Why Older Voters Wanted Out of the EU

I am seeing shock and surprise that people in their 70s and 80s overwhelmingly voted to leave the EU. The question is, why didn’t this generation see the EU as part of the post-war settlement that has secured the peace?

Perhaps the answer is that they were children during the war, or just being born — most of those who secured the peace and then elected the Atlee Labour government are now dead. Those in their 70s and 80s were the post-war generation who, when they reached the age of majority, actually voted that Labour government out of office.

Only a tiny proportion of them went to University, and they were not exposed to internationalism in their youth. Foreign holidays are about the only face-to-face exposure to Europeans outside the UK that many people of that generation have had, and those didn’t really become commonplace until the late 1970s.

The older generation has been drip-fed horror stories about the EU ever since we joined — everything from butter mountains in the early days, through to rules about straight cucumbers, and on again to waves of immigrants more recently.

Also, and this is the most unfortunate thing, Britain went into the EU for economic reasons, and the story of securing peace in Europe never really took root here. Politicians from all parties should hang their heads in shame for failing to celebrate, over decades, the full panoply of reasons for being in the EU, well beyond economics.

The worst part of this now, for me, is not the economic impacts, but the possibility that this is just the start of the fragmentation of Europe, the rise of right wing nationalism and the frightening prospect of a new era of instability — and, at some point, war once again. There is a distinct possibility that we will come full circle back to where we started in the 1930s.