(06-27-2016 01:22 PM)JustAnotherAustinOwl Wrote:  

(06-25-2016 06:20 PM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(06-25-2016 06:44 AM)JustAnotherAustinOwl Wrote:  Basically people under 50 wanted to remain, especially millennials. They basically had this forced on them by a bunch of bitter, resentful old people, and will have to live with it long after the "Leave" voters are gone.

If the result had been the other way, would you say that older people had the result "forced" on them by "selfish, ignorant" (or some other pair of pejoratives) young people?

Man, you old people are crotchety! ;-)

I should not have conflated two issues - the age split and its implications and the reasons "Leave" won.

Taking the first one, that age split is pretty severe. That's not unusual in an election, but this not a parliamentary or presidential election where you get another go in a few years, if the UK does leave, it will be very hard for them to return, not to mention the UK itself may be mortally wounded by this result. (You could actually argue it's the young people who made the "small c" conservative vote and the old fogies who are the radicals.) This result takes an existing cleavage, rips it open and rubs salt in the wound.

As to why this vote happened the way it did - there is certainly a long history of Euroscepticism in Britain, based on doubts about the continental statist model, etc. So there are reasonable arguments for England wanting to leave. But by and large those weren't the arguments made in the campaign. UKIP's campaign was based on, at best, xenophobia, and at worst outright bigotry. I've had several friends still living there comment on the shocking degree of anger, bitterness, and resentment from the "leave" voters. And it doesn't really shock me - I used to live in the West Midlands, very much a depressed industrial area and there was a lot of resentment there, toward the EU, toward "asylum seekers", basically a desire to go back to happier times, or at least the perception thereof. Older English would by and large never describe themselves as "European" while younger people would do so proudly.

So, while my inclusion of bitter and resentful in my original statement was not helpful, I don't think it's actually incorrect to say that was the source of a lot of the anti-EU vote...

There was also the promise to spend what, 350 million Pounds per day on the NHS since that was how much the Leave campaign said that Britain was sending to the EU per day.

Hey, what happened to that promise now that the Leave side won?