut it down, citing cost.
British writer George Chesterton, among many others, saw the generational chasm coming — and took cheekily to the pages of British GQ with a completely absurd call for a “total ban on anyone of retirement age voting in the EU referendum as the only way of stopping the Leave campaign.
“The idea hardened in me after a long conversation with my father, which included the words ‘conspiracy,’ ‘the central powers’ and ‘they hate us.’ ”
The fulcrum of Chesterton’s argument: “If a 15-year-old, whose entire economic and political future could be determined by the referendum, can’t vote, then neither should a 75year-old, whose entire economic and political future could be determined by the fluctuating price of mince.” On twitter Friday, Chesterton reposted the piece, adding: “Last week I wrote this as a joke. Now I’m not so sure.”
More’s the pity, then, as Britons hover today over the shattered torso of their modern-day Humpty Dumpty, wondering what next. Once an empire that outreached all, wielding a world-shaping hold over wealth and territory — it feels more like a broken nursery rhyme now. Its constituent pieces angry, jagged shards.
U.K. voters built a wall against Europe. A big, beautiful wall, you might say. They climbed it. Proclaimed it. Then promptly tumbled off in a fistbumping pratfall for the ages.
The fractures are almost too many to count. Scotland and Northern Ireland, both now eyeing Brexits of their own to regain ties with Europe. If whatever glue emerges now doesn’t hold, that way lies the end of Britain itself, with only Little England and even Littler Wales left to wave the Disunion Jack.
And London, alone, with the young wanting what democracy has told them cannot be.