“How could they do it?” It is a question being asked by many seriously angry young people in Britain this weekend after the shock referendum vote by the country to leave the European Union. The “they” in question are, by and large, older people. For among the many divides thrown up by this vote, Scotland versus England, London versus the rest of England, people with university degrees against manual workers, one of the fractures exposed is a generational one.
The official figures are not yet in, but a poll carried out on voting day suggests that as many as 75% of people aged 18 to 24 voted for Britain to remain in the European Union. The same poll suggests that, in contrast, six out of ten people aged 65 or over voted to leave.
“It's not fair that older generations are deciding our future,” Tweeted one young person. “Older generations voted for a future the younger generation didn't want. I am actually shocked.,” said another. “If you’re young and angry about the EU referendum, you’re right to be,” read a headline in The Guardian. “By all means feel bitter, and miserable, and worried about what is going to happen next, but after that, please take heart: you are the 75%, and what you voted for was noble, and one day will be again,” wrote the author Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
But it was not just teenagers and people in their early 20s who felt the pain. Others have taken to social media to express fears on behalf of their children. “I feel physically sick,” wrote Lucy Dunn on The Pool online lifestyle magazine. “My children are going to be the ones who are going to live with this decision the longest and they are the ones who will suffer the full consequences...They are the ones, not the over-fifties “Leavers”, who are going to have to live, work and bring their children into a post-EU 'Little Britain'.” This sense of anger across the country among bemused Remain voters is very real.
So why did “they” - older voters - vote for Brexit? There was no single reason why a narrow majority of 52% of the British population turned its back on the European Union on Thursday. Some voted because they wanted “sovereignty” and accountability restored to the British Parliament or saw the poll as a chance to restore a British “identity” they felt was being eroded. Others – many but by no means all – heeded the Brexit campaign warnings about the dangers of migration and how it could only be controlled by saying farewell to Brussels. Still others believed that in the long run Britain has better trade options outside the EU.
But for many of those who chose to back the Conservative Party's Boris Johnson and UKIP's Nigel Farage, the vote had less to do with immigration or even the European Union at all. Instead it was a chance for revenge, to take their frustration and anger out on the 'elite' – the 'Establishment' as it is known in Britain.
The Establishment target took many forms: bankers, financiers, party leaders, the governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, Treasury officials, top civil servants, Christine Lagarde from the International Monetary Fund, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, President Obama...the list goes on. All had queued up to tell the Britons that they 'had' to vote to stay in the EU, to ensure that they continued to get the benefits of the British economic 'success story', to avoid economic meltdown and isolation in the world.
The message was heeded by many, especially people in good jobs, on comfortable incomes or studying degrees ahead of embarking on their careers. But for many older, working class people in Britain who have seen little or no benefit from Britain's so-called economic successes, and who have suffered the most from globalisation and austerity policies, this plea did not just fall on deaf ears. It was an incitement to rebellion.
The first inkling of what was about to happen came when former Conservative government minister Iain Duncan-Smith told BBC television's election night broadcast that he had been out on many council estates that day – areas where many working class people live – and that he had seen an unusually high turnout. Somehow one knew that these voters – many of whom have not bothered to vote for many years – would not suddenly go to the ballot box to defend David Cameron's vision of European Union membership.
The early results confirmed the fear. Sunderland, Hartlepool, Stockton, all old industrial towns in the north-east of England were voting massively for Brexit. The mood had spread, sweeping across much of industrial Wales and the east and West Midlands in England. Soon a BBC reporter was able to shed light on just what was going on. “I spoke to a voter in Hartlepool who hasn't voted since 1983,” said the reporter. “He told me he was going to vote Leave because he wanted to have a go at someone, to make a protest. He said they felt completely forgotten by all the political classes and wanted to give someone a political kicking.” This included the Labour Party, whose inability to get its traditional vote out to back Remain was just another striking feature of a dramatic election.
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It was a pattern replicated across much of industrial, working class England and Wales. Because of the peculiarities of Britain's constituency based-voting system, votes at general elections are often regarded as wasted votes in many areas. Not so in this poll where every vote counted, and for many voters in “safe working class seats” it was the first chance since the financial crash of 2008 that they had had to register their anger at they way they felt their lives had suffered at the hands of the Establishment in general, and bankers, financiers and politicians in particular. It was a chance many seized with both hands. In the former industrial heartlands of the north-east 58% of people voted for Brexit, with nearly 59% doing the same in the East Midlands and 59.3% in the West Midlands. The heavy vote for Brexit in these areas was instrumental in sealing the Remain campaign's fate, which had focussed on the economic risks of leaving the EU.
In fact, prime minister David Cameron, who headed the remain campaign, had been warned this could happen. Back in April 2016 his friend Fredrik Reinfeldt, the former prime minister of Sweden, told the Daily Telegraph how losing Sweden's 2003 referendum on the Euro had taught him that anti-Brussels sentiment could prevail over economic arguments. “It becomes an emotional vote. People think: ‘I will vote against the elite. If this is what they think we should do, I will do the opposite’,” he said. “We saw that definitely in Sweden, we got an anti-elite vote in our referendum, and Britain stands a risk of that too.”