The EU referendum fallout

It’s been over forty-eight hours now since the result of Thursday’s referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union was announced and I am still reeling from it. I am so angry, and hugely ashamed. It won’t have escaped many people’s notice that it was the “Leave” campaign that won, just about — 51% about, to be precise — and Nigel Farage and co. are the victors of a battle in which the prize is economic meltdown and an uncertain, insular future. The pound has dropped to its lowest value since the Miners’ Strike in 1985, but at least “we’ve got our country back”. Time to crack open the champagne imported from France.

I am so embarrassed that this is the image my home country is displaying, not to mention on an international scale. We take so much from the world — hell, who didn’t watch the election results on a television manufactured in Japan? Or dressed in the labours of a sweatshop in Indonesia? — but still the Brexit campaign won off the back of promises of “British jobs for British workers” and “Independence” from a non-existent dictatorship in Brussels. The term “Independence” is so problematic I can barely begin to even discuss it here, but let it be said that it is a sickening insult to the half of the planet that we have colonised, invaded and irreversibly anglicised. Living in the UK, we cannot even begin to comprehend what it means to have a genuine need for political freedom, and, ironically enough, that is what makes living here so attractive to migrants and refugees. And more to the point, this has more or less always been the case. Immigration is not the recent phenomenon the tabloids would have it as, and every country is built on the foundations of cultural borrowing and lending. A look back at the family tree of any voter will tell you that “British” is not much more than a convenient buzzword.

One thing I noticed in the run-up to this election was that I was constantly told by many people of an older generation that my opinion was misinformed because I hadn’t lived in a pre-EU Britain. A customer where I work said that as a twenty-year-old I couldn’t see what I was missing out on by voting Remain, as membership of the EU was all I had ever known. That much I can’t deny, but I also don’t see how it’s especially relevant. I voted for the world I live in now, today, in 2016: a world where an international outlook is essential, where overseas support is a necessity in the face of our internal polarisation of party politics, where I am one year at university down and already £15,000 in debt to the mistakes that came before me. It hasn’t been 1974 for forty-two years. YouGov polls suggest that it was, unsurprisingly, the over 65s who swung the Leave vote past 50%, either through fear or nostalgia or misinformation about what the upshots would be. To counteract this, I cannot name a single person of my age group who wanted the outcome we have got. To us, cutting ourselves off from the world rather than opening up to it is simply illogical. It’s frightening, and it’s us who will be picking up the pieces of it for the rest of our lives.

Nobody knows what the next few months, years and decades will bring. Another General Election, maybe. The break-up of the union and long-term financial turmoil, probably. The revelation of Brexit’s election promises to be unachievable, definitely. The rest is hard to say. All we can do is hope for the best in a time that has undoubtedly changed the course of European history forever, and really I am trying. But I won’t stop being angry. I didn’t vote for this, and I will be forever left wondering why anybody did.