By Mitch Potter, Foreign Affairs Writer Toronto Star, June 24, 2016
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 UK today is to be staring at an unwanted, worldshrinking 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, UK demographers projected, and the faded memories of 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 alternateuniverse 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.
