It can’t be much fun to be young and British today
Even before the results of the Brexit vote had been properly analysed, it was clear that the decision had been taken by older people.
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But the time the analysis was complete, we knew that 73 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 had voted for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union. Now, they feel their future has been destroyed, or at the very best, reshaped in a way that they had never imagined. Right on the cusp of adulthood, as they were planning their education, working lives, travel, and new experiences, perhaps even starting a business with a bit of EU funding, they had all of that smashed to smithereens. And what was worse is that it was completely unexpected, right out of the blue.
I don’t mean that the result was unexpected, but that the shift in destiny was. Nobody ever thought, a year ago, that there would be a referendum that would change the course of young British lives, permanently and for every generation to come. Imagine growing up taking all of that for granted as a permanent state of affairs, completely unquestioned and unchangeable, and then having it all snatched away from you. They have every right to be angry, furious, desperate – young people have been interviewed by all the major news channels since Friday morning, and they are completely disillusioned by what has been done to them by their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.
The generational difference in attitude and thinking could not have been more obvious than it was in those interviews. Those in their 20s clearly think of themselves as Europeans. They think ‘European’. And it wasn’t only the ones interviewed on the streets and in the coffeeshops of Hackney and Soho, either. One man of around 20, interviewed at a livestock market in the Midlands, who couldn’t have looked less hip, told the BBC interviewer with a look of distress: “It’s more important to me to be in the European Union than in the United Kingdom.”
His views and those of his contemporaries could not have been more different to those of the middle-aged and elderly people who a Sky News interviewer spoke to in Harlow Town, just 20 miles from Hackney – 20 miles by train that take you into a completely different environment. One shabbily dressed woman in her 50s, with unkempt hair, rough skin and very bad teeth, sat in a coffee-shop where all the customers are ‘Little Englanders’ and all the staff are immigrants, and said to the interviewer in a barely comprehensible accent: “We’re British. We just want us. We don’t want all the other people.” Other customers had similar views. “We want to be England again.” They may get that, literally, as Scotland prepares for another referendum on independence and Northern Ireland begins muttering about a united Ireland.
On the BBC World Service yesterday afternoon, I heard a man called Peter, interviewed in Yorkshire, who said that he was felt “jubilant” and “ecstatic” about the result. “We have taken back control,” he said. “But I have a son of 30 who is not happy about it. I don’t think he’s too happy with me. But if I had known it would affect my son’s future, then I would have voted to remain.” I shook my head so hard in disbelief when I heard this that I almost took my eyes off the road. I too have a son of 30 (and another two of almost 30) and we have discussed this referendum and the consequences of potential outcomes at length. And this when only one of us had the vote. The thought that both father and son, living in England, had the vote and the father did not even stop to think about his vote would affect his own son’s destiny was simply incredible to me – and that the son did not tell the father until it was too late, and then only to get angry at him – how do these things happen?
In Malta’s referendum on EU membership, my primary concern was that I did not want my children in particular and their contemporaries in general to suffer the terrible, inspiration-and-potential-destroying constraints that I and my contemporaries did. I wasn’t even thinking of myself or how it affected me. I was motivated literally by desperate determination that they were going to have that EU passport even if I had to claw Alfred Sant and Joseph Muscat to pieces with my bare hands and leave them bleeding on the pavement (metaphorically speaking, of course, lest Chris Cardona thinks otherwise).
As I watched the Remain campaign unfold, I couldn’t help but notice that this was the most important thing that they missed out on: the appeal to emotion, to a sense of the future, to responsibilities towards future generations, to the new generation. Young people, as the result shows, have that sense of the future already, by virtue of their age. But almost everybody over the age of 35 has children, grandchildren or at least nephews and nieces, and the only way to win a referendum on EU membership is by reminding them that it is the future of these children, grandchildren, nephews and nieces that they are gambling with. If the Remain campaign had addressed older people by reminding them about what’s best for the younger ones they love, they would have won. Instead, they allowed the Leave campaign to appropriate that argument, perversely against the best interests and wishes of the young.
When, 14 years ago, I did some consultancy work for the Maltese government on Malta’s own EU membership referendum, this was my core piece of advice: an appeal to altruism and selflessness. Older people would be inclined to vote for the status quo, afraid of the perceived strangeness and risks of EU membership. But only the oddest parents and grandparents will not move heaven and earth and walk across a minefield if told that this will give their children untold prospects and opportunities and open up a whole wide world for them. Tens of thousands of Maltese parents and grandparents (yes, and even great-grandparents) voted for EU membership to open up that world for their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nephews and nieces. If they hadn’t been thinking about them, they would probably have voted against, just like the older Brits last Thursday.
The core messages in Malta’s battle for the EU were “Do it for them” and “Għall-uliedna”. Those messages were completely absent from Britain’s Remain campaign, which preferred to focus on appeals to logic rather than to emotion. The appeal for future generations, however, would have tied both logic and emotion neatly together, and won the day. How tragic for Britain’s youth, today’s and tomorrow’s, that this did not happen. My heart goes out to them all.